“The Broke It, Let Them Fix It” Opens in Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery

by Milap Dixit

Students make videos for open-source exhibition project.

Haverford artists Dylan Ravenfox ’09, Sam Kaplan ’10 & Goda Trakumaite ’10, Robin Riskin 12, and Jane Holloway ’11 and Bryn Mawr artist Samantha Salazar ’11 displayed short video works for the installation apparatuses that make up Finley + Muse’s Imaginative Feats Literally Presented: Three Fables for Video Projection at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery on Thursday night. It was the first time the newly renovated gallery space has been used for an event outside of the regular gallery operations and attracted a large number of students and faculty members. The works attempted to use the expressive potential of the different video apparatuses and their orientation within the gallery space, yielding a variety of results.

Dylan Ravenfox’s piece, entitled To See or Not See (and Hear): On The Physical Impossibility of Beauty In the Mind of Some One Living, used all four apparatuses.

[disturbing image from his piece-if you guys have one]

Whereas Dylan Ravenfox’s and Samantha Salazar’s works used all four apparatuses to create a kind of cinema dominated by space and movement, Sam Kaplan & Goda Trakumaite’s and Jane Holloway’s works, both of which only used the "Flat Land" apparatus, were dominated by notions of time and memory. Kaplan & Trakumaite’s piece, entitled Thinking Through Photographs, was composed of two opposite projections of collated still images of landscapes and childhood. It provided a mellow, melancholic counterpoint to the horror and anxiety of Ravenfox’s opening piece. Holloway’s piece, a concise and poignant meditation on meaning in translation, was entitled Quiché Translations. It juxtaposed a looped fragment from an oral testimony recorded in Guatemala with a spoken translation of the same fragment.

[images from sam&goda's piece]

Robin Riskin’s video consisted of text and images documenting self-created assignments that involved introducing herself to strangers on Haverford’s campus. She writes, "I break the mold of polite interaction and create awkwardness so that people reconsider their actions, relationships, and expectations.”

The final piece by Samantha Salazar also used all four apparatuses. Entitled Craving, it used the rotating projector to convey the anxious dreaming consciousness of its subject.