Wilson Commons

Dana Sherwood

Artists: Dana Sherwood
Dates: February 27- March 28, 2025

• Artist Statement

  This exhibition of painting, sculpture and video unite around the interwoven ideas of ecology, ecofeminism and mythology in the age of the Anthropocene in order to reimagine these stories in relation to our planet and its current ecological and social crises. The mythology that has been passed down for millennia, that we hold deep in western consciousness, is a narrative of the dominant voice of conquering powers. I am interested in a different story, a story of the Other, one gleaned by listening to the plants and the animals in order to hear their tales and garner messages from their subtle voices. Anchoring the installation will be a new video collaboration with forest animals eating from ceramic vessels reminiscent of classical amphora or kraters in a woodland clearing. For the past decade, a large part of my practice has been to spend time in “the field”, crafting elaborate banquets for the non-human inhabitants living in our midst, and filming the feast on infrared video. Each night, while filming, I am presenting offerings to the natural world that build connection and companionship via the act of breaking bread. This video marks the first time I am offering the feast within the sculptural form. My video and the companion paintings and sculpture weave the stories together, crafting, retelling, and sharing rituals and mythologies, to investigate new ways of “staying with the trouble”. The ceramic sculptures, reminiscent of ancient vessels used to contain food and drink, and here, offered to the animals of the forest, record use in the form of wear and tear, cracks and fractures, in turn becoming relics that have been touched by them. The resulting exhibition creates a multisensory wonderland experience of sound, video, and image. Alongside traditional practices of painting, sculpture and video, the creation of this work relies upon intuitive, magical and ancestral practices that aim to reorganize and reinvent myth and folklore in a way that begins to create a new conversation and connection with the more than human world.

Approaches to Portraiture

Artists: Images in this exhibition were provided by Nigel Maister from his collection of over 10,000 photographs. The show was curated by Maister and Emily Broad, a third-year PhD student in VCS. Maister is the Russell and Ruth Peck Artistic Director of the international Theatre Program at the University of Rochester.
Dates: January 21 - February 21, 2025
Opening Reception: January 23, 4 - 6 P.M.
Film Screening: Gowen Room (Lizzie Borden's 1986  Working Girls) with filmmaker: Nov. 21, 5:30 - 7 P.M.

• Artist Statement

  Face Value: The Uses of Portraiture explores the evolving meaning of photographic portraiture throughout the history of the medium—from a daguerreotype embedded in a piece of Victorian hair jewelry to early 20th century popular forms like the tintype and photo booths to the conceptual practices of contemporary portraiture. In each of the 500 photographs in this exhibition, we pose the following critical questions: What does portraiture do? Who is it for? Why photography? Where does it transport us? The exhibition is presented in two sections: “Conversations” in the Hartnett Gallery and “Identities” in the Frontispace outside the Art and Music Library.
  
  Images in this exhibition were provided by Nigel Maister from his collection of over 10,000 photographs. The show was curated by Maister and Emily Broad, a third-year PhD student in VCS. Maister is the Russell and Ruth Peck Artistic Director of the international Theatre Program at the University of Rochester.
  
  This exhibition was made possible with funding from the Humanities Project, the Hartnett Gallery, the Graduate Program in Visual & Cultural Studies, the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies, the Department of Anthropology, the Susan B. Anthony Institute, and the Office of Minority Student Affairs. The curators would also like to thank Rochester Picture Framing for their generous support.

Sex/Labor

Artist: Antonia Crane, Barbara Nitke, Chichi Castillo, Sasha Waters Freyer, Alyssa Wood, Weixin Zhuang, Katina Bitsicas, Lena Chen, Maggie Oates, David Kim, and Emily Broad

Exhibition Dates: November 21 - December 18, 2024

• Artist Statement

  When describing the feminism of Lizzie Borden's Working Girls (1986);as defined against her two preceding films Regrouping (1976) and Born in Flames (1983) the critic So Mayer commented:Feminism itself has been curtailed, and made newly urgent, by the need to work within capitalism. Sex/Labor was conceived of in the spirit of Borden's Working Girls, which traces the everyday activities that occur across a day in the life of sex workers. This exhibition brings together contemporary art that elaborates on Borden's depiction of sex work as a job taken up to pay rent, put food on the table, and make art.

  The artworks featured in Sex/Labor;made by Antonia Crane, Barbara Nitke, Chichi Castillo, Sasha Waters Freyer, Alyssa Wood, Weixin Zhuang, Katina Bitsicas, Lena Chen, Maggie Oates, David Kim, and Emily Broad;represent both the physical and emotional forms of labor that sex work entails. This labor is constituted by: exhaustion, establishing boundaries, moments of joy and play, and kinship with clients and fellow sex workers that extend beyond the nuclear family. This exhibition does not claim to fully capture all the complexities of sex as a form of labor. Rather, it proposes three things. First, that the history of sex work has a clear significance in contemporary visual culture. Second, its significance can be found in Rochester's local history. The Portable Channel Archive, managed by the Visual Studies Workshop, documents the sex industry's presence in Rochester's downtown area in the 1970s. And third, that the sex workers' rights movement is an urgent matter of our time that relates to larger complications in the distribution of wealth and labor in late capitalism. In a moment when many of us struggle to buy groceries and pay our bills, the decriminalization of sex work could herald a new era for understanding how we work to live.

  Thank you to our generous sponsors: The Humanities Center Project; The Little Theater; The Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies; The Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies; The Hartnett Gallery; Visual Studies Workshop; and the Departments of Art and Art History, Anthropology, English, Film and Media Studies, and Health Humanities and Bioethics

Oracles Apparitions

Artist: Gary Sczerbaniewicz

Exhibition Dates: October 24, 2024 - November 15, 2024

Hold Still Life

Artist: Eric LoPresti

Exhibition Dates: September 26 - October 18, 2024

Time Tripper

Artist: Carolyn Gennari and Tom Carpenter

Exhibition Dates: August 19 2024 ^th- September 20 2024