Bow House

Professor of Biology and Art, Michael E. Moody Professor, Olin College 
Helen.Donis-Keller@Olin.edu

The work Portrait of Boris is a tribute to my late husband Boris Magasanik, created in the last year of his life. Boris was a biologist who had a deep interest in art. The Arctic tern, which I photographed in Iceland, shown on the left panel is a metaphor for his intellect. He had a soaring intelligence, an almost child-like curiosity of all things and he was a gentle kind soul. 

The work Listen to Me demonstrates a need for us to do whatever we can to limit climate change before our planet is completely destroyed. The image was captured at Dettifoss in Iceland. The waterfall is the largest in Europe. It thunders to mostly deaf ears. 

A professor at Olin College since 2001, Helen Donis-Keller received a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University in Cambridge, MA and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Tufts University in Medford, MA. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and is contained in museum and private collections.

Technology Support Specialist, Wellesley College
feshragh@wellesley.edu

Babel deals with failures of text, language, and translation and how those are related to gender politics. The texts represented are drawn from literature specifically focused on female representation. Both texts and images are reproduced using the scanner as a camera. I treat these images as documents. Witnesses to an erosion.

This project is a research-practice investigating how the patriarchal system has shaped language as an oppressive force in the lives of women as in kept them largely invisible. The research material includes folklore, fairy tales, literature, and spoken language.

Growing up using one language and now speaking another drove me to look at language as a subject and material for artistic practice. I started to investigate visual representations of language attrition and how each language starts to fail itself and the other at a certain point. In choosing Farsi and English, I am using the languages I know to explore how visual and linguistic representation and translation can fail one another. These failures of language can have far-reaching consequences that include many of the outcomes of colonialism as well as the oppression of the disempowered.

Fari Eshraghi is an Iranian artist currently living in Boston, US. She is a visual artist working mainly with photography and video to address the issues around gender and body and culture. Her work is mostly concerned with how social and political concepts affect personal experience. While using current issues she channels her work to the past and uses history and found imagery to demonstrate her ideas.

Growing up in traditional Iranian society and now being an immigrant in the United States, she utilizes her personal experience to expand her subject matter. In her most recent work, she is working on the cultural and physical experience of immigrants and how immigration can affect one’s language and communication abilities.

Windows System Administrator, Olin College 
Kurt.Hirschenhofer@olin.edu

Kurt is a staff member in the IT department and has been a member of the Olin community for 17 years. He works in a variety of media and diverse subject matter including music, abstract art and design, and the photography of animals, architecture, landscapes and macro-imagery. He finds photography particularly satisfying as a means to share the experience of wonder and to reveal the richness of color and the beauty of the world whether it be splashes of sunlight, the feathers of a tropical bird or the glow of stained glass. Travel photography is a relatively recent pursuit, which he has found fascinating and addicting. For example, on his first trip he traveled halfway around the world and came face-to-face with a wild leopard he had previously only glimpsed online. He is careful not to disrupt the environments he visits and his work is meant to be true to the subject. The process of photography has opened his eyes to the beauty of the natural world and he hopes that his images also inspire others to preserve, protect and enjoy our planet.

Associate Director of the Visual Arts, Babson College
dkrcmar@babson.edu

These portraits are based off of the images and text of Craigslist Personals Ads.  A personals ad or its current equivalent, a dating profile, is an autobiographical act from the crafting of its content to the distillation of a title line. It is also a portrait of desire- the desire for companionship, love, or sex, or simply to be understood. The writers describe themselves and the qualities of a desired partner, sometimes even offering challenges as a means of inspiring a response. My response was to bring these characters, as I understood them, off of my screen and back into the physical world through the materials of my sculpture; concrete, nylon, and glass. Though these works hover in the uncanny valley, I want to build a sense of sentience within the sculptures with hopes of creating empathy between the viewer and the portrait.

Danielle Krcmar is Associate Director of Visual Arts at Babson College. She earned her BFA in Sculpture from SUNY Binghamton and an MFA in sculpture from UMASS Amherst. She has received grants from from the St Botolph Club Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Blanche Colman Foundation, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.

