PROJECT ROOM F

“This is one of the joys of education as the practice of freedom, for it allows students to assume responsibility for their choices.”

—bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”

—Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

We danced. In a shared space. Tracing and remembering the cadence of community, we practiced freedom and transgression, embracing contradiction within ourselves, and within our practices. This takes courage. With paradigms literally shifting beneath our feet, we encompassed the discomfort and asserted our voices.

Because our lenses of experience are unique, transgressing a boundary looks different for each of us. Through a multi-varied and abundant praxis, you not only challenge the form and meaning of a photograph, but also question how images operate and circulate within the world at large. Utilizing photography, video, sculpture, painting, mixed media, and text, you critique social, political, and cultural norms and contest ontological systems. You expose abundant beauty and vulnerability in your acts of refusal to be defined or categorized by a system of binaries, instead reveling in the dazzling confluence of subjectivity and ambiguity. You challenge complex layers of representation, including ethnic and racial stereotypes, gender expression, intimacy, desire, kinship, nationalism, and the convergence of sexuality and trauma. You destabilize borders, literally and figuratively – and defy that Barthesian edict, “From a phenomenological viewpoint in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.”

You remain at a beginning, a glorious space to further your power as visual transgressors. The “ends” are places that we should never want to arrive, as we continue to question, weave, subvert, and release our stories into the world.

—Ann Weathersby