May 30, 2024

On Tuesday, May 21, seniors who completed advanced work in visual arts, their friends and family, fellow students, and local arts enthusiasts crowded into Bennington College’s Usdan Gallery to admire recent works by the graduates. Works represented a wide array of media, including animation, architecture, ceramics, digital art, photography, printmaking, sculpture, video, and others. 

The works are evidence of the graduates’ technical skill, memories, interests, and explorations. A walk through the gallery during the opening reception offered encounters with a few of the artists and their stories. 

 

“I have come to this [event] every year since I was a freshman and wondered what I would do, and now, here we are,” said Molly Palmer ’24, of Brooklyn, New York. She created an architectural design for a community bathhouse for an empty lot near her home. “All of the pools have skylights above them with different colored glass, so underneath it you are in this tube of colored light soaking in different temperature water…. It’s a place for the community to engage and have a sensory experience.”

 

 

Neither of Daisy Billington ’24’s works, a large scale painting and a large clay sculpture, had been seen by others until the show. “It’s kind of nerve wracking but also a huge relief to let it be out there in the world,” she said. For her, one of the most valuable lessons was determining when the pieces were finished. “It was just a lot of fun working on [these] this term. It was hard to find a stopping point.”

 

 

Zoe Hamblett ’24 worked for more than a year on a physical quilt and a digital one. “I was mixing a lot of digital and analog work in a painting class,” she said. One of her professors told her how to make a network of digital pages featuring handmade work. “I wanted a way to convey a lot of images at once and show a lot of imagery styles without forcing things to be linear or stagnant…. You can just click around and build your own story.”

 

 

Sofie Harriman ’24 of San Francisco grew up surfing. She used ocean-themed prints —including, woodcuts, lithographs, and cyanotype—to create a large irregularly shaped “paper quilt” wall piece. She was inspired by the ubiquity of water in nature and in the human body and its “capacity to both wear down solid objects and to animate and enliven lighter materials.” 

Sam Kemmerer ’24 was interested in creating meaning through the placement of previously unrelated work. “I don’t get a lot of chances to see a lot of my work in one place and get to play around with its arrangement. It’s like creating a whole new piece of work,” they said. They placed a small portrait of a pious scholarly looking figure, frozen in the moment of a wink, up and to the right of his other work, as if it were looking down on the viewers. The arrangement gave their large and otherwise very serious paintings some levity.

 

 

Sawyer London ’24 of Virginia is a ceramic artist. “I am working to find the balance between ceramics and sustainability,” London said. “They are at odds with each other with material extraction, firing, transport….” He created a series of tea bowls using crushed bisqueware and waste and textured glazes. In the show program, he wrote, “It is my goal to develop practices that use waste in a way that becomes more alluring than new materials while making work that pushes ceramics forward.”

 

 

Kayetan McEnerney ’24 used a large steel and rammed earth sculpture to capture a childhood memory of what his mother called “a good fall.” Of the show, he shared, “this was a pivotal moment in my formation as an artist to think more deeply about my work and what I would actually like to show. In this last term, more than anything, I have made the most thoughtful and meaningful work that I have created.” 

 

 

Alma Reiss Navarre ’24 combined her interests in painting, storytelling, and comics in a large wall installation of small oil paintings that illustrate a poem she wrote. “I think about how words disrupt an image or how an image can complicate a text,” said Navarre. She is also interested in the “soft vibration or hum omitted from all living and nonliving things” and using painting to “tune into those frequencies.”

Malvika Dang ’24’s video presentation took viewers outside the gallery and into the studios of some of the other artists exhibiting. “Throughout this term, talking to artists inspired me to create a project that let you into their studios and worlds beyond the gallery space,” she said. “I think I always wanted to find a way to enhance the space of the gallery, to make it something beyond the end product.”