Emma: So to start off, how did you first get into graphic novels?

Vanessa: My interest in graphic novels started when a friend recommended me Alan Moore’s Watchmen. But I truly fell in love with graphic novels after I began reading Neil Gaiman`s Sandman series; after being immersed in that world of fantasy and beautiful artwork, I realized at that point that I wanted to be an illustrator.

E: When did you first start thinking about making a graphic novel for your senior thesis? And what were some of the factors that finalized the decision? Can you tell me about the process?

V: I didn’t exactly plan on doing a graphic novel per se; the format just lent itself to what I wanted to do. When I was figuring out the size I wanted my pages to be, I had to figure that out according to the plate size I had available. The zinc etching plates are 22×30 so I decided I could either have 6 very small plates (meaning one image per page) or 3 very long pages. I decided to go for the longer-page format because of the interesting shape. Since I wanted to have a story composed solely of illustrations, I had to decide how I could format multiple images on one page. That was when I knew that the graphic novels I was so in love with would help give me inspiration and ideas for formatting my illustrations on my page to better tell my story.

E: Can you tell me a little bit about what your graphic novel is about?

V: I do want to clarify that I don’t consider my story entirely a graphic novel; I am hesitant to call it that because my story doesn’t have any words nor is it nearly long enough to be a novel. (Although, there seems to be no other noun that can describe what my story is.) The story is about a tree-like creature that is born from the roots of a tree and comes out to discover the world above. She (I call her Nova, like “new” in Latin) walks along and encounters four other characters, each with which she interacts. First there’s a bird, which helps her build a nest for the berries she collects from a bush. Then she meets a small gnome whose home Nova steps on but they work together to fix it up again. Once Nova says goodbye to the gnome it starts to rain and a fox offers Nova to stay in his foxhole. She stays there until dawn and when she goes out to see, she meets a small girl and they watch the sun rise together. It’s a rather simple story and there’s no climax nor any big reveal at the end, but I still hope to attract the readers with the images and evoke the beauty of encounters with other living beings.

E: Why do you think this medium is particularly effective for your project?

V: Etching has always been my favorite of the printmaking techniques because it allows for the most detail. Also, I really like the fact that I can reproduce a page many times; that characteristic was especially useful for storytelling I believe because that gives me the opportunity to share my story with others.

E: Can you tell me about the physical construction?

V: With the help of Bruce Bumbarger, I was able to make a clamshell box; we measured and glued fabric to board and then put everything together. It is a much more complex process than it sounds and took maybe more than 10 hours to complete. I decided to make this box instead of a bound book because I thought it better displayed the etching prints; since each has intricate detail, looking at each print one by one allows you to look more closely and pay more attention to each image.

E: What were some of the difficulties you encountered?

V: Yes, many more than I had anticipated. First, coming up with a storyline was difficult (as simple as mine seems, it took a lot of planning). I made a storyboard so I could visualize the story more easily. This storyboard actually also helped me out figuring out how to frame each smaller individual image on each page.  I had to make sure I wasn’t becoming too repetitive with the page design. Also, the actual etching process is one that takes a very long time. I was experimenting with new techniques for printing this semester, so that has been something I feel I haven’t quite mastered yet. Another thing that I have come to notice as I near the end of this process is that it was difficult to find a balance between the commercial and fine arts; by this I mean, I needed to make sure that I wasn’t making a story that could be read and then put aside, but I also had to make the actual images interesting so they could stand on their own as a piece of artwork. I’m not quite sure if I achieved that balance but I have definitely learned a lot from this project.

E: What limits and liberties do you find characteristic of making a graphic novel?

V: One limit I can think of is that towards the end I felt a bit constrained by the frames. I also, I started to want to do crazier creatures but wasn’t sure how to incorporate them into the story. I guess that will have to wait for my next project. Even though I did feel constrained by the neat format, I did enjoy experimenting with the different sort of feelings one can create from the way one frames an image. For example, on my tenth page, there is a raining scene, and instead of just including rain in each frame, I made an large encompassing frame on the edge of the page that establishes that it is raining.

E: How do you think your Spanish major contributed to your project?

