News

April 23, 2015

Three exhibitions open at the Lewis Center for the Arts

The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Visual Arts at Princeton University will present three exhibitions by seniors in the program. Labor Against Waste by Margaret Craycraft documents the concert tour of a Brooklyn-based songwriter through film and photography. In wave, form. Matt Rogers explores the synesthetic relationship between audio and visual through a range of multimedia works. Caresse Yan’s All My Things Are Hims uses a range of media in a room-sized installation to examine philosophy, mind games, and levels of reality.

Craycraft, from Cincinnati Ohio, is majoring in visual arts through a collaborative program between Princeton’s Department of Art and Archaeology and the Lewis Center’s Program in Visual Arts, which enables students to focus on studio practice. She had already deeply explored photography before coming to Princeton and continued to study the medium at the Lewis Center but also began to explore filmmaking through the Program in Visual Arts’ Film and Video Track.

Her senior thesis project and exhibition combine film and photography to document musician Christopher Paul Stelling as he tours, records, and makes the transition from independent artist to signing with a major record label. The short documentary film, which will be continuously shown in the gallery throughout the exhibition, will also be screened with films by other seniors in the Film and Video Track on April 25 at Frist Campus Center Theater. The medium format color photographs in the exhibition fill in further details of the songwriter’s story and help to promote and support the documentary; the exhibition takes its name from Stelling’s third album, which will be released in June.

Craycraft has been interning with New York City-based photographer Danny Clinch, who specializes in photographing musicians ranging from Johnny Cash to Tupac Shakur and from Bjork to Bruce Springsteen. After Princeton she is considering continued work in photography, as well as a teaching career.

Rogers, from Lincoln, Massachusetts, is majoring in psychology and pursuing a certificate in visual arts. He has a background in music, having composed electronic music and audio-visual work since his teen years. His project investigates the conversion of basic waveforms into sound, and the conversion of that energy into visual manifestations. This array of visualizations interact with the exploration of basic waveforms to build up visual vocabularies for the sounds one hears. As one begins to recognize patterns in the visualizations, they begin to identify and discern the corresponding sounds and to understand the unique properties of these patterns. His artistic work relates to aspects of his studies in psychology, such as perception.

In an example of one of the works in his show, a laser is pointed at a small mirror that is positioned inside a speaker. As sounds vibrate the speaker, the mirror moves in response and the laser’s moving beam is reflected on walls in the gallery. Other installations present similar physical manifestations of sound.

Yan’s work is highly influenced by her studies as a philosophy major. The Scotch Plains, New Jersey resident is interested in the ideas of myth, games, uncertainty, and improvability, all of which are explored in her work with an attitude at times playful, at times unsettling. Through paper, video and other multimedia works installed in a large room, Yan invites viewers to become immersed in these ideas and guides them through with a “map” of the exhibition. As an artist, Yan seeks to develop a concept and then determine which media would most effectively enable her to manifest the idea. For example, parallel videos in the exhibition that explore death required that she learn video production, a medium in which she had not previously worked.

The Lucas Gallery and Room 301 are open Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission is free.

Press Contact

Steve Runk
Director of Communications
609-258-5262
srunk@princeton.edu