Revolutionary Tales: A Trio of Emerging Artists
Revolutionary Tales: A Trio of Emerging Artists
Graduating seniors across artistic disciplines—including Benjamin Cunningham, Eve Harclerode and Jordan Tovin—exhibited their work at the NEXT Festival.
Story: Greg Varner | Video: Cara Taylor | Photos: Cara Taylor, William Atkins, Sarah Hochstein
Spring semester in the senior year of George Washington University art students can be hectic, with normal academic pressures intensified by preparations for the annual NEXT Festival exhibition. Students work diligently, in some cases for a year or longer, to show off their talent at the culminating event for degree candidates at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design.
Like artists everywhere, students across disciplines at the Corcoran, housed in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, share a drive to perfection. Painter Benjamin Cunningham—also completing a bachelor’s degree in political science—graphic designer Eve Harclerode and photojournalist Jordan Tovin are no exception.
In their quest for perfection, they use art as a means of building a better world. Ethical considerations preoccupy Tovin. Harclerode is interested in making work that can further her interest in sustainability and environmentalism. Cunningham wants to take some of the political sting out of current events by painting somewhat abstract scenes that live in a time beyond the present.
This is not to suggest that they are single-minded in the pursuit of their interests, or that other issues don’t intersect with their artistic work. One thing they all share is an interest in formal and technical excellence. When framing a shot and clicking the shutter, Tovin said, technical considerations are foremost in his mind. At that moment, he added, “I am having a geometric conversation with myself about how to align things, how to layer my compositions so that they feel balanced. Even if the subject matter of the photograph isn’t harmonious, is not beautiful, how do I present it in a way that’s visually cohesive? You want it to be beautiful, sort of, but you don’t want to pretend.”
The genuine talent of this thoughtful trio of emerging artists is beyond pretending.
Painting meets politics and history
In Cunningham’s paintings, hot content is tempered by cool form. He begins with emotionally charged images and abstracts them by presenting them in pixelated, “paint by numbers” style. He is drawn to dramatic, often politically loaded subjects, such as the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the Baltimore metro area or a Waymo autonomous vehicle set on fire in Los Angeles during protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but then works to drain them of his own emotional response.
“I’m curating moments of history that I think mark really critical transformations or shifts,” Cunningham said. “But I don’t want to impose how people should think or what they should believe. I almost want to zoom out as far as I can. Or maybe zoom in as close as I can—I don’t know which one it really is. But I want to cut all the cords of the connotation on the piece and just get denotation.”
In wall text for his large-scale painting (made up of six 3x3 panels) of the burning Waymo, currently on view at the NEXT Festival exhibition, he briefly mentioned that it’s based on an image from the Los Angeles ICE protests but says little beyond that about the topic. He is reticent to inject his own opinions, though he follows the news and is politically informed—he is a double major in politics and fine arts. But he doesn’t want to dictate the feelings his paintings should produce in viewers.
“I don't like to have any subjectivity in my work,” Cunningham said. “I do the best I can to remain as objective as possible. Who wants to hear about me? There are so many voices talking about politics that it’s a cacophony—so many that it gets to a point where you can’t hear anything or find the truth. I feel like it’s my job not to say, ‘Remember this because A, B and C,’ but just to capture the historical moment.”
His goal is to confront people with a moment that they might ignore, to have them pause and reflect on what they are seeing. One of the attractions of working on a large scale, he said, is that it enables more people to see an image at one time.
His favorite audience is made up of people who have little or no connection with his subject matter to begin with. People curious about what looks like a car on fire may move to the wall text and learn that it’s a Waymo burning at a protest. That may lead them to ask more questions, in the kind of cascading effect he hopes to set off. In a sense, he is giving viewers a history lesson, pulling them into an engagement they might otherwise avoid.
“That’s my dream,” Cunningham said. “I want a transformation to occur somewhere. Because I am in the political science world and the art world, people are always trying to get me to merge them together. But I see my artistic practice as one side of me trying to reach into the other side, to pull something out of that context and bring it into the art and play with it.
“There’s a fine line between people being pushed away and people being willing to open their mind to think about something. The actual photo of this is not fun to look at. But art is another world,” he said. “We have a little more leniency. People aren’t as quick to run away or push back, even though they may be critical.”
Graphic design meets environmentalism
While many people may think of graphic design as something deployed by corporations for advertising or promotional purposes, in a competition to create the most eye-catching package or the most unforgettable logo, Harclerode connects it squarely with positive social purpose. Her capstone thesis explores how graphic design in the food and beverage industry can be used to foster better habits of sustainability and more awareness about food—where it comes from, who grows it, who makes it—and ultimately to build a better world.
