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 2000, which was exhibited at his high school “Senior Art Exhibition.” Now...
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 tension, presenting an image of discomfort, pain, and human frailty. Yet beauty is...
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 Studies whose research focuses on...
In 1915, T.S. Eliot published his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Poetry. It presents the wandering thoughts of an alienated, likely depressed, and certainly indecisive modern man. In thinking of his indecisiveness and unsatisfactory life, he says, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Here, instead of representing productivity and speed, coffee symbolizes wasted time...
Any old hipster will tell you that the best coffee—as per the directions of the barista at their favorite third wave coffee shop—is made with a Chemex Pour Over. You could, however, opt for the French press, (the modern design actually comes from Italy, an important note), if you prefer the thicker, oily consistency that comes from a longer steeping process. But if you really want to be an...
[7-10 minute read] The exploration of queer representation in Hannibal allows for a greater understanding of the conventions of gender and sexuality within the thriller genre. Highly-fictionalized thrillers such as Hannibal thrive on extreme relationships, but also rely heavily on non-traditional erotic relationships to further depict the extremes of personalities in its central characters. The...
Among the harmful tropes of Hollywood, the figure of the Sissy Villain is one tainting LGBT representation in film and television. Despite the improvements of LGBT rights outside of film, the image of men in women’s clothing is one that pervades the genre of horror in particular. Such figures at Buffalo Bill, Cillian Murphy’s John/Emma of Peacock, or James McAvoy’s multiple-identity’d character...
To some degree, all of our posts this month have flirted with affect. Whether it’s waking up dazed in confused in graduate school or exploring the significance of melancholia, memory, and reverberating energies, all of these topics point to a larger picture of attempting to understand and read feeling in texts and our daily lives. This week, we’d like to revisit how we’ve engaged with discourses...
It seems like academia (or any professional forum, for that matter) encourages us to keep our feelings out of things. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve crossed out passages of student essays this month for being “off topic” or “too praisy,” for bringing in “irrelevant” value judgments on the film they’re writing about. And that’s fine: we’re trying to teach them the conventions of textual...
I suppose it speaks to my interest in the virtual that I wrote a whole post about spatiality last week without moving an inch. On the surface, that doesn’t seem quite in line with the so-called “spatial turn” I mentioned in my last post: the trend in humanities scholarship towards the importance of place and space to ideas and power. Then again, many of the concepts we associate with the spatial...