The Department of Transmedia in the (VPA) will present “Beyond Selfies,” an exhibition of select works by students in Jessica Posner’s spring TRM 351: “Selfies and Beyond: Identity and the Creative Process” class.
A work by Tasha Belikove for the class “Selfies and Beyond”
The free exhibition will take place at 601 Tully, and will be open to the public on Friday, May 2, from 2-7 p.m., and Saturday, May 3, from 2-5 p.m. A light reception and performances will take place on May 2 from 5-7 p.m.
The exhibition features work that generally falls into one of three categories: alter ego, autobiographical documentary and self portrait. The works are unique in that they are all grounded in the personal, subjective experiences, histories and bodies of each artist.
Student artists include Noura Aldakhil, Jasmine Armstrong, Tasha Belikove, Nancy Taylor, David Elleman, Boying Huang, Taylor Jody, Nathan Jordan, Young Kim, Qing Ma, Meng Meng, Jeniva Quinones, Malcolm Rizzuto, Kevin Sampaio, Carly Tumen and Tong Wu.
The course and exhibition acknowledge identity as a creative process and serve as a platform for an intellectual investigation and creative complication of one’s subjective relationships with and beyond themselves.
Over the course of the semester, students were charged to create and critique representations of the self across a variety of media. Through readings and lectures, the class built a shared vocabulary and language around subjectivity, identity and otherness. Selected authors—including Louis Althusser, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Amelia Jones, Lucy Lippard, Susan Sontag, Rosalind Krauss and José Esteban Muñoz, and such artists as Claude Cahun, Walker Evans, Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke, Félix Gonzáles Torres, Lyle Ashton Harris, Jonathan Caouette, LaToya Ruby Frazier, iO Tillett Wright and Maricruz Alarcón—served as important reference points for the class.
In addition, the course sought to frame the recent, social-networking phenomenon of the “selfie” within a greater historical context of self-representation by artists, writers and filmmakers. The “selfie” represents a new, democratic, technological embodiment of a creative form that has been practiced by creators since the beginning of most time-based media (audio, photography, film, video, etc.). To this end, each student will be publishing his or her own “Theory of the Selfie,” along with select works, on the class blog .
For more information about the course, visit or contact Posner at jlposner@syr.edu.