V: Yes. I think just the Spanish language has contributed to my project in general. I’m actually fluent because I grew up in a Spanish-speaking household so I feel that both languages are a huge part of me. Other than the fact that I don’t feel that I am really a writer, I wanted to create a story that could be read by anyone, no matter what language they speak. This way, I can show it to my family and they can enjoy it as much as any English-speaking person might. Also, my Spanish major allowed me to research more in depth the artwork of an artist I really admire, Xul Solar, and it has inspired me to continue studying art that isn’t really included in the center of discourse in art history.

E: Do you think you’ll ever make a graphic novel again?

V: Maybe in the future, but I think for now I want to experiment with larger images that I have had brewing in my mind.

E: And finally, what do you think of Haverford’s collection on the 1^st tier of Magill?

V: I actually never really explored it very much other than looking at some titles. I definitely regret not taking advantage of that resource.

____________________

To talk to other students about their artwork come to the opening reception May 10th from 5:30-7:30!

I finally finished my film this past Monday and then on Thursday—May 2—I screened my film, along with the other films made in the Advanced Documentary Video Production course. The running time for the film is 10-minutes and 23-seconds. Below is a link to the final version (for now) of Chipinga. 

Watch the film here:

Here is a brief description of the film:

“Chipinga” is a documentary film, which details a filmmaker’s journey to wade through the multiple layers of her mother’s childhood memories and recollect memories she never had. This film illustrates what stories and images from a past life mean to three generations—a granddaughter, a mother and a grandmother—and how the past is constantly re-imagined in the present.

Director’s Statement:

My mother was born the 1960s in Chipinga—a small town in southern Rhodesia, which later became Zimbabwe. She grew up on a dairy farm during wartime and knew how to shoot, take apart, clean and reassemble an automatic weapon by the age of nine. As a child I idealized her memories and chose to only see the beauty and excitement in these stories.

As I grew older, I heard the stories in new ways and learned about the complexity, tragedy and inequality that underlay each moment of life in Rhodesia. I had always thought of my family’s life on a farm in Rhodesia as beautiful, simple and ideal. But, my family’s past cannot be separated from the context in which they lived.

This film was started out of a desire to learn more about the grandfather I never knew and the place I never lived in, and ended up being about how these memories run through me but what they mean to me has changed and taken on new meaning overtime.

This has been an incredible experience and my next dream is to travel back to Zimbabwe to make a longer version of this film. I am very grateful to everyone who has supported me through this process and would love to hear all kinds of feedback!

Thanks!

Caileigh Feldman

Emma: So first off, if I didn’t know what skee-ball was, how would you describe it to me?

Nick: I would describe skee-ball as a carnival game. There’s really not much to it; it’s a simple game. You roll a very dense wooden ball (or plastic, but I preferred the wood ones–in the tournament I always made sure mine were wood) up a ramp, aiming for the smallest of the scoring holes that you dare. The scores possible per roll range from 10 (or technically 0 of you miss the table) to 100; my strategy was to shoot for sustainable 50s and 40s. The 100s, for me, were only for use in emergency, if I really NEEDED 100 I would have gone for it, but that never happened.

E: Had you ever played skee-ball before?

N: Only at Chuckee Cheese. And I can’t remember being particularly good.

E. Can you talk a little bit about tournament/gallery space? Had you been to the gallery prior to Winner– what did you think about its transformation into a sort of arcade?

N: I had actually seen the previous exhibit, which I didn’t really understand very well. When the “And the Winner is…” exhibition moved in I wasn’t sure really either. I think I was kind of just excited that the Campus Center had 2 game rooms now. The stated goals of the tournament gallery were very abstract and fluid, but they made more and more sense as names and numbers filled the walls; as I kept on coming back, as people–very serious adult people in most cases–were getting more and more excited about what was truly a child’s game. The way the gallery brought to the eyes and the ears a blend of the aesthetics of our really special community in one concentrated space, and then supercharged it with a “high-stakes” competition: it truly was art.

E: Can you talk a little bit about how you advanced from round 11-1? How did you know to come back? How did you know who you were playing? What if your schedules didn’t match up in terms of free time? 

N: I was lucky in that I work in the bookstore which is one floor below the Cantor-Fitzgerald Gallery; I would usually try to make match up times right before or right after work, and it also made it easy to get the odd practice in, although I wouldn’t really call it practice, it wasn’t that serious. I was never really aiming to win. I just liked to go play a couple rounds because it was there, and because it’s quite honestly a lot of fun.

E: The tournament seemed to last a long time — did you ever just want to check out? Or were you into the game the whole time?

