The Tripod

I. The Gallery

If you had told me my freshman year that I would eventually kick off homecoming weekend by attending an art show on Vernon Street featuring students' work, I would not have believed you. If you had told me that the entire project was student-run, I probably would have asked if you were lost, if you were maybe on the wrong campus. But since my freshman year, things have clearly changed: last Friday, Nov. 13, I went to an art gallery at The Mill featuring the artwork of fellow Trinity students, an event put on by students for students. In addition to visual arts, the gallery featured music and dance, and finished with a performance by The Accidentals.

Taylor Colantonio '10 led the effort and enlisted support from Lizzie Rechter '10 and Ghazy Hernandez '10. The lighting, for example, was not your usual clinically fluorescent glow. I am not an expert on gallery production, but the gallery itself seemed in no way amateurish or inattentive to even the smallest details. The gallery was installed with track-lighting - basically spotlights - adjusted in ways deliberately designed to highlight the works. Even the order in which the pieces were hung seemed tactful: The individuated pieces hung in such a way that they came together to form what felt like a coherent artistic narrative. For example, photographs depicting the simultaneous power and delicacy of feminine bodies hung opposite a wall on which there hung a picture of a deer destroyed and neglected by people on a black-and-white highway.

Colantonio,Rechter, Hernandez, Ben Gascoigne '10, Will Pollock '10, Hannah Springwater '10, Luc Rioual '10, Allie Millstein '10, and Lydia Damon '10 were the featured artists. The contents of the gallery varied from photography to sculpture to oil paintings to collages to drawings. Ben Gascoigne's small but expressive photography was framed and placed on a pedestal in a corner of the gallery, documenting his experiences in Southeast Asia. Hernandez's "Wire Man" - a sculpture whose name accurately describes what it was - hung from the ceiling alongside both Rechter's prints and collages and Pollock's modest and emotionally complex photographs of the inside of his family's cabin. On the wall opposite the Wire Man was Damon's explosively colorful collage of sneakers. Colantonio's striking colored pencil work titled "Widow" hung on a wall opposite Rioual's T-shirt design, one he designed to raise money for his imprisoned friends. In the same room as the "Widow" (there were two rooms) hung Springwater's photographic representations of the feminine subject, and Millstein's haunting sketching of skulls. I haven't covered all the featured work, but in short: Every student's work demonstrated serious and praise-worthy artistic effort and ambition.

Had this gallery never taken place, I may never have known that these students had such talent. I asked Colantonio if we should expect more events like this, and he said that we absolutely should, and that next time he hopes to expand the scope of featured artists. Many (but not all) of the artists were, by time-dictated necessity, Mill members. Apparently he hopes to use this gallery space as a venue in which student-artists can show what they have accomplished.

II. A new kind of fun

That this gallery took place on Vernon Street alongside the fraternities which house the majority of Trinity's weekend activities indicates to me that our campus has begun a positive change. Of course, art galleries will never replace the fraternities' late-night scene as the dominant form of on-campus fun. (To be perfectly honest, a college experience of that sort sounds horrible, and elicits from me an emotional response similar to the one I have when I encounter people who scoff at John Grisham novels and claim to hate J.K. Rowling for making people stupid. Gross.) But the entire student body should recognize that we now have the opportunity to rupture - or at least to challenge and question - the "Camp Trin" stigma. The Mill is one example amongst a few new student-run organizations that seek to help us reconsider what constitutes "fun" for a Trinity student. (The iHouse is another notable example, and there are more.)

It's important to keep in mind that this change depends on us. The gallery was student-run, made possible only by the efforts of a few students. Everyone who feels the impulse to make a statement like the one made by Colantonio and his gallery needs to realize that (to use a cliché, but one I like and think is valid sometimes) anything is possible. As a member of The Mill, I can tell you that there's no exclusion in these new campus organizations.

We have meetings at 5:30 p.m. on Thursdays - stop by and see what our campus can do.

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