Synonymous with spring quarter, Saturday marked the annual Frost Music & Arts Pageant, colloquially referred to as Frost Fest. Though many company come for the music, a rising part of the pageant resides within the grove to the left of the amphitheater’s entrance: the Frost Artwork Exhibit.
Placed on by Stanford Live performance Community, Stanford Dwell and Goldenvoice, the occasion caters to Stanford college students and the higher Palo Alto space alike. This 12 months’s theme of “Sacred Areas” attracted 12 artists engaged on 9 tasks who acquired funding after a rigorous choice course of. Within the Frost Arts crew’s curatorial assertion, they invited artists to “contemplate the sacred by its many potential resonances and definitions — it could be bodily or summary, spiritual or secular, private or collective — as a power that each restores and transforms realities.”
Nestled within the bushes, the installations had been scattered on both aspect of a paved walkway, inviting viewers to discover the grove. I solely want that there might have been extra signposting throughout the occasion in order many individuals knew about it as potential.
Camilla Napa’a ’25 stated she went to see the exhibit as a result of she has “seen [that] my friends are extra STEM-smart, however I’m actually fascinated about what they [have] to creatively present to the world.”
The items different in medium, however the works had been usually massive, three-dimensional and engaged in a number of mediums. A number of the works invited viewers interplay; a telescope urged viewers to “LOOK!” into its viewing lens, displaying a projected night time sky (“Meet Me within the Stars” by Vincent Music ’24), and a three-dimensional platform depicting an Armenian rug had an indication in entrance with directions to “Take Off Sneakers & Step Inside” (“My Cloth of Time and House” by Rima Makaryan ’24).
My favourite work was “Tinkling Pavilion” by Drew Vallero ’23. It was impressed by tinkling, a conventional Filipino dance the place performers step in between clapping bamboo sticks. Vallero mounted bamboo sticks right into a body utilizing conventional lashing strategies and hung blue photo-sensitive cyanotype prints between the sticks, revealing ghostly footprints and different objects. The skillfully crafted prints had been paying homage to gadgets floating in outer area or the deep sea. Moreover, there was a chair positioned within the middle of the dice, inviting viewers to think about what it will be like inside this ghostly blue area.
Miranda Li’s ’23 M.S. ’24 “Lepus Californicus” referred to as on the viewer to think about humanity’s relationship with the jackrabbit and the land we share with it. Li strung a portray of a jackrabbit between tree branches; one aspect of the portray used reasonable brown colours, whereas the reverse was a mirror picture achieved in neon pink. The pink rabbit glowed and stood out, whereas the pure colours utterly blended in with the atmosphere. It was a reminder of what number of animals we most likely stroll by every day and by no means discover.
Fourth-year PhD scholar Shintaro Fushida-Hardy centered as a substitute on human contact together with his “Shrine to Relationships.” Paying homage to Japanese structure and Shinto, an Indigenous faith of Japan, Fushida-Hardy’s exhibit invited viewers to step contained in the small shrine with others to examine and worth their relationships with each other. In Shinto, ropes and paper streamers referred to as shide each signify sacredness, so each of those had been current inside Fushida-Hardy’s work. He relied on pals to assist him assemble the shide, tying the venture again to its intent of commemorating relationships.
Attendee Hailee Heinrich ’23 stated, “It was simply tremendous cool to see what college students are engaged on and creating and producing.”
Sadly, the exhibit lacked markers labeling every work, which might have been useful in explaining each bit distinctly and instantly. Of their place, nonetheless, an artfully designed companion zine showcased every artist’s progress images, work descriptions and biography.
Lucy Nemerov ’24, one of many curators of the present, hopes viewers will step away with “a brand new conception of what makes a seemingly regular area; transcend the traditional, what makes one thing sacred, and how one can contemplate that inside your individual life.”
The Frost Artwork Exhibit was definitely a sacred area in itself, and the group ought to look ahead to the way forward for this system, in addition to the way forward for all collaborating artists.
Editor’s Observe: This text is a evaluation and contains subjective ideas, opinions and critiques.