Lamont Gallery Events

Stephanie Misa: Filipinos, Cannibalism, and Mothers Dancing on Tongues
Performance

Virtual offering for this event TBD 

In this performance, Misa looks at first languages (the “mother tongue”), her own included, and the complication this notion implies in contexts where the mother tongue is a purely spoken language outside of institutional (read-write) frameworks.
Misa questions power hierarchies implicit in institutionalized languages by putting forward oralities from the margin and their alternative forms of expression whose agency live in embodied forms of articulation. She argues that the embodiment of an orality, its containment in a colonized, disenfranchised, diasporic body, is exactly what gives it power.

Orality is a way to access an intersectionality, one that ruptures the idea of bound cultures, and instead proposes that culture—by extension, language—is in perpetual flux, one that’s marked by creative becomings. To do this we have to break down and re-digest what constitutes a “mother tongue”—to imbibe, expel, replenish, take shape—and sing, sing in a tongue blessed by many mothers.

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Art of the Personal

Carissa Chen ’17, Cheryle St. Onge, and Sue Repko

Virtual offering for this event TBD 

Join us for a panel discussion that will explore how artists integrate emotional, private, and personal material into their work. Carissa Chen ’17, Cheryle St. Onge (whose work is on view in Being & Feeling), and Sue Repko will share excerpts of their visual art and writing, and discuss how they use personal, even intimate material drawn from their direct experiences, inner landscapes, or family histories. The panelist address what it means to work with this source material artistically—how and why they transform it into an aesthetic object, how they edit or make choices about form and content, and the ethical considerations of making work in this vein.

About the presenters: 

Carissa Chen graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 2017 and is currently a student at Harvard University. She is a painter, photographer and writer and was the 2018 recipient of the Davidson Institute Fellows Scholarship for her project Humanizing the Self and the State. Her work has been featured at the White House, the RISD Museum, and the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, among others. Awards include the 2017 Presidential Scholar for poetry, the National Scholastic Gold Writing Portfolio medal, and the Kenyon Review’s Patricia Grodd Prize. She also serves as the volunteer director of a grassroots non-profit, Angel Heart International, that funds surgeries in developing areas world-wide.

Cheryle St. Onge teaches photography at Phillips Exeter Academy, and has also been on the faculty at Clark University, Maine College of Art and the University of New Hampshire. She is a 2009 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Her photographs have been widely exhibited, including at Princeton University and in an American Institute of Architects traveling exhibition. Her work is in the collections of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her recent work, Calling the Birds Home, focuses on her mother, who is living with vascular dementia. St. Onge received an M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art

Sue Repko teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy, is the 2019 Everytown Survivor Fellow, and a volunteer gun violence prevention advocate with Moms Demand Action. She is the Be SMART Lead for Maine, a gun safety program. She has a degree in psychology from Princeton University, a master’s degree in city and regional planning from Rutgers University and an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington College, where she studied with Dinah Lenney, Susan Cheever, Honor Moore, and Phillip Lopate. Her work has appeared in The Portland Press Herald, The MacGuffin, The Southeast Review, and The Gettysburg Review, among others. She is at work on a memoir.
 

Image Credit: Carissa Chen '17

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Interior States and “Thingness”:
Sachiko Akiyama

Virtual offering for this event TBD

Sachiko Akiyama’s sculptures exert a quiet, physical, and psychological presence. She employs symbols that draw from a variety of sources, including her own Japanese American heritage, family history, and dreams. Woodcarving, her primary sculpting process, lends itself to an exploration of how tactile forms can represent an intangible, psychological subject matter.

Image Credit: Sachiko Akiyama, (detail) Finding Home, 2013, Wood, paint, gold leaf. Sachiko Akiyama, (detail) Origins, 2014, Wood, paint, resin.

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Mental States: Psychedelics & Mental Health

With Wendi Yan ’18 and Julia Bornemann ’16

Virtual offering for this event TBD 

The panel will explore questions including: How can we more effectively cure a number of mental illnesses? How can we better understand what consciousness is? How can we alleviate human suffering?
Join Wendi Yan ’18 and Julia Bornemann ’16 as they discuss research on the connections between psychedelics and mental health. While psychedelics are still classified as Schedule I (US) and Class A (UK) drugs—the same groups as heroin, recent research has shown the promise of psychedelics in treating number of mental illnesses: depression, PTSD, anxiety in cancer patients, alcohol addiction, and more.
Yan will screen excerpts from The Psychedelic Club, a documentary she is making that chronicles the rise of psychedelic clubs on college campuses, from Harvard University to the University of Pennsylvania. Bornemann will discuss her research as a PhD student at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, where she blends her interests in psychology, philosophy, meditation, and mysticism with research on the therapeutic applications of psychedelic drugs on a variety of disorders.

About the presenters:

Wendi Yan ’18 researches and creates works that concern the edges of the self—where the feeling of the ego dissolves. She is interested in the idea and the feeling of self, how people engage with these constructs, and the various resulting emotional states. She is a fan of the emotional experiences of awe and absurdity. Yan is taking a gap year from Princeton in order to make the documentary, and to learn a variety of other skills, including game environment design, interactive music making, and Mexican weaving. Her academic work includes the study of architecture, sculpture, the history of science, AI and public policy, and Tibetan Buddhism. She recently published an essay, “Neuroscience Informs Design, Now What? Towards an Awe-inspiring Spatial Design,” for the Centre for Conscious Design.

Julia Bornemann ’16 is a PhD student at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London. At Exeter, Bornemann’s study of psychology, philosophy, meditation, mysticism, and biology sparked her pursuit of a neuroscience degree at King's College London. As a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Psychedelic Research, she focuses on how psychedelics work and their rich cultural history, and researches possible therapeutic applications of psychedelic drugs on a variety of disorders, including treatment-resistant depression and chronic pain.

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Ambiguous Desire: 
Andrew Fish and Lauren Gillette

Virtual offering for this event TBD 

Andrew Fish’s paintings offer an open, and ambiguous narrative that responds to the desires of the viewer, illuminating memory, personal experience, and one’s relationships to others and the world around them. Lauren Gillette’s work in the exhibition, inspired by Paul Harding’s The Tinkers, involved people contributing list of “things I did.” Reading these lists in the mirrors, you see your reflection, but only in fragments.

Image Credit: Lauren Gillette, Things I Did, 2018, Multi-media installation, glass, vinyl text.

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Conversing And…
Jon Sakata and Lauren O’Neal

Virtual offering for this event TBD 

ex(i/ha)le is a multifaceted extension of an ongoing creative response to the poetry of Willie Perdomo. Participate in this immersive installation via an experimental and playful walking, sensing, and discussion that will encourage sensory exploration, solitary reflection, and collective discovery.