N: The tournament did last a long time, but I never really got tired of it. It was drawn out over what, around three months so I only ever needed to think about it once a week at most, so it wasn’t overly intrusive. Up until the tournament’s aftermath, I was just another competitor, with average to pretty good scores, certainly not the best. If it had been the concentrated attention of the post-tournament all those three months then maybe it would have become a bit tiresome, but I enjoyed it the whole way through.

E: From my understanding the whole campus was involved– who was your most noteworthy competitor and why?

N: All my competitors were noteworthy; it’s remarkable to see how uniformly great Haverford students and staff are at sports. I guess if I have to pick one, I’d do so grudgingly and say it was the Assistant Vice President for College Communications, Chris Mills. I can’t remember if he said it so that others could hear or not, but when we were talking to the exhibit Co-Curator, John Muse, in front of the crowd that was gathered on the bleachers (still sounds weird to say! Bleachers at a skee-ball game…), Chris insisted that no matter the outcome of the match, that I was the one going to North Carolina, which while I thought was unbelievably cool of him, I didn’t want to take that trip to spend a day being Nick Kahn the almost-winner. If it came down to it, I was going to insist that he go. Luckily it didn’t.

E: Who did you wish you could have played?

N: This is an easy answer actually, Matt Wetherell. He was by far the most enthusiastic competitor I had seen. We had been exchanging messages about the tournament all through the process for example when and who we were playing, how they play, etc. We exchanged strategies, but mostly due to his initiation. We ended up being the last two soccer players in the bracket and when he was eliminated, he sent me a text message that expressed what was truly, heartfelt sadness. And then at the final when he was sitting in the front row, he cheered and jeered the loudest, and then after I rolled that last 40, I had barely turned around before he lifted me off the floor.

E: What did you do in Greensboro? Tell me about one of the things that you did?

N: I did a ton in Greensboro. No way I can say it all here, but one episode that sort of captures the spirit of the day was this: Lee Walton and Chad, one of his UNC art students drove me to a mall and parked right outside a massage salon (is that what they’re called?). One said “Ok Nick time for your massage!” Then the other said “Well actually we just have all this money for a massage, so we could also go on a mall shopping spree. But we were hoping you’d get a massage.” So I got my first professional massage in Greensboro, despite the fact that I badly needed new shoes.

One other quick thing that happened: they had me ambushed by a bagpipe concert when I thought we were just going to a nice game of Frisbee. I love the bagpipe.

E: Which 12 pledges did you choose? Did you submit one yourself?

N: There was never any time to take all of them, but the ones that I did take were awesome. Chemistry Professor Alex Norquist blew stuff up with me, Micah Walter gave me a 1-on-1 Celtic violin concert. In an ironic turning of the tables, my friend and roommate David Robinson was waiting on ME in the dining center, Sonia Giebel made me a home-cooked dinner, Professor Vicky Funari drew a wonderful portrait of me, and Phil Drexler made regular Facebook posts praising me for a couple weeks. The prize I offered was 4 hours of utter servitude.

E: And finally, have you played skee-ball since? 

N: Yes, once. It was under very different circumstances, last summer in Las Vegas. I still won.

For more on the skee-ball tournament and the transformation of the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery into an arcade space see a piece written by John Muse, one of the exhibition’s co-curators and Haverford’s current Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Studies: andthewinneris.haverford.edu/2012/04/25/on-march-16th-all-1920-haverford-students-faculty/#more-1843

Watch a video recap of the whole project: 

And, see what happened to Nick in Greensboro: 

As part of the exhibition White Boys currently on view in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, the Creative Residencies Program and the Hurford Center are hosting a panel discussion with four artists from the show and curator Natasha L. Logan this Wednesday, 4/17 at 4:30 p.m. in Stokes 102. Moderating the panel will be Brendan Wattenberg, Director of Exhibitions at The Walther Collection Project Space in New York and Haverford Class of 2006 (While a student at Haverford, Brendan was also one of the first to get involved with the Hurford Center’s student programming).

In advance of the conversation, CFG Gallery Assistant Pia Chakraverti-Wuerthwein ’16 checked in with Brendan to get his thoughts on White Boys and his own time at Haverford.

How do you know White Boys Co-Curators Hank Willis Thomas and Natasha L. Logan?

