Reflections in the Visual Arts
Mariana Pereira Vieira
Touching
Mariana Pereira Vieira is a Brazilian artist and educator based in Colorado. Mariana’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Dairy Center for the Arts, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Center for Fine Art Photography, and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Lenscratch, among others.
She writes:
'Spring in the Rocky Mountains is a delightful season of growth and rebirth. Brown patches of dirt or entire mountain sides start to slowly show spurs of green. In March of 2020, while the world was coming to a halt due to the Covid-19 pandemic, nature was undeterred - it continued to bloom and blossom, encouraged by the warmer, longer days of Spring, unaffected by the human chaos surrounding it.'
'One of the first, lasting impacts of the pandemic was the fear of touching. Suddenly, the act of hugging a friend or shaking hands was an act of violence. Touching was loaded with fear of transmission of a deadly disease. I started making these prints to celebrate the human touch. These images record my touch on the surface of the paper, a gesture to symbolize the missed hugs of comfort, support, and love that we could not share with our family and friends. In my backyard, I discovered a world that refused to stop thriving, and used the seedlings of weeds, dandelions, tulips, and vegetables to form a bond with my touch.'
'The relationship between humans and nature is complicated and tragic. We are a species that continuously abuses our planet, destroys the resources that sustain life, but whose constructed world broke apart due to the smallest possible life form. Touching presents an intimate world of contemplation, where the human touch and nature exist in symbiosis, supporting and celebrating each other.'
Bridget Nelson
The Face Behind the Mask
Bridget Nelson is a CU Undergraduate in Women and Gender Studies. Honorable Mention.
Nelson describes her work as a "visual art project that captures all of the diverse ways people have made face coverings during this time." Through Instagram, Bridget has incorporated photographers' masked self-portraits and quarantine stories, revealing the "humanity in people during such a frightening time."
Gregory Robl, Julia Seko, Danny Long, and Susan Guinn
Minding Your Ps & Qs!
Using mail art as their stylistic and methodological model enabled Gregory Robl (Special Collections, Rare and Distinctive Collections), Julia Seko (Scholarly Resource Development), Danny Long (Program for Writing and Rhetoric), and Susan Guinn (Special Collections, Rare and Distinctive Collections), to remain safe from the pandemic of the present, while printing a broadside about pandemics of the past. Mail art is an artistic movement that arose in the mid-twentieth century. Collaborative mail artists use what might be called a create-and-share method: creating a work of art and sharing it with a fellow artist, who adds to it and shares it with yet another artist, who then continues the process. The result is a layered and variegated collage, the artwork spreading from one person to the next like a benign virus.
Julia Uhr
The Stillness in the Room
Julia Uhr is a Ph.D. student at the ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder, where her research focuses on virtual and augmented reality. She also holds a J.D. and an M.A. in philosophy from CU.
Julia Uhr writes: The Stillness in the Room is a virtual reality game and immersive research environment based on the life and work of Emily Dickinson. As a game, it subverts the “escape room” genre by encouraging players to “escape” by delving inward rather than outward. As a research environment, it digitally reproduces the Dickinson Homestead in VR, including images of Emily Dickinson’s hand-written poems with transcriptions and metadata from the Emily Dickinson Archive, interactive annotations, and references to Dickinson scholarship. The goal is to create a playful virtual environment where people can explore the richness of solitude and immerse themselves in poetry. This is currently a work in progress. The part that is finished and can be seen in the video is the Emily Dickinson Reading Room, the final scene of the game, set in Emily Dickinson's bedroom where she wrote most of her poetry.