Her work has been shown at The Fuller Art Museum, The Duxbury Art Complex Museum, Green Street Gallery, Clark University and The Revolving Museum, among others. She has completed architectural sculpture commissions for St Kateri Church in Ridgeway Illinois and St John Newmann Church in Knoxville TN, and also created outdoor installations for the Dartmouth Natural Resources Trust, Forest Hills Cemetery, and the Fort Point Channel area of Boston. Her work has been featured in Ocean State Review and Quilting with a Modern Slant in addition to having been reviewed in Sculpture Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Boston Phoenix, Arts Media, and The Rockland Journal.

Lecturer in Art, Director of 3D Arts, Wellesley College
amowbray@wellesley.edu

I create objects that have a use. These works function to fulfill the desire of a particular goal I have in mind and are often realized or practiced through a performance-type interaction with the object. When developing these project-based works, strong consideration is placed on both the history and current everyday use of the materials employed. In this haptic search I often parallel or draw from previous eras and movements and use these to gain perspective. My current work started with a cucumber that grew imbedded in a fence and lead to creating sustainable modular building blocks from grown and molded Lagenaria gourds. In recent times these gourds have been used as decorative birdhouses and art, but they have also served as functional vessels for thousands of years by cultures spanning the globe, and are believed to be one of the earliest cultivated plants.

These modular gourds have been the main focus of my recent work, and are created in conjunction with forms built from inexpensive construction materials and fragments of reclaimed and recycled buildings. The work shares aspects of gardening, quilting, and decorative craft along with art, architecture and design.

These grown and created forms also unintentionally aesthetically can resemble objects produced by early modernism, and with this observation I scrutinize the imposition of my own vision of architecture and design on backyard flora and fauna, and the problematic structures of any utopian ideal.

Associate Director of Art, Wellesley College
dolsen@wellesley.edu

Linux System Administrator, Olin College 
jpardis@olin.edu

A long time ago, far far away in the city of Columbia, South Carolina Jim decided to take a soul-sucking job as a professional photographer with a focus on high school senior portraits. Please sit down, turn this way, tilt your head. If you are wondering, girls would tilt their head to the left and guys to their right. While the Job at Bryn-Alan was not the start of his photographic profession, it was most definitely the end of it. After photographing thousands upon thousands of teenagers, his creativity crumbled. Fast forward to today, Jim is still recovering from his creative quicksand but tackles photography on his terms. 

Jim does not have any artistic credits, with this being his first exhibition.  While being honored and a little scared, he hopes someone will appreciate his photographs.  His favorite quote is from Buckaroo Banzai, “Remember, no matter where you go, there you are.” It pretty much describes his attitude towards photography and life.

Associate Professor of Art, Wellesley College
drivera@wellesley.edu

I am a part and symptom of blurry cultural boundaries, performing on a stage of vernacular cannibalizations. I focus my attention in the migration of cultural objects, narratives, practices, and myths. 

I address episodes in political history, the history of art and personal history to generate open-ended conversations among viewer, artist and subject. It is finally, the relation in between these three players that bring the work to completion.  

Drawing as understanding, drawing as seeing, and drawing as analysis is at the center of my practice. Without exception, all my projects are thought, analyzed, and constructed through and by drawing. Then, I incorporate painting into my language as a communication strategy.  On the one hand, I recreate utilitarian uses of painting, which alter representational and perceptual planes, to make the painting perform as the space and ask the body to assume the role of the figure in the painting. Painting becomes a tool for staging and generating a physical experience that presents an opportunity to locate understanding back in the body. On the other hand, I use, as a strategy, the control of the discipline of painting in an attempt to claim ownership of a tradition and its history, positioning my work within a specific genealogy. 

My work tangos with the process of baroque painting techniques and the presentational strategies and formal undertones of minimalist art, a contradiction in many ways but a world of possibilities for staging. 

