Photo by Ali Meizels ’23.
From left: professor of art Lisa Iglesias, Olivia Brandwein ’22, Rua McGarry ’22, Fred Bird ’23 and assistant professor of art Amanda Maciuba pose at the “Juice Box Party” gallery opening.
By Liz Lewis ’22
Managing Editor of Content
The drab white walls of the Blanchard Hall Gallery exploded with vibrant color on the evening of April 22. The opening reception of “ua, ia + ed Present: Juice Box Party The Gallery Show,” the collaborative senior showcase of art studio majors Olivia Brandwein ’22, Rua McGarry ’22 and Fred Bird ’23 began at 6 p.m.
The showcase’s title was fittingly unconventional — both in its play on the last two letters of each artist’s first name and in the phrase “Juice Box Party.” To the immediate left of the gallery’s entrance, a display block turned makeshift table was nestled in the corner, bearing juice boxes, stacks of colorful party hats, stickers and a bowl of crayons. Many of the couple dozen attendees donned the sparkly hats as they milled around the exhibits. The unmistakable slurping noise of apple juice whizzing through a plastic straw punctuated conversation throughout the night.
The far corners of the room were each plastered with brightly colored patterns in full scale installations. McGarry’s wallpapered dining room scene titled “Make yourself at home” stood in the back left corner. To the right was Bird’s “FREDSCAPE,” a neon maximalist splash of stenciled patterns on layered handmade paper. A dollhouse constructed by Brandwein out of cardboard and found materials stood on a platform against the left wall in front of McGarry’s installation. A short film of looping vignettes featuring Bird and Brandwein — dressed as a clown and a mime, respectively — was projected on the opposite wall. In between these pieces hung countless other works, including prints by all combinations of the three artists and selections from drawings that Brandwein created as a child.
Bird, Brandwein and McGarry became friends and collaborators this year while working in the art studio department. Upon seeing common and complementary themes in their individual practices, they decided to work together on a final showcase.
According to the gallery statement, “The work of these artists explore ideas of domesticity, identity and play through prints, installations, video and mixed-media sculptures. The show is a celebration of collaboration and friendship.”
In “Juice Box Party The Gallery Show,” collaboration is everywhere, from a blind contour drawing etched into magic scratch paper by all three artists, to Bird and Brandwein’s short film, to a collaborative print layering a design of a shadow puppet rabbit by Brandwein and a living room scene by McGarry.
“It was really joyous,” Bird said of the collaborative process. “I feel like all of our works … [are] talking about difficult things like consumerism and bodies and identity, but there’s these exciting moments of enthusiasm and joy, so the space coming together and then the party just really topped it off.”
Brandwein sees the approachable, celebratory theme as a way into more serious topics, including embodied identity, commodification and domesticity.
“I think the three of us use things like humor, color and pattern as ways to invite the viewer in and act as entry points for exploring deeper concepts,” she said.
McGarry highlights repeating images
McGarry’s “Make yourself at home” follows this sentiment in the communication of its theme. The piece features a table, set for one, and a chair facing a mirror hanging on the wall. Viewers are invited to sit at the table themselves. During the gallery opening, several attendees took mirror selfies while seated in the chair.
“Make yourself at home” leaves no surface blank. Everything from the chair’s legs to the checkerboarded floor is covered in a pattern which layers relief stamps of grapefruit and nude bodies. This pattern is built from a combination of two of McGarry’s previous works.
One of them, titled “I have eight,” features stamps of a torso repeated in a pattern, taking after the pop art movement to comment on the commodification of bodies. “I was like, what if, instead of soup cans, it was my body?” McGarry explained. In the other piece, “so happy you’re here (queer)” McGarry photographed her friends eating fruit as a meditation on queerness, which she described as a “play on being ‘fruity.’”
These ideas manifest in the grapefruit and body stamps which cover every inch of “Make yourself at home.”
“I was thinking about … the commodification and hypersexualization and objectification of queer people — where does that come from? When did I first think about that? It was at the dining room table,” McGarry said. “I think that those things often do come from your house and growing up. Your parents need to be pretty intentional to not be enforcing those ideas.”
“I wanted to create a scene where people are invited to sit at that table and be surrounded by this … encompassing, overwhelming feeling,” McGarry said. Due to the placement of the well-worn mirror on the other end of the table, McGarry’s piece also invites viewers to “[eat] with themself,” according to the artist statement, and potentially examine their own biases about queerness and commodification in the process.