When I was in graduate school for Africana Studies at New York University, I had a class with Deborah Willis, Hank’s mother, who is one of the most renowned historians of African American photography. Through Dr. Willis, I met Hank and I began to learn about his work, particularly after his exhibition “Pitch Blackness,” which was shown in 2009 at Jack Shainman Gallery. This winter, Hank, Natasha, and I participated in an amazing conference in Paris, co-organized by NYU and Harvard, called “Black Portraiture[s]: The Black Body in the West.” At one point during the conference, as we were rushing around between events, I ran into Natasha and she said: “Remind me – we have to talk about White Boys.” And at first I thought, “white boys”? Like, in general?

Were there any pieces from the show that particularly stood out to you?

I am so fascinated by Philip Metz’s “iwishiwas.” Although it’s a very minimal picture, “iwishiwas” gives off a kind of intense energy full of difficult associations. I’m thinking of Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, the history of skin-lightening creams marketed to African Americans, the phenomenon of “passing” as one race or another, and the privileged status of an “all-American” type of white masculinity that you see just about everywhere, from GQ to Matt Damon movies.

Philip Metz, iwishiwas, 2007

“iwishiwas” also references the clinically spare ID portraits by Thomas Ruff, as well as the self-portraiture of Cindy Sherman and Samuel Fosso, who masterfully displace their personalities through costume, makeup, and pose. Except Metz’s self-portrait has the added edge of obviously playing out some kind of personal drama about race identification. Maybe it’s supposed to be funny or satirical, but if so beyond the joke is a dissonant mood. I’m not surprised to see how “iwishiwas” has been used in the branding of White Boys, considering that the image sharply describes an illusion of whiteness.

What ideas are you most excited to explore on Wednesday?

Since the 1960s, the Menil Foundation and later the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard have been working to publish an encyclopedic set of books called The Image of the Black in Western Art. When I first looked at a volume from the series I was intrigued by the way one question – how have black people been represented in art? – could bring together all kinds of objects across time and medium. The question becomes a conceptual device, a way of looking guided by one pursuit. And it changes the way you see historic paintings, for example, as if something’s missing or someone is in the shadows. Hank and Natasha have also used one organizational principle – whiteness – in curating White Boys. Well, they’re not compiling 3,500 years worth of art, but the idea is similar. In our conversation, I look forward to discussing how this provocative idea amplifies, first of all, the way we look at white skin.

As soon as I started thinking about “white boys” I was thinking about whiteness not only as a racial category but also as a color palette. Suddenly, all the white boys in photographs by artists such as Ryan McGinley and Wolfgang Tillmans seemed defined by their race, the variations and similarities in their color, where before they were just having fun or looking sexy. As Maurice Berger has written, for some white people “whiteness is pure and value free. It is innate. It is everywhere. Yet ironically it is also invisible.” So, I’m eager to hear from the artists and the audience how White Boys might change the way we look at white people in contemporary art and the ways in which whiteness (like blackness) might be subjected to the attention – as Hank and Natasha have noted – of ethnographic curiosity.

How has the CFG space changed since you were a student here?

A few years ago I visited Haverford for a conference organized by Ruti Talmor on African photography, coinciding with the exhibition Possible Cities/Imaging Africa. To me, this was a major event for the college, not only in the organization of a superb and challenging exhibition, but also providing the space for scholarship around visual culture and the humanities in Africa. I wouldn’t have imagined that such a program was possible I when was a student. To be honest, I remember Haverford’s gallery as a somewhat quiet place, maybe a place for student and faculty exhibitions. I’m impressed by the transformation of the gallery as a venue for exploring issues within contemporary culture: disabilities, race, African photography. Even the pop-up exhibition organized around the time of alumni weekend in 2011 (when I visited for my fifth reunion) was so witty and inventive. Clearly the Arts and Humanities Center has created a new sense of artistic energy on campus.

When you were a student here you were very involved in performance arts. Why did you decide to transition to becoming more involved in exhibition work?

“Performance arts” sounds so lofty! I really just directed a few student plays. Although I guess I thought I’d give it a try – and after graduation I worked for two years in various sectors of the theater industry in New York. When I began applying for graduate school, I wanted to focus on African drama and cinema. (At Haverford I was an English major concentrating in Africana Studies and I spent the spring of my junior year at the University of Ghana.) I decided on NYU in part to work with Manthia Diawara, who has written widely on African cinema. But, in my first year, I took a class on photography with Deborah Willis called “The Black Body and the Lens.” By this point, I was working part-time on exhibitions at the Museum for African Art. Following Dr. Willis’s advice, I continued studying photography and visual arts. I later interned at a London photography agency, Autograph ABP, and since 2011 I’ve worked with The Walther Collection, a foundation devoted to presenting photography and video by African artists.

