CMP Welcome

Last night marked the first-ever gathering of CMP students from across the university in our welcome event for the new semester.  It was great to hear from graduate students in Anthropology, Literature, Design, Public Health, and other fields describe their research and media projects.

We look forward to more opportunities to build community through regular critique group meetings, workshops, and other gatherings.

CMP Students at Kirkland Gallery

“Unspecified Objects, Marfa TX: The Built Wall” by Lindsey Lodie and Megan Alvarado-Saggese

This summer three Film and Visual Studies graduate students from the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and the Critical Media Practice secondary field presented installations at the Graduate School of Design’s Kirkland Gallery in a series titled “Neither/Nor, Any/All”. These exhibits explored “the limits and possibilities of research as practice, exposing and probing the nature of art-making as a multi-modal activity.”

Lindsey Lodie and Megan Alvarado-Saggese’s “Unspecified Objects, Marfa TX: The Built Wall” explores the contradictions of site-specific practice at America’s borderlands, in particular the case study of Donald Judd, who in the mid-1970s used Marfa, Texas as a backdrop for his art installations while “largely ignoring the cultural, demographic and geo-political dimensions of the region”.

Brandon Evans presented “By Listening, Pain and Sin Are Eradicated,” which included a performance in audio works, curated materials, and textual translations of gurbani (Sikh sacred text) exploring “the dimensions of language, performance, and listening as shared spheres of practice in the Sikh religious tradition and in Western contemporary art”.

“By Listening, Pain and Sin Are Eradicated” by Brandon Evans

Jessica Bardsley’s installation “Unearthed” mapped “an internal geography, exploring relationships between surface and interiority, matter and affect. Taking inspiration from topography, geology, and theories of emotion, this exhibition assembles artifacts from a quiet, eerie galaxy, a desaturated land, light-years from within.”

“Unearthed” by Jessica Bardsley
“Unearthed” by Jessica Bardsley

LAMPEDUSA | Philip Cartelli and Mariangela Ciccarello

In late 1831, a volcanic island suddenly erupted off the southern coast of Sicily. A number of European powers laid claim to the newfound “land,” but the island receded six months later, leaving only a rocky ledge under the sea. Through its intersecting utopic visions and depictions of possession, “Lampedusa” also considers those who traverse the sea today in search of an elusive solid land.

http://pcartelli.com

THREE LANDSCAPES | Cynthia Browne

Caught between a past no longer viable and a future not certain, Germany’s Ruhr (aka Ruhrpott, das Revier) is a landscape full of spatial and temporal disjunctures. For those unfamiliar, the Ruhr was arguably the former industrial heartland of Germany —mostly mining and steel production—reaching its peak production in the mid-20th century before experiencing a slow, steady, but also uneven decline in second tier industry over the past fifty years. “Three Landscapes” is a video triptych and media installation that offers a perceptual experience of the Ruhr’s “specious present,” in which a passage of time, the recent past and the near future, are brought together and made palpable within the duration of the exhibition space.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/cynthiabrowne/galleries

PEOPLE’S PARK | J.P. Sniadecki and Libbie D. Cohn

“People’s Park” is a 78-minute single shot documentary that immerses viewers in an unbroken journey through a famous urban park in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.

The film explores the dozens of moods, rhythms, and pockets of performance coexisting in tight proximity within the park’s prismatic social space, capturing waltzing couples, mighty sycamores, karaoke singers, and buzzing cicadas in lush 5.1 surround sound.

A sensory meditation on cinematic time and space, “People’s Park” offers a fresh gaze at public interaction, leisure and self-expression in China.

 

CLEANUP | Kyle Parry

In the summer of 1989, picturesque Prince William Sound in southern Alaska became the scene of a multi-billion dollar, multi-institutional “cleanup” operation. A few months before, just after midnight on March 24, an Exxon-owned tanker carrying Prudhoe Bay crude oil had run aground on a reef well outside its shipping lane, ultimately releasing some 10 to 40 million gallons, causing one of the worst environmental disasters in history. The botched response effort by Exxon and Alyeska Pipeline and the shocking sights of oil-smothered wildlife and oil-ridden beaches set off extraordinary amounts of imaging and storytelling, for use in upcoming litigation and nightly news broadcasts. For the summer at least, the lower 48 mourned with Alaskans.

“Cleanup” by Kyle Parry, a member of metaLAB@Harvard, exposes an unusual byproduct of the spill: a roughly 777-gigabyte, 56-hour digital archive of videos produced by state and federal agencies from the first days of the catastrophe through the end of 1990. “Cleanup” gathers fragments of this intractable archive into shifting assemblages of violence, deception, performance, and resilience. “Cleanup” was installed in the Lightbox Gallery of the Harvard Art Museums in April of 2015 as part of an investigation of how technology can help us visualize, explore, and play with large fields of information. The project explores in moving image installation what Parry’s dissertation explores in writing: how diverse forms of media assemblage can facilitate—and disrupt—memory and engagement around large-scale events.

www.kparry.com

MANAKAMANA | Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez


Pilgrims make an ancient journey in a state-of-the-art cable car. Their rides unfold in real-time, highlighting interactions with one another, the landscape, and this strange new mode of conveyance. Through these encounters, the film opens a surprising window onto contemporary Nepali lives, propelled along by the country’s idiosyncratic modernization.

www.stephaniespray.com

 

A VIEW FROM THE VIEW | Jared McCormick

“A View from the View” is a collection of postcards motivated by larger research questions into visual cultures, representations of tourism, and issues of mobility in Lebanon. The database aims to make portions of this genre of photography public. Beyond the database this project explores circulations of place (Eddies) and the act of disrupting the images’ composition (Reframing).

www.jaredmccormick.com

GOD LISTENS TO THOSE WHO PRAISE HIM | Peter McMurray

“A View from the View” is a collection of postcards motivated by larger research questions into visual cultures, representations of tourism, and issues of mobility in Lebanon. The database aims to make portions of this genre of photography public. Beyond the database this project explores circulations of place (Eddies) and the act of disrupting the images’ composition (Reframing).

https://scholar.harvard.edu/mcmurray/about

INTO THE HINTERLANDS | Julia Yezbick

“Into the Hinterlands” is a video collaboratively produced with the Detroit-based performance ensemble, The Hinterlands who practice a form of ecstatic training which they see as a provocation towards the unknown. The “hinterlands” evokes an unknown space both physical and imaginary whose mystery is its very source of generation and from which their creativity emerges. Their practice is one of ecstatic play, of finding the edge of one’s balance, and the limits of one’s body.

www.juliayezbick.com/