Bird showcases maximalist art
If McGarry’s piece implicitly invites the viewer into weighty themes through color and pattern, Bird’s “FREDSCAPE” does so as explicitly as possible. The words “COME ON IN,” written across the floor in neon yellow tape, point towards the artwork, all overlaid with a grid constructed out of the same tape and neon pink paint.
“FREDSCAPE,” which is also Bird’s thesis project, is a site-specific installation crafted from handmade paper, acrylic paint and found objects such as yarn, toy cars and a toy cash register. The recurring motif throughout the work is a floral pattern made through repurposed stencils from “a 1970s do-it-at-home kit marketed toward housewives,” according to the gallery statement. Bird “distorted [the stencils’] original usage and created a rich pattern filled with colors that nod to traditional stereotypes of gender in the United States,” his gallery statement elaborates.
“My whole thesis is talking a lot about maximalism, and using maximalist aesthetics and color and different things to portray my trans identity and my gender identity in a very visual, kind of chaotic culmination,” Bird said.
The taped grid is another key element of the piece’s commentary on gender. “[The grid is] a lot to do with the conceptual themes of like, containment and … ways in which that fails and succeeds or affects my trans identity,” Bird said. These themes extend beyond “FREDSCAPE,” also present in his hand-cut stencil piece “play the fool” and “Fool 4 U/Be Mime,” a screen-printed adaptation of a frame from the short film he created with Brandwein.
“This is really the culmination of my time in the art program,” Bird said. “It’s been really emotional, but also really great to see all the work kind of come to fruition and be my capstone and ending place in the art community at Mount Holyoke.”
Brandwein discusses collections
Brandwein’s artwork on display included “Blueprint #1,” a cyan ink print made by manipulating bubble wrap and netting, and “The Jean Herald Collection,” a site-specific sculpture of archival boxes, the contents of which viewers could only view by appointment. According to the gallery statement, this requirement commented on “the multiple barriers to accessing art in an institutional setting.”
Her centerpiece project, however, is “Apartment 1B:” a dollhouse modeled as three floors of a New York apartment building. Brandwein spent the year researching the history of dollhouses, particularly as they pertain to concepts of girlhood, home ownership and the American dream. Having grown up in Brooklyn apartments rather than houses, she had a different experience playing with her own dollhouse as a child.
“My brother and I, we had this dollhouse where the attic space was accessible without opening up the [bottom floors],” Brandwein said. “We had two characters, a Pee-wee Herman action figure and a Harry Potter action figure, whose name was Zed and was devoid of any Harry Potter associations. But those two, they were roommates, and they lived in the attic apartment of this house, and the Fisher Price family that came with this dollhouse were the landlords.” She continued, “A lot of the narrative was, like, them skateboarding around, and then the family downstairs being mad at them. And then Pee-wee Herman working for the Old MacDonald farmer next door to, like, make his rent. … I don't think a kid in the suburbs would maybe imagine that kind of dynamic.”
Brandwein explained that each resident of “Apartment 1B” is a collector — the top floor houses an art collector, the middle floor an egg cup collector and the bottom floor a snow globe collector. Their collections are on full display on every floor.
Each floor also features found objects repurposed into furniture, wall hangings and other knick knacks. A metrocard, a stamp and a queen of hearts card hang from the walls of the art collector. A basket filled with the toothpick umbrellas usually reserved for beachy cocktails stands in the corner of the first floor apartment. The middle apartment’s floor is checkered with lettered tiles from the word game Bananagrams.
To Brandwein, the spirit of Juice Box Party — the juice, the hats, the crayons and the energy and color of the art itself — is connected to the playful freedom so many of us are pressured to grow out of as we age.
“I think all of our work thematically has to do with childhood,” she said. “The Blanchard Gallery is like this white cube, essentially. And like those spaces can feel really sterile and really static and kind of unwelcoming. And we were like, it doesn’t have to be like that. We’re gonna have a party, like we’re gonna make people wear party hats.”
“So often … to be a serious artist one thinks that you have to kind of take away that fun and humor, but that’s like really not the case,” Brandwein said. “Why can’t we keep having fun like that? Why can't we keep on just playing?”