SYE Autumn 2022 Pop-Up Gallery Show

→ Please see the photo gallery of this event included at the bottom of this page…

In the Autumn 2022 term at St Lawrence University two graduating Senior students presented their artwork in a pop-up gallery as part of their Senior Year Experience (SYE) curriculum. The two bodies of work by Titania McFarlane and AJ Graff showed very different styles of work.

Artist: AJ Graff

Title: Fragmentation of Perception

Medium: Ink and acrylic on paper, mounted on foam board
Size of full Installation: ~ 6’ x 6’

This artwork serves to function as an act of fragmentation and abstraction, taking the known and making it unknown. This piece works to take an image of a scenic rest stop in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming and take away the familiarity with the image. By using a variety of mediums, styles, and textures, the pieces fall towards the unrealistic, and by fragmenting them and placing them out of order, their coherency becomes incoherent. The work asks the question, “How far can we deconstruct a natural scene before psychologically it is no longer familiar, or recognizable as one?”, and pushes us to consider what happens after that point. The creation of this work was, in this way, an experiment done on the artist’s own perception of the world, and the final work allows others to study their own reactions as well.

Artist: Titania McFarlane

Title: An Ode to CROWN

Medium: Acrylic on canvas, textiles, hair extensions, and hair accessories
Installation: 11 paintings in series

A series of eleven portraits, with each acting as their own composition but also still interacting with one another. In previous painting courses, I made a series of portraits inspired by the CROWN Act, which prohibits discrimination based on hair, and celebrates Black hair like mine. This series expands and explores this concept in more depth. In some cases, the interaction between the canvases is more explicitly depicted and the portraits interact through direct action. Comparatively, in some portraits the interaction is implicit and depicted through things such as the direction the figures are glancing and the relative canvas sizes. Each painting includes a mixture of paint and objects within the image and the color of each painting works to combine the series.

Black women such as myself are the biggest victims of hair prejudice and discrimination, oftentimes being told that our natural hair looks unkempt if it is not straightened, or being ridiculed for wearing extensions. Such social injustice, coupled with the physical and psychological damages this causes, are mainly why I view the CROWN Act as a major achievement for the “Natural Hair Movement”. Markedly, the CROWN Act was legislation passed in 2019 that prohibits prejudice towards others due to their hair.