——————————

Join Brendan along with White Boys curator Natasha L. Logan and artists Lisa Fairstein, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Bayeté Ross Smith, and Michael Ratulowski this Wednesday, 4/17 at 4:30 p.m. in Stokes Hall, Room 102, Haverford College.

My name is Caileigh Feldman and I am a junior Anthropology major at Haverford College. At present, I am working on a film project for Professor Vicky Funari’s Advanced Documentary Film Production course. This ten-minute film will detail my journey to learn more about my family’s past. This past is anything but simple. My mother was born in the 1960s in Chipinga—a small farm town in Rhodesia, which later became Zimbabwe. She grew up on a sustainable dairy farm during wartime. My grandparents were South Africans who decided to leave South Africa because of apartheid and move to Rhodesia. However, the society in Rhodesia was anything but equal. Throughout the film, I will discuss my own relationship to my family’s memories.

Thanks to Haverford’s John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, I was able to travel to London, England a few weeks ago to extensively interview my grandmother and rediscover the incredible archive of objects, images and recordings she has from this past life. Luckily, my parents were in London at the same time to go to my cousin’s wedding so I was able to film both my mother and grandmother together. Further, I had a friend who is currently abroad help me shoot some of the scenes so that I could be in the film as well. I am glad I had an extra hand behind the camera because since returning from this trip, I have decided to put myself in the film a bit more and now I have lots of footage to work with. Currently, I am deep the editing process but I hope to have this piece finished in the next two weeks!

Here are some pictures from the trip:

This is a shot of my grandmother telling me about the pictures she had from Rhodesia. 

Here, my grandmother is reading old letters from my grandfather aloud. 

This is a shot from an interview I conducted with both my mother and grandmother. 

Here is a shot that still needs to be color corrected but it is of my grandmother and me clicking through photos of her life in Rhodesia on the computer. 

This is a painting in my grandmother’s house of Merroleigh farm, the farm where she lived in Rhodesia. 

Here is a picture of my grandfather–Grant Abraham–that my grandmother had in her flat. 

This is a closeup shot of one of the many pieces of furniture that my grandfather made for their house in Rhodesia. 

A year ago I performed for Peter Loewi’s (’12) Fine Arts thesis — a convertible stage — during the James House Block Party, which was very uncharacteristic of me.  I mean, it was in front of an audience and everything. Granted, the harder half of my performance was filmed — the gist of the piece was that I dueled against myself about artifice, so the “me” with more (and sassier) lines had been already filmed, while the live version of “me” had a more timid role. But at any rate, despite the difficulties of the live performance, I was intrigued by the grant that funded Peter’s project — the E. Clyde Lutton Memorial Fund for the Performing Arts.

Clyde Lutton (’66) was a lover of the performing arts, and in his memory Charlotte Lutton funds a creative student project each year, as long as it includes the element of performance. For me, performance includes film. So, this semester, with the backing of Charlotte Lutton and the E. Clyde Lutton Memorial Fund, I wrote and directed an original story, which I shot over spring break (+ a few extra shoots post-break) after compiling the the cast, crew, set, and equipment.

I proposed the project in the fall of 2012, with a story idea much different from the story that’s being pieced together in the editing process now. Originally, I was going to deal with more of the same ideas that I was discussing in my piece for the “Duel/Duet” — the artifice in art, it’s a mimetic representation, truth derived from fictions, etc. But as the characters became more real, and their relationships more developed, it was clear that the story that I wanted to tell was more accessible. Maybe dealing with similar tensions, but not rooted in art.

So the story evolved… I drafted about 9 scripts before I was satisfied labeling anything the “Shooting Script”.  Basically, the story centers around Lola, who is unable to remember anything about her childhood, separated from her parents and family since before she can remember. She is dating Leonard, who is earnestly trying to help her cope with her lack of identity, and who is her brother Mark’s best friend. Mark, though older than Lola, is also unclear about their past — or, so Lola thinks. But repressed memories inevitably resurface, and with them come confrontations and unveilings, in search for the truth of past time.

