artPROJECTS | The Department of Art
The Department of Art presents ‘ART PROJECTS’ in the Clarvit Courtyard:
Beginning every evening just after sunset and running until midnight, the Clarvit Courtyard of the Parren J. Mitchell Art Sociology building will be filled with a rotating program of video, and other time-based media artwork produced by students, faculty and staff at the University of Maryland as well as by guest artists from around the globe. These exciting and provocative works of film, animation, digital media, motion graphics, and other related media will run nightly and rotate regularly. This project is administered by the Department of Art, and is made possible by a generous gift from the Clarvit Family.
Currently On-View:
watching time watching god, by Mojdeh Rezaeipour
About the work:
I started as an Artist In Residence at The Nicholson Project in Southeast DC in April 2020, just as COVID was deepening in its severity here in the US. While I had proposed to do a community based project for my on-site activation, the pandemic called for me to reshape this proposal to fit within the context of our new circumstances. I spent many of my first weeks there in lockdown behind the lens of my camera, bearing witness to time through watching the light move across the wall, the moon move across the sky, etc. I then projected hours and hours of this collected footage onto various surfaces in the space, capturing a layered imprint as part of a silent conversation with the house itself. Meanwhile, the ambulance sirens shrieked, the birds chirped, the helicopters flew past, and I managed, in this liminal moment, to make a handful of dear friends in the neighborhood with whom I continue to be in relationship. To me, this work is as much about what is visible as what is not at the intersection of bearing witness, being in relationship, and surrender.
This nine minute single channel iteration of watching time watching god debuted as part of Inside Outside, Upside Down at The Phillips Collection in July 2021. You can read more about it in this interview.
About the Artist:
Mojdeh Rezaeipour is an Iranian-born transdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Mojdeh’s archive-based, iterative practice bridges over a decade of their varied backgrounds as an architect, storyteller, and community organizer. Her solo and collaborative projects have been exhibited nationally and internationally in a wide range of venues, from DIY project spaces to larger institutions and platforms. In 2024, Mojdeh was an artist in residence at The Luminary (St Louis), debuted her solo exhibition Notebooks at Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion (Washington, DC), and shared an inaugural iteration of Classroom Solidarities at the student run Herman Maril Gallery here on campus. Mojdeh’s ongoing curatorial project 93 Fragments is produced by Washington Project for the Arts and is exhibited at GW’s Corcoran School of Arts and Design thru February 15th, 2025.
Previously Exhibited:
Recent Screenings:
Are You the Perfect Specimen, by Lauren Lee McCarthy and Casey Reas
Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of automation, surveillance, and algorithmic living. She has received grants and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA, Sundance, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Autodesk, and Ars Electronica, and her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work SOMEONE was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica and the Japan Media Arts Social Impact Award, and her work LAUREN was awarded the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. Lauren's work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as the Barbican Centre, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, Seoul Museum of Art, Chronus Art Center, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, and the Japan Media Arts Festival.
Lauren is also the creator of p5.js, an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code, with over 10 million users. She expanded on this work in her role from 2015–21 on the Board of Directors for the Processing Foundation, whose mission is to serve those who have historically not had access to the fields of technology, code, and art in learning software and visual literacy. Lauren is a Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT.
"New Words" | Varvara Tokareva:
Nov 10th - Nov. 29th, 2022
The process of making the installation was recorded in Studio #5, Department of Art, at the Art-Sociology Building, UMD, from the 19th to the 25th of September 2022. The artist is grateful for the help of Trevon Coleman, Kevin Gomes, Justin Strom, Marilena Draganescu, Shannon Collis, and Farid Shiafetdinov.
Merriam-Webster officially added 54 new entries to its dictionary in September 2022. These “new” words represent the flexibility and elasticity of human speech and show how the English language is changing as well as society, culture, and ideas. Perhaps these new words are the brightest examples of having an “elastic mind.” Referring to this record, I have focused on these new words, writing down all, repeating each one on a separate sheet of paper, and creating visualizations of the updates. Fancy abbreviations, web slang, and foreign sayings apparently have been used often enough to be fixed in one of the world’s most popular dictionaries.
New New Media: recent work by Digital Media students in the Department of Art:
Nov 2nd. - Nov. 9th, 2022
Cassiel Arcilla
Beniyam Berhanu
Sebastian Bolatto
Evan Deist
Marcus Finger
Eva Ginns
Jia Li
Jacqueline Maloney
Rocky Mlodik
Tobe Micah Peabody
Abdul Ibrahim Sallah
Jasmine Voon
Maryam Ali
Vance Degan
Dani Feng
Madeleine Guiliani
Jesseca Greene
Carmie Hsaio
Erin Hulbert
Jamie Mueller
Jessica Nefflen
Hailey Ng
Lynn Nguyen
Wesley Tan
Wendy Wu
October, 2022
"Bodyknots" and "Fatigue:Relief" by Charlotte Richardson-Deppe (MFA candidate)
October 5th, October 17th, 2022
Charlotte Richardson-Deppe is an interdisciplinary artist from St. Paul, MN. Growing up she trained in circus arts at Circus Juventas, where she excelled in aerial arts. Her artistic focus expanded to include visual art while studying at Grinnell College, where she became enamored with sculpture, performance, and installation while continuing to train in dance, theater, and vocal music. Charlotte’s artistic endeavors include performing with the Riverbed Theater Company at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan; representing Weaving Hand Studio in a residency at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, NY; serving as program Assistant Director at Urban Arts Academy in Minneapolis, MN; and completing a Resident Artist Fellowship at NE Sculpture in Minneapolis, MN. Her work has been shown at Culture Lab LIC in Queens, NY; Troppus Projects in Kent, Ohio; Frederick Arts Council in Frederick, MD; and VisArts in Rockville, MD. She is currently a third-year MFA candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park.
More information on Charlotte Richardson-Depp can be found here
September, 2022
"Difficult Donuts" & "Paper Bag Test" by Trevon Coleman (MFA candidate)
September 20th - October 4th, 2022
Trevon Coleman (b. 1987, Fort Washington, MD) is a multidisciplinary artist working in film, painting, printmaking, and caricature illustration. His work has been featured in several programs including Slamdance Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival, Mimesis Documentary Film Festival, Florida Film Festival, SF Cinematheque's CROSSROADS, as well as others and has shown works in exhibitions curated with Orlando Museum of Art (virtual) and Henao Contemporary Center, in Orlando FL and The Walker Art Center Mediatheque, in Minneapolis, MN. Trevon holds BFA in Studio Art and BFA in Film Production from the University of Central Florida, MFA in Film and Video Production from University of Iowa, and is currently an MFA Studio Art student at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Learn more about Trevon Coleman here.
"Prowl' by Jefferson Pinder (MFA 2002).
September 8th @ 7:30PM: Coinciding with NextNowFest.
About Jefferson Pinder:
Jefferson Pinder (b. 1970, Washington, D.C.) has produced highly praised performance-based and multidisciplinary work for over a decade. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group shows including exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, The High Museum in Atlanta, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and Tate Modern in London, UK. In 2017, Pinder received a Guggenheim Fellowship; he also won a 2016 USA Joyce Fellowship Award in the field of performance, and in 2017 the Moving Image Acquisition Award. Most recently, he was named a 2021 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow.
You can read more about 'Prowl' here, and learn more about Jefferson Pinder here.