Thanks to the Grua O’Connell Research award I received I was able have an enriching experience over the course of my independent study and I was able to experiment with many new materials that would have been otherwise inaccessible to me. The grant primarily covered the cost of art making materials, especially larger quantities of rubber for mold making and other materials for experimentation and casting. I explored different techniques as related to mold making and casting, and I continued to push my ideas throughout the project to create numerous works that sought to consider ideas related to gender, sexuality, and identity.

In the beginning of my project, I focused most of my time on making molds and exploring my ideas through mass-production. As my interests continued to shift, so did my use of materials, moving from this more systematic approach to one that was centered in hand building with clay. Although the central themes I was examining remained constant throughout the semester, with each subsequent work the forms and pieces I made morphed, with the resulting work consisting of three ceramic objects as part of a Decorative Object Series. These objects, informed by previous works that I had developed over the semester, were not only emblematic of my ideas as they continued to mature, but also my larger concern with the relationship between art objects, decoration, and the perceived “beauty” of the works.

I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity as it allowed me to further explore my artistic ideas with materials that I would not normally utilize. Through this experience I was able to consider themes that had consistently shown up in my work but required the depth and time that an independent study provided to fully come to fruition and be realized within a complete art piece. After gaining such insight in terms of my own creative process, I am excited to continue forward with the material knowledge and conceptual background that I gained from this experience.                                                                                                                      

This summer, my work went in a different direction than I originally planned. After rethinking my Fellowship project and being offered some unique opportunities in the Bowdoin Art Department, I ultimately decided to revisit the CODOX project during senior studio next year. This summer I have continued to work my portfolio creating more figurative pieces in a series exploring crowds and social settings that I start last summer. While initially this project was made about social settings at Bowdoin, I have been experimenting with how this project can be made to represent the intense emotions found during “Senior Week” of last spring. As a fifth-year senior spending more time at Bowdoin, I was enabled to witness the stress, excitement, and anxiety surrounding that time from a removed perspective, and am excited to make more pieces representing that event. After building, stretching, and preparing my own canvases, I ultimately completed two large pieces exploring those ideas, while also examining how angularity and abstracting can contribute to the tension and complexity in how figures interact with one another and the viewer. I also had the opportunity to be showcased in a Bowdoin News article about my work this summer.

In addition to this portfolio work, I was able to work as the Harrisburg-Rosenfeld Artist’s student- assistant for visiting artist Titus Kaphar. This widely shown artist creates figurative work exploring how appropriating style and mediums from Classic and Renaissance painters can showcase the role of race and history in formal portraiture. I had the privilege to assist with his arrival and work this summer, and will continue to help during his return this upcoming year.

Frankie Ahrens '18

What was set forth as a summer project to create paintings of abstracted biology quickly became an investigation of much more. For starters, what can paint do? How can it be combined with other mediums to achieve certain effects? How can these effects be manipulated on a canvas to complement compositions in specific ways? Over the summer I found an investigation of material, technique, and approach usurping my investigation of biology, and this was a shift I gladly welcomed into my studio practice. Accompanying this shift came an investigation of light and space and how it operates within the parameters of a canvas. Very quickly, my work came to focus on various manipulations of the perception of light and space. Though biology is certainly a subliminal theme in my summer work, the final collection of over thirty paintings – many finished and some still in progress – represent visual investigations of material, light, and space. These investigations quickly broke into various different sub bodies of work.

One such sub body of work consists of six paintings that were made using blown air to move the paint around instead of a brush, creating an interaction of the paint with itself that simply cannot be achieved with a firm tool (i.e. a brush). These six works vary in their material composition. Five were made with faster drying acrylic paint and one was made with a combination of acrylic paint and slower drying oil paint. Four have various mixed mediums worked into them like wood putty, sawdust, and diatomaceous earth in order to create surface tension and 3-dimensional elements. Two are more traditional in their material composition in that only paint and paint thinner are applied to the canvas. All six focus on the organic process of moving different colored patches of paint into each other via the process of blown air in order to create aesthetic allusions to amorphous combinations of the cosmological and the microbiological.

Another body of work, consisting of three paintings, focuses on space in a very different way by manipulating the canvas itself in conjunction with manipulating the paint that is applied to it, therefore transforming the paintings into low-relief sculptures. All works on wood, I built up two of these paintings three- dimensionally with synthetic wood in order to give a subcurrent to the paint that was then applied. The third work involved cutting a completed painting into subdivisions and displaying it in a disordered rendition of the initial painting’s composition.

The largest body of work I completed this summer, consisting of over fifteen paintings, focuses on the perception of three-dimensional space within a flat canvas. These paintings were primarily painted using more traditional oil-painting methods, though many incorporate elements of mixed media as well. The main intent in these works is the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of illusory space. That is, they force the viewer to question whether there are realistic objects being alluded to in the abstract compositions or whether any such calls to reality simply do not exist. These works are very similar to the work of American abstract painter Arthur Dove (1880-1946) in his investigation of abstracted space, however, many of my works in this collection also embark upon questions about the abstraction of the emotional content within a painting. Through the use of variations in light and dark in the pigment values of my paint, many of these paintings are equally as ambiguous about their representations of space as they are about their representation of emotion, often torn between the disparate realms of hope and despair, embodying elements of both while simultaneously rejecting elements of each other.