In January, I began the casting process, which involved placing advertisements on various websites (some exclusively for talent advertising, some for more general advertising — yes, I did use Craigslist) and receiving resumés and emails from interested actors and actresses. I had a lot of interest, and after filtering through it scheduled around 50 auditions. Some were sent in as video auditions, while most auditioned with me live, and some ended up not auditioning after all.

After two weekends of auditions, I had found my actors. I casted Emily Dabney (emilydabney.weebly.com/index.html) as Lola, Carlo Campbell (www.carlocampbell.com/) as Leonard, and Kevin Austra (Kma1723@aol.com) as Mark.

After the student cinematographer dropped out of the project due to scheduling issues, I was reaching out to different freelance cinematographers and posting advertisements and receiving interest, and after reviewing the different candidates was really excited to have Chris Newhard (chrisnewhard.com) on board.

After the original sound recorder dropped out last minute, Raymond Ogilvie (happyreflex@lycos.com), studying at Temple University, was available as a field recorder, and I was really thrilled to have him participating in the project too. After spring break, when shoots took place during timest that Raymond was unavailable, Aaron Jenkins (aaronjenkins@phantomsonics.com)

With the help of Marcus Williams and Geoffrey Labe, I secured an apartment where the majority of the scenes would be shot. The two other set locations were the Haverford Septa Regional Rail Station and the Ardmore Station Café. The first day of shooting took place at the former and apparently there had been some misunderstanding between me and the Septa representative I spoke with, but after talking with the supervisor of Septa on set, he agreed to let us continue filming. Bob Campman of the Ardmore Station Café was incredibly helpful and accomodating throughout the filming process, and I highly recommend that you try their Nutella French Toast… it’s really delicious, Carlo can vouch for that…

I prepared the apartment with props from various friends (thank you, all! too many to list here, but you will see your names on the credits!) and Amy Radbill of the Bryn Mawr Theater Department. It didn’t look half bad, and definitely passes for a young couple’s apartment.

Corey Chao of the ITC also helped me greatly in the equipment department, outfitting me with sound recording equipment and a lighting kit.

With all of those elements finally in place, we could begin shooting. Shooting was pretty standard, in its structure — start around 10 AM, run until we were done, sometimes around 8 PM, and a few times more like 12 AM. We worked off of a schedule that I created, completing about 1 scene per day, give or take a few pages.

As far as the actual substance of each shoot, it varied a lot. For the intense scenes, where Lola had a nightmare and Leonard was expected to comfort her, or when Leonard confronted Mark, for example, the set was very intense, as the actors would stay in character for pretty much the whole day. There were token lighthearted moments, though — whether it was Carlo calling Emily various nicknames, like “Lola the Patrola”, or a line delivered in the perfectly wrong way…

Some pictures of filming:

Really cold directing outside of Ardmore Station Café

directing confrontations; Carlo’s got a pretty intimidating glare, which is not captured here…

Carlo messing around while Kevin looks over lines…

There are no pictures of Chris or Aaron…

Overall, shooting was an incredible experience. We all worked really well together, we all learned a lot in our respective skills together, and everyone put in their best effort to collaboratively make my project into a reality, a final product that we’re all going to be proud of. I’m grateful to everyone involved in the process, each person on a very  long list of names, who respected my project, helping me tell this story that’s so important to me.

And now, I’m editing the footage. Altogether, the final project — “Bitter Root”, for now — should be about 35 minutes. There will be a screening on Saturday, April 20, at 7 PM in Sharpless Auditorium of the work-in-progress.

I started filming over winter break when I was back home in Puerto Rico, collecting family testimonies. However, I found it impossible to pay attention to sound, interviewing etiquette, and cinematography while filming. Waleed, Mary Clare, and I received funded through HCAH’s Student Arts Fund to film in Puerto Rico over spring break. With the three of us, we could get a wider array of footage and bring complexity to the interview segments, while also managing sound and shooting. Mary Clare unfortunately could not be here with us in Puerto Rico, but we miss her!

