Category: Watching
Natural Hauntings: A Return to the Creaturely
“Humans,” art historian Glenn Peers contends, “have slipped into a modern faith in knowingness that thinks it exceeds the scale and complexity of our world…, blind[ing] us to other human possibilities.” The statement embodies the recent artworks of Pakistani multimedia artist Huma Bhabha in her 2024 exhibition entitled, “Welcome…to the one who came.” Primarily a
Transcending Boundaries: A Mother’s Work
Referencing his mother’s passing in 1992, Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “aim as an artist [was] to make a work that [was] so palpable and so dynamic and so incredibly felt that [his] Mom could literally walk off the surface of the canvas and back to life.”[1] The result was Untitled (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) from
I Came By
Babak Anvari’s 2022 film I Came By tells the disjointed story of graffiti artists Jay and Toby. Set in the contemporary United Kingdom, the story addresses colonialism, race, and the curious characteristics of modern, industrial societies in this follow-up to Anvari’s 2016 debut film Under the Shadow. In many ways, I Came By resembles recent
A Painfully Honest Portrayal of Beauty
Tracey Emin, Like A Cloud of Blood, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 59 7/8 x 71 5/8 in. (152 x 182cm) The difficulty in comprehending Tracey Emin’s Like A Cloud of Blood (2022) is the paradox of witnessing a disappearing figure coming into being. In Emin’s painting, an incomplete and empty body lies isolated in curled
A Patriotic Reflection of a Broken Image
The nature of quilting implies a coming together of disparate elements to create a pleasing and cohesive whole. Rachel Clark’s quilt, These Colors Should Run, utilizes these formal qualities to reimagine the American flag, conveying an unsettling and paradoxical image of a nation in disrepair. Clarke is a Professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information
Under the Shadow: Islamic Horror and Shadows of the Djinn
In the last 25 years, the American media landscape has been flooded by stories of war and conflict in the Middle East. In the perspective of many American spectators, the Middle East is a chaotic and even frightening place full of terrorists and extremism. While such terrors exist in the Middle East, attending to the
Attempting to Wrangle Video Game Genre Adaptation
When used in relation to video games, the term “genre” primarily functions as a descriptor of the types of interactive play present in the text—e.g. role-playing, shooting, driving, etc. Games’ systems of interaction often become the main identifiers by which they get categorized. While a plethora of genres defined by narrative and theme are represented
Interracial Couples as Outcasts in Loving
In the 2016 movie Loving, the interracial couple of Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga) experience discrimination under segregation in 1950s and 1960s Virginia. Outside forces (i.e., people in the community and institutions) continuously try to separate the couple, making it difficult for them to be together. These outside forces use a
Teaching Race with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric
In the same year that Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s murders at the hands of the police sparked national protest, Claudia Rankine published her book Citizen: An American Lyric. Originally published in 2014, Citizen consists of poems, monologues, lyrical essays, artwork, and photographs, all of which explore microaggressions and their broader relationship to systemic racism.
Slavery on Screen and the Black Trauma Genre
Upon the release of Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum (2020), the film was met with mixed reception. Antebellum follows a young Black woman author, Veronica Henley (Janelle Monaé), who, after leaving her home and family to complete her book tour, “wakes up” to find herself enslaved on what appears to be a cotton plantation