These three large bodies of work, coupled with various single-painting endeavors, all surmise a rather diverse summer portfolio. Though I welcomed the break from biological investigations, this summer’s work remains organic in retrospect. Abandoning biology to grapple with what paint can do, I found myself striving to create abstract compositions with the feeling of a real world inside. Grounded in our biology or not, they all give allusion to an organic existence. A selection of these works will be showing on campus in the fall.

This summer, I started working on an interactive art installation that explores different meanings and perceptions about water. More specifically, it is a media art that creates an interactive system of video and sound, both of which are inspired by the religious analogy of water as salvation. For the past eight weeks of the summer, I focused on crafting video pieces and experimenting with the ways to programmatically incorporate the interactive features. This work in progress is an ongoing collaboration with Soomin Kim, a student composer at Oberlin Conservatory, who will compose the music and other sound pieces for the project. By putting these pieces—the sound, the video, and the space and structure that holds them—together, I hope to create an environment where one can experience the immersive, destructive, and purifying nature of water.

The video is a series of non-narrative images of water. I tried to inundate the screen with visually loaded footages that conjure up feelings that I associate with water without telling stories or evoking specific emotions. Below are the screenshots from the videos I have created.

I initially regarded the project as an apparatus for my continued academic pursuit of finding ways to incorporate elements of computing into art. While it still was an important objective of my project, I was able to stray away from my almost obsessive interest in “technology art” and challenge myself with aesthetic and expressive questions, which allowed me a chance to make art the way that I have never made before.

I plan to continue working on this project back on campus. The sound will be edited into the video, and the interactivity will be achieved through Processing and Max codes that I have written. These codes enable the use of devices such as Microsoft Kinect and Arduino, which I use to capture viewers’ movement and relative distances. These inputs will manipulate the videos projected onto the screen. I plan to exhibit the final product during the first few weeks of the second semester.

This summer, I attended Brandeis in Siena, a Brandeis University program exploring early Renaissance art at the Siena Art Institute. Between July 11th and August 18th, I lived and studied with nine other students in the city of Siena, a UNESCO World Heritage site with preserved Medieval and Gothic buildings. The program provided an opportunity to discover the history of the region, as well as contemporary Tuscan culture, through the lens of art and art-making.

Formally, the program consisted of two academic courses, but it was much more than that. The art history and studio art courses were closely linked to each other, to site visits in cities around Tuscany, and to our everyday experiences in Siena. We explored developments in painting, sculpture, and architecture from the Romanesque and Gothic periods in the 13th-14th centuries through the beginnings of the Renaissance in the 15th century. In the studio art course, we took up the glazing technique used by Renaissance oil painters, which involves a monochromatic under-painting with color applied afterward in thin layers; we used this technique on still life and landscape paintings, figure paintings from the model, and copies from master works. Excursions during and outside of class time allowed us to see artworks created with the same techniques that we were learning in the studio, as well as works which marked major milestones in art history. These site visits took us to the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Siena, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and many churches and architectural monuments in Siena, Florence, and San Gimignano. We also had the opportunity to view contemporary art at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano and at the Venice Biennale, an incredible event featuring more than a hundred contemporary artists from dozens of countries around the world. These instances prompted reflection about art’s changing role from the period of the Renaissance we were studying to the modern day. Overall, the site visits and course materials blended with our immersion in Sienese daily life to provide a culturally intensive experience.

This experience has had a profound effect on me. I encountered art in a way that I rarely do; visits to museums and churches felt at once like personal experiences of the artworks, with time to reflect on the profundity of each piece or location, and like class time, with details of the context and significance delivered on-site by knowledgeable professors. The stories of these works will stay with me for a long time. It is particularly powerful to think of the artists working in Florence in the 1420s and after, who were conscious that they were creating a new visual language— a language of humanism, a new respect for the human body and for Classical ideas, a new conception of space and humanity’s role in the world. These artists knew they were making breakthroughs in the realism of painting and sculpture or in the intentionality of architecture, and they cared deeply about the precedents they were setting. To walk from the art history class into the painting studio and work with the same techniques, in the same settings as these artists was profound in itself. We were just as active in the process of creating art as we were in learning about it. Furthermore, the history we learned about in class was visible in our daily life, walking around Siena; we were able to visit the Siena Cathedral, a beautiful mix of Romanesque and Gothic architecture, during lunch breaks or glance up at an archetypal Renaissance palazzo on our way home from class. In terms of my personal growth, the program has influenced my academic goals as well as my perspective on art. I am more certain than ever of my love of painting and my path as a Visual Art major, and I expect that concepts from the studio course this summer will directly inform my work in Visual Art courses at Bowdoin. The art history class has had just as strong an effect; my new understanding of the context of the oil painting tradition will give me a more nuanced perspective on my studio work, but I’ve also realized that I am passionate about art history for its own sake. My studies this summer, therefore, will affect my trajectory at Bowdoin and beyond.

Brandeis in Siena was an intensive, profound experience which broadened my understanding of art and art’s connection to specific locations and contexts. I fully experienced the cultural environment of Siena; I learned in great detail the developments in art production which led up to the blossoming of the Renaissance; and I created oil paintings intimately linked through subject matter and style to the location in which I was working. My time in Italy was incredibly valuable and will make its mark on my academic career at Bowdoin.