During his freshman year at Harvard, Christian Starling \u201910 had a panicky moment. An art project was due. What now?<\/p>\n
He found the answer under his bed \u2014 in bits of trash, paper, and random materials. Voila, he had an art installation.<\/p>\n
The experience also gave the anthropology concentrator a theme that has lasted four years. Starling began collecting found objects in Cambridge and Boston, and on sojourns to Mississippi and New Orleans. He recorded what he found and where (including an Old Thompson whiskey bottle, from in front of the Memorial Church, that was empty.)<\/p>\n
For a new show of student art, \u201cInvisible Cities,\u201d Starling took images of three months of objects and arranged them chronologically in a tiny diary. The images and entries resonate with a strange power and read like a poem of consumer culture: belt buckle, hoop earring, Ph paper, hair piece, flattened fork, bent spoon, fragment of licorice rope, cell phone antenna. (Earth to civilization: Is that you?)<\/p>\n
The strange power of cities, real and imagined, is the theme of \u201cInvisible Cities,\u201d where a visitor will find Starling\u2019s \u201cThe Book of Found Objects,\u201d along with the work of 14 other Harvard students. The show runs through April 20 at the Center for Government and International Studies<\/a>, CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St. It was co-curated by Nancy Lin \u201911 and Anne Sawyier \u201912, both history of art and architecture concentrators.<\/p>\n Included in the show at the building\u2019s Concourse Gallery are photographs, paintings, drawings, miniature sculptures, and five films running in a continuous loop.<\/p>\n \u201cInvisible Cities\u201d is more about the emotional response to places than it is about travel itself, said Lin.<\/p>\n \u201cWe thought about how you experience travel, how you experience new places,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was more of an internal experience, as opposed to \u2018Here\u2019s a photo of the Eiffel Tower.\u2019 It has less to do with the city than it does about yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n Fun was part of the equation too, and inclusion. \u201cWe wanted to reach out to as many students as possible,\u201d said Sawyier. \u201cWe wanted the artists to have fun with it, and to share their internal experiences of places.\u201d<\/p>\n The students represent a clash and clamor of disciplines: economics, biology, art, literature, and the social sciences. A budding economist, Jieliang Hao \u201911 made her \u201cWhite Series\u201d from daily photo studies of the same corner of Dunster House.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s not like a travel-abroad photo,\u201d said Lin, who called the Hao series \u201cher own poem,\u201d and a kind of internal journey. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to travel abroad to have journeys. You can have them inside of you.\u201d<\/p>\n Kayla Escobedo \u201912, a Visual and Environmental Studies<\/a> (VES) concentrator, displayed a few panels from MONTY, a graphic novel in progress.<\/p>\n And neurobiology student Natasha Coleman \u201910 co-created \u201cMoving Through the City,\u201d a mixed media\/video exploration of New York, with Andr\u00e9s Castro Samayoa \u201910, a concentrator in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIf medical school doesn\u2019t work out,\u201d her artist statement says, she\u2019ll \u201ctry her hand at fashion photography.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cInvisible Cities\u201d \u2014 taken from the title of a 1972 novel by Italo Calvino<\/a> \u2014 seems to say that art has a place in every academic discipline.<\/p>\n Anh-Thu Ngo, a second-year doctoral student in anthropology, is one of two Harvard graduate students in the show. She used her film \u201cShadow of Echoes\u201d to explore the sensory experiences of place.<\/p>\n Ngo recently spent 10 weeks in her native Vietnam, in the city of Hue, employing what she called \u201cthe camera\u2019s amble and resting gaze\u201d to give the viewer a lush sense of place that words alone cannot create. \u201cChildhood and motherland loom in these dreams,\u201d wrote Ngo, in the film\u2019s minimal and poetic text.<\/p>\n There are caged birds in an outdoor market, men lounging at a tree-shaded caf\u00e9, a gray bridge fluid with the traffic of motorbikes, ancient stone walls, a shaded walk, and a vendor crouching on a sidewalk. She holds up a single flower.<\/p>\n \u201cWith this medium I was able to explore more creative aspects of my time there,\u201d said Ngo. Hue is known for its centuries of art as well as for the Vietnam War\u2019s most horrific urban battle, in 1968.<\/p>\n Ngo said Harvard is prominent among universities breaking new ground in \u201csensory ethnography,\u201d the name of a two-semester class she took last year.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot more evocative power through images and sound,\u201d said Ngo of using film for ethnography. But despite its power, she added, incorporating film into scholarship \u201cis really stretching the boundaries of the discipline.\u201d<\/p>\n Funding for \u201cInvisible Cities\u201d came from Harvard\u2019s Office for the Arts<\/a>. Guidance came from painter Bettina Burch<\/a>, the art board associate at CGIS, and from Ruth Lingford<\/a>, VES professor of the practice of animation.<\/p>\n