Art
Pretty Little Flower, 2020
Presenter(s): Nicole Daskas
Advisor(s): Micol Hebron
Pretty Little Flower, 2020, is my junior thesis project which has been funded by the CUE’s Scholarly and Creative Grant. The piece consists of three videos. Each is focused on a specific type of flower and corresponds to a moment or movement from feminist history. Flowers, metaphors of femininity, are destroyed in each video. The first video is inspired by The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan’s novel outlining the dissatisfaction felt by housewives in the fifties and early sixties. While this novel predominantly focused on white women, failing to represent all women, its lasting significance is the impact it had in starting the second wave feminist movement. In this video, I adopt the fifties aesthetic and insert myself, a half Asian woman, into this history. I destroy orchids by chopping them, sewing them, cleaning them, and eating them. The second video is inspired by Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, which details the process by which intense standards of physical beauty have replaced former systems of oppression. As women gained power in other areas of society, the beauty myth became ingrained deeper and deeper into women’s brains. I wanted to illustrate how this myth is still relevant to contemporary society; the beauty myth is present in different iterations rather than disappeared completely. Pink roses sit on a vanity in glass vases as I “beautify” myself in front of a mirror. As I apply makeup incessantly, I absentmindedly knock the vases to the ground, shattering them. Sunflowers are utilized in the third and final video component to Pretty Little Flower. I burn sunflowers in a recreation of the Freedom Trash Can, used in the Miss America Pageant protest of 1968. I recreate posters from protests and boycotts surrounding the push to ratify the ERA and abortion speakout of the late 60’s/ early 70’s.
A Brush with Death, 2020
Presenter(s): Morgan Grimes
Advisor(s): Dave Kiddie
Throughout the history of painting artist’s have strived to create brilliant pigments of every color. Using natural substances they have made pigments with unmatched brilliance, but also unknown dangers. Many of the substances used to create pigments throughout history have been toxic, unknown to artists until nearly the 20th century. These toxic pigments have been used by nearly all the most well known artist throughout history, and many are still in use today. Through this series of paintings I have delved into the history of oil painting, as well as the history of pigment itself. These six paintings highlight some of the deadliest colors in the history of oil painting; cadmium red, chrome yellow, sheele’s green, Viridian green, Prussian blue, and cobalt blue. These paintings are some of the most famous in art history that have been stripped of all their color, save for the toxic one. This series is meant to highlight the dangerous use and minimal regulation on oil paints and pigments, as many of the pigments are still in production today.