“10,001 Hours,” an exhibition of senior capstone projects by art majors at UMass Boston, opened in the Harbor Art Gallery on the evening of May 9. Approximately half of the graduating UMass Boston students from the Art Department (excluding two honors students, and other students who chose to mount an off-campus exhibition at a gallery in East Boston) displayed their work, which included performance art, photography, drawing, painting, and multimedia installation.
The first piece visible upon entering the gallery was “A Wash,” a documentary photo-essay by Anastasia Panagopoulos. “A Wash” follows the daily lives of Panagopoulos’ parents, a Greek immigrant couple who dissolved their arranged marriage after coming to the states and now lead separate lives.
Panagopoulos described the images of her elderly, somewhat isolated parents as “sad,” and her own feelings about documenting her family as “guilt and trepidation.” When they saw her photographs, she said, “a couple people started crying a little bit.”
Panagopoulos admits that her parents have never even seen the finished work. “They never even asked. … I do fear that it would hurt my mother, maybe, to see herself,” she said, adding, “My father, to be honest with you … I don’t think it would phase him, and I don’t think he would realize what I was trying to do anyways.”
Tri Quach’s “Self-Portrait” dominates a wall in the smaller of the two gallery rooms. The piece consists of two drawings: a detailed black and white self-portrait and a group of more abstracted figures in ink. Onto the drawings, Quach has projected a short video of himself speaking.
Lauren Elise Marston’s “Consistency,” an interactive performance project, dominated the gallery’s larger room. Marston’s work involved carefully baking several cupcakes on a large table, frosting the cakes, and serving them to her audience. She was inspired by the work of Anissa Mack, who baked pies outside of the Brooklyn Public Library in her work, “Pies for a Passerby.”
Meticulously-piped frosting and the candies applied with tweezers made Marston’s interesting, and — for people who have no idea what baking, let alone baking something as gorgeous as a well-decorated cupcake, entails — educational.
Marston said that people ask her, “Am I ruining your art? Am I allowed to take that?” and seem relieved when she gives permission. “People are afraid of food sometimes.”
The next cupcake-baking demonstration will take place in the Harbor Gallery at 3 p.m. on May 13. Audience members are free to eat the cupcakes.
The show will stay up until May 16, when the two honors students graduating from the Art Department will showcase their work in a separate exhibit.
