2024 Senior Thesis Exhibition: haven
April 26 – May 11, 2024
@Nichols Gallery, Broad Center and Hinshaw Gallery, The Grove House
Jonah Ifcher
Jonah Ifcher, Sun Room (detail), 2024, cinder blocks, concrete form tubes, c-prints, inkjet prints, and toy cars, dimensions variable.
Jonah Ifcher mines early childhood to construct a fantasy world. This installation, comprising images of his body, toy cars, construction materials, and video, is a playful kaleidoscope of utopia and dystopia, adulthood and youth, safety and peril.
Video work courtesy of Maggie O’Connor.
Lillie Minkskoff
Lillie Minskoff, Potery (detail), 2024, clay, glaze, nail polish, glitter glue, glass, sharpie, stickers, dimensions variable.
Potery is a collection of various functional ceramic pieces for use with cannabis, comprising bongs/water pipes, pipes, ashtrays, rolling trays, storage containers, dab rigs and carb caps. Multimedia artist Lillie Minkskoff hand crafted and painted each highly personalized piece for 15 people of great significance from her time at Pitzer College and the 5Cs. The collection addresses themes of community, comfort, joy, simplicity, whimsy, personal connection, and love. Lillie also emphasizes sentiments of great gratitude and honor for the magical plant that is marijuana. It is key to the collection that viewers and users of the pieces recognize our privilege with the chronic in society today, particularly in California, U.S.A., and even more specifically at Pitzer. A central element that Lillie highlights in Potery is the social power of “the herb,” referring to the plant’s magical ability to bring people together and forge community with like-minded individuals by creating a comforting, relaxing space to simply exist aside one another amidst the chaos of this world. The power of pot helped Lillie make social connections at college, allowing her to come out of her shell, to be vulnerable in unfamiliar environments, to find her second family, whom she loves and cherishes so much and were crucial to her time at Pitzer.
In the exhibition of Potery, Lillie curates a welcoming, peaceful, relaxing environment reflecting the various spaces across the 5Cs in which she has spent much of her time to escape daily challenges and academia, finding solace in the company of friends. The gallery space resembles a living room, with couches, comfy chairs, tables, and lamps. Pictures are scattered across the walls, and eight small shelves are interspersed throughout, displaying select pieces from the collection, while others sit atop the furniture. The environment is meant to be chill and inviting, encouraging and welcoming viewers to engage with the furniture, the pieces, and everything in the room.
A QR code in the gallery connects to a compilation of information about the long, trying history of the magical mary-jane. From curiosity, appreciation, and great religious and cultural significance to prominent “anti-reefer” propaganda throughout history and the journey from criminalization to the legalization within the United States, Lillie unpacks ganja throughout human history in easily digestible, colorful infographics that encapsulate the whimsy of the ceramic collection. Lillie presents viewers with the opportunity to engage comfortably and casually with the realities of all that the plant and its proponents have endured throughout history to fully appreciate and enjoy our privileged contemporary coexistence with cannabis.
Potery is the culmination of all the love and gratitude Lillie has for these people and pot and all the good they’ve brought into her life.
Ryann Liljenstolpe
Ryann Liljenstolpe, Furta Sacra (detail), 2024, ceramic, wood, mixed media assemblage including fabric, candles, metal, water, glass, dimensions variable.
Inspired by sacramental rites and holy relics, Furta Sacra emulates a personal altar of the type found in homes across the world. The installation incorporates references to Christian theology and aesthetics in a nod to Liljenstolpe’s sense-memories of religious worship, while also calling attention to social norms of reverence and restraint which are reproduced in museums and galleries. The enclosed space, flickering candlelight, and padded kneeler reflect the setting of an intimate personal sacrament in Liljenstolpe’s imagination, but the installation invites the visitor to concoct a sacrament of their own.
Ryann Liljenstolpe‘s work engages with multisensory immersion through ritual and performance. In their practice, Liljenstolpe makes use of clay, fiber, and mixed media sculptures to explore meaning-making through tactile perception. They employ the less conventional senses in art-viewing—such as touch, smell, and taste—to engage their audience in intimate encounters beyond passive observation. Having spent their formative years in Catholic and Evangelical Christian schools, their current work reflects on a journey of personal liberation and delights in unconstrained expression, invention, curiosity, and institutional critique.
Molly O’Hara
Molly O’Hara‘s Harbor series explores the complexities of protection and loss through personal iconography. The paintings juxtapose scenes of vulnerability with fading memories of security, emphasizing the present absence and the dissolving nature of memory. Warm colors evoke a sense of nostalgia, while the raw canvas, with its exposed threads, reinforces the theme of vulnerability. These loose threads mirror the unraveling of once-solid feelings of security.
O’Hara invites viewers to engage with the subtle details in her work, seeking out the stories embedded within. She hopes to spark memories in viewers, prompting them to reflect on their own methods of protection—the people and objects they hold closest in times of hardship. The chosen title, Harbor, resonates on multiple levels. It suggests a safe haven, a place of refuge, but also the act of harboring memories and emotions, both joyful and sorrowful. Through this series, O’Hara grapples with loss, cherishes fading memories, and ultimately, explores one’s capacity for resilience.
Skye Park Tausig
Skye Park Tausig, Quill, Ink, Thorn, 2024, printed books, 5.5 x 8 in. each; concrete; cast aluminum; plywood; sound.
Quill, Ink, Thorn is a two-part exhibition, including both an installation and a curatorial book centered around the layered histories of the Southern California desert. Addressing themes of utopianism, the spectre of desert modernism, and various exploitations of the desert as open space, this exhibition implicates the complex network of actors and agents that function within the endless psychic construction of “the desert.” A storytelling, archival, curatorial, and artistic endeavor, Quill, Ink, Thorn accesses conversations about and between those engaged in the construction, transformation, negotiation, and perception of desert spaces.
Skye Park Tausig’s work braids together creative and critical practices with the synergetic aim of making philosophy tactile. Her exhibition work reflects attempts to further her research processes through an exploration of sculptural elements and material contexts. She is fascinated by the inherent co-presence of body and mind, ideology giving rise to object and object containing ideology. Tausig contends that physical, sensory forms of knowing are critical for a deeper understanding of intellectual subjects, and that an art object or piece of design might be understood more thoroughly by the philosophies that it embodies rather than by its form alone.
Reception
Friday, April 26, 2024
6:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Exhibition
April 26 – May 11, 2024
Visit
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 5 pm.
WORLD IS WATCHING – MANIFESTO