Eldis Artist Defense

Matthew Buckingham’s Celeritas

Buckingham’s Celeritas would appeal to many people on campus. It concretely represents the phenomenon of travelling light, a concept that everyone is familiar with. Therefore, the piece would interest not only math and science majors, but the university community at large. As a sculptural piece that would be mounted on the wall, it would add an engaging new medium to the works currently in the collection. This would not be an empty addition for the mere sake of its sculptural medium, however, because the piece interacts with its environment in a very specific way; that is, the numbers on the chalkboard would differ depending on whether it’s placed under an electric light or near a window.

Fred Cray

from Travel Diaries

from 2 Minute Self Portraits

In his works, Fred Cray manipulates photographic methods to create impressionistic images. Far from documentary images we’d typically expect to find in photographs, Cray superimposes images on top of one another, or, in the case of his long-exposed self-portraits, moments on top of moments, to show how different fleeting perceptions and moments in time interplay. His work would enter nicely in conversation with the other photos in the series, which also question the capacity of the camera to accurately reflect perceptions. While the other photos in the Collection achieve this by sharply contrasting multiple individual points of view, Cray achieves it by muddling them. In his superimpositions, he is also referencing nineteenth century spirit photographs, which operated on the belief that cameras and photographs could capture spirit images (they were of course illusions).

Jenny Morgan

Captured

Jenny Morgan’s portraits confound what we expect of portraits and their subjects. By rubbing away upper layers of paint she reveals a vital red, giving not only her subjects but also her method a new life. As a Like the Spice press release explains, this reveals “both the layers of her technique and the metaphorical flesh of her subjects.” It is significant that many of her paintings are of women, and that a good number of these are of herself. She presents herself and other women in her paintings naked and vulnerable, but deliberately wears away the upper layers of the paint, thus undermining the notion that the female subject in a portrait is passive; because she self-consciously emphasizes her method and reminds us that what we look at are paintings, the subjects gaze back on us as much as we do on them.