My visit to Postcrypt’s latest student exhibit.

I love when art exhibits are a little bit chaotic. 

This past Saturday, my roommate and I visited Postscrypt’s latest student exhibit, “(N/A)tural WØr1d/F1Øw and F1ux.” The exhibit was made up of a collection of pieces from students from Barnard College, Columbia College, NYU, and Pratt. The collection was made up of a multitude of media forms, including digital, organic, mixed, and others. Its aim was to articulate feelings of change, instability, or even doom on the horizon, to immortalize this anxious generation’s insecurity and isolation in our industrialized and technologically advanced world, so far away from our natural roots. 

When I first arrived at the exhibit, it felt like chaos—that artistically inspirational, delicious kind of chaos. Ladders moved left and right, the hammering of nails resounded to the booming beat of the music, and artists’ pieces went from here to there and back again. This is one of the reasons I love more informal artist events: a small peek behind the curtain of what our society considers to be art. That, and actually getting to meet the artists. 

Of the collection, there were two pieces that stood out to me the most. The first was a collection called MOI, made up of a painting and sculptures of fingers. The artist, Rosie Ding (NYU), was inspired by the works of Jaques Lacan (a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist) and focused on the idea of the self versus the other. The painting was an abstract self portrait. It was a melting of greens and blues and grays. In places, I could see the resemblances of legs or maybe clenched fingers with blackened nails. The effect was surreal, with the audience not knowing where one part begins and ends. The sculpture of fingers were similarly surreal. The fingers were made up of different colors. Some were pale gray, with black nails dripping black onto the rest of the digit. Some were scaled black and white. However, this collection of fingers is more focused on showing the artist’s process, as she is planning to make more to complete her collection. I found her collection to be much like the work of Salvador Dali, using similar abstract principles and the same melting effect. I liked the work, and thought it was effective in its goal of portraying the idea of the self vs. the other. 

The second piece that stood out to me was called PLAcente of CAKE by Columbia’s very own Viela Hu. The piece was a plastic vacuum bubble in the shape of ovaries. Inside were different organic materials, including fruit rinds, agar, starch, and edible pearls. To make the shape of this piece, Hu used a vacuum. As time goes on, the food and bits of organic material inside the vacuum will start to rot. Thus, the process to create the piece was technological, but the effect will be natural.

This piece, I thought, was the most representative of what the exhibit was hoping to accomplish, of melding the world of technology and nature. It was inspired by eating the placenta after a birth, relating to consumption of the celebration of the female body. Is this act grotesque or cannibalistic? Or is it beautiful? It draws on the idea of dualities in other ways too, asking where the line is between edible and inedible, appetizing and grotesque. I thought the piece was impressively well thought out, with each detail adding to the overall message of the piece, even down to the process of its construction. 

The rest of the pieces followed along similar lines, incorporating technology or natural processes in their art, while going in many different directions. Reflecting on it now, I’m very happy that I got to experience this event. I have not been able to experience student exhibitions before, and this first one inspired me. I liked seeing people of my generation express themselves and their thoughts about the world, and I would encourage others to go to other student exhibitions. For this exhibition in particular, many themes and ideas struck me as profound, such as becoming isolated from the natural world as a result of technological innovation. When leaving, I felt a sense of being grounded, a feeling that stemmed from reconnecting with at least some part of the natural world while becoming a little more aware of my technological isolation. 

Image via Author