Reappearing at different locations across Kenyon’s campus, Spots demonstrates and questions the perspective of the academic. Reimagining my grandparents’ hilltop telescope over Dayton as symmetrical, the pieces confuse and equalize the observer and the observed. The rudimentary design and materiality of the objects allows viewers to literally and figuratively look through them, focusing instead on the fixed images they isolate from the surrounding space.
The first looks downhill one way and to the roof of Lowell House in the other, alluding to the people our community looks down on and/or studies and the values it determines are worth aspiring to. The second looks from Greenville, where my great-grandparents were from, to the backdoor of the Church of the Holy Spirit, where they were married against family wishes. Pointing towards Greenville simultaneously points towards Chalmers Library, dichotomizing religion and academia to further complicate our ideas of power. The third extends the trajectory of Paul Manship’s Indian Hunter and Pronghorn Antelope, positioning viewers opposite the Indian but directing attention to the flowers in front, suggesting academia as extractive of beauty.