calista

This class began with a meditation on Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly -- their "eight-month trip that shifted the course of art history".

As an intern at the Rauschenberg Foundation last semester, one of my most treasured experiences was assisting in the imaging of Rauschenberg's negatives from that trip. I connected with his photography in a way that I hadn't with the rest of his work. I felt the urgency of documentation, but also the desire to capture the beauty of the people and places that he encountered.

In Rome, I thought about the way that his body of work shifted before and after that trip. 

Before: white paintings, black paintings. Layers of meaning shrouded, secreted away for the artist himself. 

During: Feticci Personale, Scatole Personale. A scavenger's curated discoveries -- memories, intimate thoughts in hand. 

After: The Combines. The Combines! Orchestrated desperation -- acting "in the gap" between art and life.

I felt a kinship to that same desperation -- to capture the things that I saw, to reconstruct moment-by-moment and step-by-step the awe that I felt at everything around me.

the visual journal of this semester's mere graduate assistant

digital series

film series