While in Puerto Rico, Waleed and I set out to collect more stories from my family members about my grandfather and the impact of his absence on my mother and the rest of my family. We also spent some time filming in the Condado Lagoon in San Juan. Visuals of the lagoon will be repeated throughout the film narrative, stressing the fact that like memory, my mother’s past is filled with gaps, or lagunas, a term that in Spanish refers both to lagoon and lacuna (a missing section of a text). We also filmed a scene of my mother and I reflecting on the film process inside a boat in the lagoon. Finally we filmed my great-grandmother’s birthday celebration, in which many of the film characters were seen together.

Meanwhile, Waleed has been eating plantains and

wants to share this piece of PR convent visual culture with you:

See more pictures below:

Past Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery artists Billy & Steven Dufala will be featured tonight, Friday March 1st, on WHYY’s Friday Arts program, along with Campus Exhibitions Coordinator Matthew Seamus Callinan. Check out a preview and tune in to WHYY TV 12 at 8:30 p.m. TONIGHT.

Meanwhile, learn more about the Dufala Brothers’ Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery exhibit PROBLEMY here; and, check out these crazy time-lapse videos created as part of their residency at Haverford, courtesy of the Center’s Visual Studies Postdoctoral Fellow John Muse:

On January 31^st 2013, 20 professors, students, and staff came together in the Philips Wing of Magill Library for Lightning Talks Round II. Sponsored by SAVE AS, Lightening Talks is an event where students and teachers can present their works and ideas within a two-minute time frame. The theme of this event was digital scholarship and the speakers addressed their work within this emerging field.

Photo by Catherine Bitners

While sitting in front of and along side my peers, faculty and friends I learned about the means and methods Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery interns implement while organizing exhibits. Aubree Penney taught me that there is a virtual Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery used by interns to simulate and organize exhibits prior to their arrival on campus. Who knew the simulation could consider the dimensions of an artist’s work to the hundredths of an inch?

Some projects applied new tools to old problems. How do you visualize trends in the arrests of participants of Occupy movements across the country? How do you make this data accessible? Samantha Shain attacked the project of mapping these social movements via an animated map of the United States. Her project led her to more questions: “Why did the arrests happen in the places that they did? Are there special and architectural implications of where the arrests happened?”

Other presentations questioned the very nature of those tools, and how they’re changing us.  Professor Laura McGrane’s presentation titled “The User Paradox” addressed the anxieties and reservations many have towards computers, digital devices, and emerging software – how digital technologies perhaps use us as much as we use them. But who is this them? As Professor McGrane suggests the term user-friendly arose in corporate settings as an efficiency concept to promote a networked corporate mentality. So what is the difference in using and being used in the context of emerging technologies that demand more than we initially bargained for? I.e. should I use the apps that came equipped with my new iPod just because they’re there? Wouldn’t it be wasteful if I didn’t use them (even if I didn’t pay for them directly)? What did I pay for in the first place?

There was an air of simplicity, elegance, and poignancy to the talks. I left the event with an admiration of tact and presentation. What’s so great about Lightning Talks, as a themed event is that any student or faculty member can present their scholarship on a wide range of topics.

While sitting in the audience, I imagined all the projects, insights, and/or problems students and faculty engage with in their spare time, through internships, through research, or even during the summer, but who haven’t shared their work. For many, Lightening Talks is or can provide this opportunity.

If you didn’t get a chance to attend the event, but are interested in some or all of the talks, all 20 can be watched online: ds.haverford.edu/wp/saveas/2013/02/02/save-as-lightning-talks-round-ii/

The Bloodroot plant (or as it is scientifically named, sanguinaria canadensis) is found in the murkiest, bottom-most parts of forests in many parts of North America. Its name comes from the the bloodish red liquid that runs in its root and through its veins. It is known for opening its white petals up to witness the sun, and closing them again during dark or overcast times.

Opening and closing
Rising and falling
Ebbing and flowing
Living and dying
Pulsing, pulsing

Bloodroot, a student-made installation piece sponsored by the Humanities Center’s Student Arts Fund, presents this rhythm to you, the player, by creating an immersive environment where you may move, touch, play, experiment, and leave your mark.

KNOW THESE THINGS:

• Bring a friend. One friend. Only 2 people may enter the installation space at a time.
• Come with your mind open and ready to solve puzzles.
• The rest is a secret. We wouldn’t want to spoil the show.

Set to open the week after Spring Break. Exact dates and times TBA.

Questions? Comments?
Marissa Gibson-Garcia ’15 mgibsong@haverford.edu
Honglan Huang ’16 hhuang@haverford.edu

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