Born in Santiago, Chile, Daniela Rivera received her BFA from Pontifcia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1996 and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, Boston in 2006. She is currently an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Wellesley College. She has exhibited widely in Latin American cities including Santiago, Chile, as well as in the United States. She has been awarded residencies at Surf Point, Proyecto ACE in Buenos Aires, Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the Skowhegan School of Paintings and Sculpture. And she has been the recipient of notable fellowships and grants including from The Rappaport Prize,  Now + There, VSC, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, and the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. Recent or upcoming exhibitions include: The Andes Inverted, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2017–2018);Fragmentos para una Historia del Olvido/ Fragments for a History of Displacement, The Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA (2018–2019); En Busca de los Andes, solo exhibition with Proyecto ACE, Buenos Aires, Argentina (June 2019); Sobremesa (Karaoke Politics), a public art project developed during her Now + There Accelerator Fellowship, Boston MA (summer/fall 2019), and Labored Landscapes (Where the sky touch the Earth) at Fitchburg Art Museum.

Olin College of Engineering
Tim.Sauder@olin.edu


This body of work has been (and is being) created in response to an interaction I had with my students a couple years ago. It was the morning after an incredibly charged US election and my class was just starting. As soon as everyone showed up and grabbed a seat one of my students raised her hand and asked, “Since this is a communication course can we talk about how I’m supposed to communicate with my family about politics when I already know we don’t agree? Especially about what happened last night?” We talked that day about how difficult it is to be open to others’ points of view while staying true to your own beliefs when those two things differ. We discussed how it was our responsibility to work to find ways to broaden our own perspectives and share with others what we see. This work is an exercise in exposing myself to other people’s experiences in America. I’m exploring what this country means to them and deepening my own understanding of what America and its identity means to me.

Tim Ferguson Sauder is an artist, designer and professor in the practice of design at Olin College. His work ranges from sculptural installations to graphic design. He is a co-designer of the Accessible Icon Project which has been included in exhibitions in America, Germany, UK and Korea and is part of the permanent collection at the MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. His sculpture work has been shown at the White-Ellery House in Gloucester Massachusetts in association with the Cape An Museum. His Americans Flags series was exhibited in 2019 at the Define American Summit in Louisville Kentucky. He lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Artist
Michellestevens2000@gmail.com

I began as a photography student at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. While I was thriving, I had to leave due to the cost.

I received my fine arts education at my community college. There, I discovered my love of painting under the guidance of master artist Marian Loomis.

I’ve exhibited in group and solo shows in California.

My inspiration comes from spending time outdoors.

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Olin College 
etow@olin.edu

As an artist, I am interested in repetition: spatial patterns, unquestioned habits, and tedious creation processes. Currently, I am pondering our society’s habits of clothing consumption through a series of patterned soft sculptures made from our cast-offs. I wonder what useful or beautiful things we could do with the large quantities of textile waste we produce. Even more so, given the known environmental and ethical consequences of the way we consume clothing, I wonder why we feel we need so many clothes. 

Although many of these sculptures lightheartedly explore the possibilities of discarded clothing as art materials, the pieces I chose for this show address clothing overconsumption in both material and form. For “Expansion (Heptagon Tiling),” I created a hyperbolic plane from t-shirt rags and suspended it in tension using wire and weights. I chose the hyperbolic plane for its frustrating unwillingness to lay flat, which reminds me of the proliferation of fashion waste worldwide as well as the unintentional expansion of my own wardrobe. In “Brilliant Cut,” shrunken wool sweaters become the facets of a diamond, drawing an analogy between clothing and a recognizable symbol of beauty, status, and unseen harm. 

Emily Tow is a visual artist working in various media, including soft sculpture, ceramics, drawing, and mural painting. Emily has an S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Art, Culture, and Technology from MIT, where she was a recipient of the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts. In addition to her work in visual art, much of her engineering work overlaps with the visual, including investigating the thermal properties of quilts and elucidating mechanisms of membrane fouling through video and microscopy.

Artist-in-Residence, Olin College 
rwechcsler@olin.edu

Wechsler’s recent projects focus on the U.S. penny. Minted since 1909, the penny has been one of the most familiar objects of daily life in America for generations. Today, rendered practically worthless by inflation, the penny may soon be eliminated from circulation. Produced but without purpose, exceptionally common but rarely used, ubiquitous to the point of invisibility, the penny is fertile ground for surprise.