“In a consumer culture, the products we buy inform our identity, and that can connect people to values,” Harclerode said. “A lot of what I do is guided by the empathy I have for our world and other people, and even animals. I’m navigating how something that has been used for a lot of bad and marketing and all that kind of stuff could be utilized, on the other hand, to actually do good and have a positive impact on people’s lives and the environment.”
As part of her capstone project, Harclerode created a book of case studies on subjects such as consumerism, eco-friendly greenwashing and other topics. She researched how brand design shapes human behavior, how a company’s ethos can be integrated into its branding and how design responds to changes in culture and society. As a concept case study, she created designs for a brand called Utopia Coffee.
“I researched key points about the coffee industry—some general history, its roots as a commodity and how commodities relate to sustainability and eco-friendliness, and some key labor issues like fair trade, farmer direct-to-consumer trade—different kinds of trade models.”
For the NEXT exhibition, she is displaying the brand identity she created for Utopia Coffee—packaging design, different brand collateral such as logos and signage, posters and billboards that she hopes would be commercially successful as well as promote the imagined brand’s values around sustainability. The display consists of large posters and smaller printed materials.
Marc Choi, assistant professor in the Graphic Design program, praised Harclerode for the sustained visual approach she brings to all of her projects. “Eve has always been a very ambitious student who loves design,” he said. “She’s hungry to produce work, and that really shows.”
Another place to see Harclerode’s work is in the marketing materials for the NEXT Festival. Banners, signage and other items advertising the annual celebration of the arts have been designed by students from various majors, working together in the Corcoran School Design Lab to produce materials that will get people excited to attend NEXT. Since Harclerode’s concept was chosen—students based their designs on her ideas—she acted as a sort of art director for the project.
“For the concept I pitched, I tried to get input from people I know in different majors and see what they think NEXT represents about the Corcoran,” Harclerode said. “Since NEXT is the culmination of students’ thesis works, my concept was energetic and colorful and diverse. It represents so many students from different backgrounds, in different mediums, so we wanted to use a lot of bright, punchy colors that felt dynamic and energetic. It was a really fun opportunity to work with other students that aren’t necessarily in my major or even in my year.”
As in all of Harclerode’s design projects, communication is key. “It’s not just about making designs that speak to the purpose,” she said, “but also connecting them to the proper audience.”
Photojournalism meets ethics
When Tovin was in his first year at GW, his teacher, Associate Professor Matt Eich, memorably told students about the extraordinary power they hold with their cameras. It made a lasting impression on Tovin, whose artistic practice is bound up with ethical considerations.
Tovin had previously made an equally strong impression on his teacher. “Jordan is one of those rare students who reached out to me while still in high school, and he arrived at GW with his creative engine already running,” Eich said, adding that he has enjoyed seeing Tovin and the other students in his cohort grow as artists and storytellers.
In his typically thoughtful way, Tovin has worked on his capstone project, a study of the go-go music community in Washington, D.C., for more than a year. He wanted to immerse himself in a project that could only be done locally, and go-go music is a regional specialty. The fact that he knew very little about it to begin with made it more tempting.
One of the challenges the project presented was finding places to photograph go-go fans outside of concert venues. Otherwise, Tovin realized, he might have gone to concert after concert and taken a string of similar photos. That was just one of many problems he needed to solve. Another was how to visually represent such a strongly aural experience. Is making still photographs the right approach to such subject matter? And if it is, what medium should he choose?
“Polaroid is a classic medium associated with go-go,” Tovin said, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to commit to having all of the pictures be Polaroids. Maybe a mix of regular still shots with Polaroids, then? He ended up going down what he described as a “rabbit hole” where one consideration led to another.
“You think, well, maybe some of the things that are missing are the actual tangible objects that people hold dear—the CDs, the cassettes,” Tovin said. “But then I'm still not really getting pictures of people. All right, let’s introduce portraits. Should this be a linear installation, as in a traditional documentary, or should the installation be layered, and complicated and loud, just like the music is? Do I need text? A lot of the stories that people are telling me are not seen in the photographs. OK, I’m going to introduce text. Well, how am I going to showcase text on the wall without distracting from the photographs, the ephemera, the Polaroids and the portraits? I'm condensing the conversation that I’ve had with myself, my peers and my professors over the past year and a half.”
Tovin worked on his go-go project concurrently with a series of photographs of a family in Shaw. For work like this, ethical questions acquire special significance.
“The level of transparency that I have with the people I photograph is not common for photojournalists—being open and honest about where these pictures are going, who could see them and what information is going to be attached, especially when children are involved. It’s very important that how I depict the way they grew up doesn’t affect their future,” Tovin said.
“I have such a privilege to access people’s lives and to enter and capture these unseen moments. Some of those moments people keep unseen for a reason, and they trust me enough to let me photograph them. What I do with that trust matters a lot to me. It keeps me up at night.”