FRANKE HONORS STUDENTS CURATE PAGES & PROJECTIONS, IN COLLABORATION WITH THE CCP
Faurest Davis, Sahuaros, near Tucson, 1942, © Faurest Davis Faurest Davis, Sahuaros, cerca de Tucson, 1942, © Faurest Davis
On Wednesday, September 27, the Center for Creative Photography, in partnership with the W.A. Franke Honors College, will be hosting an event showcasing a student-curated exhibition as a part of the community focused gallery, Studio CCP. The event will be the paramount of a weeklong showcase of Franke Honors students’ work, alongside photographs from the CCP's 2023 exhibition, 8-track: Images of the West.
This exhibition, titled Pages & Projections: Student Curated Portals into the West, is a collaboration between two Franke Honors courses: HNRS 212: Narratives of the Southwest, taught by Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Jennie McStotts, and HNRS 222: Explorations in Creative Writing, which is taught by Assistant Professor of Practice Claire McLane. Both courses are investigating what it means to tell stories in innovative, alternative, and unexpected ways, including how narratives can be built by way of other stories and other media, like photography.
Students in McStotts' course, Narratives of the Southwest, will be writing about how their selections from 8-track: Images of the West represented collective or individual conceptions of the Southwest. As in, how did both the content and the composition of the image create a narrative of the region, and how did it resonate for them personally? Those in McLane's class, Explorations in Creative Writing, studied ekphrastic writing, which examines how the visual is translated into the verbal via vivid description. The term ekphrastic can refer to any literary response to a non-literary work (including dance and music) as a way to merge the experience of oneself and that of the artist. This serves as a lens to explore symbolic meanings, story invention, dialogue and dramatic scenes via our own subjective experience of a piece of visual art.
As a result of their unique analyses, students have been asked to create single-page writings that responded to these prompts in a form of their choosing. The pages and displays they curate will combine to create interwoven narratives that respond to the original exhibition’s photographs and open new portals into notions of the American West.
Pages & Projections: Student Curated Portals into the West, will be running in the CCP’s center galleries from September 22 through September 30. A digital version of the exhibit will be coming soon on the CCP’s mobile app, CCP Interactive.