Students will showcase their visual arts projects in the walkway leading to the Read & Relax Room.

Adjacent - A Psychological Thriller by Izzy Cheung

Izabella Cheung, Film & Music Production, Psychology

My final product aims to be a rough cut of a short film fully written, shot, and edited by myself. The film will follow Max, a young veteran who finds himself haunted by visions of a past he never had a choice to partake in. Returning to his life has not proven to be easy, especially when the hallucinations started. These hallucinations look and feel real. They move objects around the house, and they ask their big brother for breakfast every morning. As a brilliant physicist, Max desperately seeks out answers in an effort to placate his slipping sanity, like for instance an alternate reality bleeding into his own. 

Advisor: Kevin Smith, Film and Media Studies

Mimikyu

Avalon Lee, Psychology major, Education minor

My creative project is a gijinka costume based on the ghost Pokemon Mimikyu. Pokemon is a pop culture phenomenon stemming from Japan where in its universe people capture creatures known as Pokemon in which Mimikyu is one of those creatures. I designed and created the costume myself. It was inspired not only by the existing design of Mimikyu but also classic horror elements from popular media like “It”, “Trick ‘r Treat”, and “Dark Harvest”. The costume’s cowl and skirt are primarily made out of yellow and tan cotton fabric that I dyed using peppermint tea. I hand stitched twine around the edges of the fabric and black yarn over seams to give is a scarecrow-esque effect. The teeth corset is made out of thermoplastic and EVA foam clay. I dyed the thermoplastic teeth using coffee. The prop hammer is made out of wood elements and EVA foam. The EVA foam was carved and painted to make it look like wood. 

The Costumes are Always the Best Part: An Intersectional Analysis of W&M’s Theatre History

Sarah Mahooti, Theatre major, Psychology minor

Theater has been frequently posited as an agent of socio-political change. In the past century, it has become standard for productions to have a “message” that specifies what you as the audience should do in response to seeing it. The visual design aspects of a production, such as costumes, are often the audience’s most immediate reference points for the message of a show. 

As such, this project explores how socio-political movements, specifically surrounding women’s rights and queer liberation, and significant fashion industry changes, such as the introductions of half sizes and ready-to-wear clothes in the 1920s, affected the process of building costumes for theater, using the William & Mary theater department as a case study. I examine past productions by William & Mary theater and theater student groups in light of William & Mary’s gendered Student Handbook, dress code, personal testimonies and writings from the Swem Special Collections. 

 As the Theatre Department settles into a new building, new professors, and new classes, my goal is to look into the past to determine why our status quo came to be, and how we can use it to shape the future of the arts. 

Advisor: Jeremy Quick, Theatre

The Structure of Collaboration: Composers, Choreographers, and Creating New Ballet 

Calder Sprinkle, Music & English

My research explores how composers and choreographers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries collaborated in the process of creating a new ballet. Initially, I focused on how the musical structure of ballet has evolved over that time period, but very little analysis has been done on ballet music. Additionally, I discovered that the structure resulting from each composer-choreographer collaboration looked quite different, especially during the time period on which I focused, which was when many of the most well-known ballets were created. As a result, my project takes influence from the structures of Romantic and Classical ballet in adapting a modern folktale to the stage, crafting music based on how similar aspects of the classic stories are treated during those periods. 

Advisor: Sophia Serghei, Music