SBGradMag Stony Brook's Graduate Student Magazine

The setting: the back patio to my parent's house, Manistee, Michigan.  It's a brick patio, a small outdoor table and chairs, umbrella, and porch swing.  Next to the patio is a small garden, the brilliant orange and red lilies and roses are juxtaposed with tufts of tall grass, things usually identified as weeds, garden gnomes, and a water fountain and fishpond, complete with five goldfish, green with algae. 

I love summer.  I love food.  And summer food?  Seriously at the top of the list of things I love.  I spent a good portion of my summers as a kid on my grandparents' farm nibbling on the fresh fruits and veggies they grew-perhaps one of the reasons I hate those pale, cardboard-y, things they pass off as tomatoes and strawberries in the supermarket.  So I thought I'd send along a few of my favorite summer recipes to you.  As a brief disclaimer, I'm a vegetarian, though a few of these can be easily modified to include animal flesh if you have to have it.  Also, as I played around with these over the course of many years, I hope you experiment with the ingredients and add or subtract to your own tastes.

"And then she just stood there, not knowing what to do next"
Lawrence Alloway Gallery, Stony Brook University

Walking into Shannan Lee Hayes's recent installation at Stony Brook University's Lawrence Alloway Gallery was like walking into my own head. I had the uncanny sensation that someone had gone through my trash and discovered my copious lists, the obsessive neurotic ones I write each night and carry with me throughout the next day, with everything from "wake up" to what I plan to eat and where I should be at any given moment, as if I would forget to go to class.

Sonic Residues

If you haven't heard, the Art Department has a new branch; the Consortium for Digital Arts, Culture, and Technology (cDACT).  Directed by Christa Erickson cDACT emphasizes new and mixed media.  Sound, light, music, the moving image, code, these are the new tools of the artist and the product of their use can be both daunting and beautiful.  Sonic Residues, the current exhibit at the SAC Gallery showcases the work of graduate students, faculty, and professionals from the art world.

Yana K.M.  Steal this exhibition

Looming in the Staller Center Gallery during the showing of third year graduate students in the MFA program was a fifteen-foot structure with cardboard skin.  This giant cube whose outside surface was quilted together with flattened boxes contained but one entry in the shape of a doorway, facing away from the entrance to the gallery so as to require the viewer to walk around the piece. 

"The vision, the ‘democratic vista,' is not metaphorical, it is a social necessity. A political philosophy rooted in elation would have to accept belief in a second Adam, the re-creation of the entire order, from religion to the simplest domestic rituals. The myth of the noble savage would not be revived, for that myth never emanated from the savage but has always been the nostalgia of the Old World, its longing for innocence. The great poetry of the New World does not pretend to such innocence, its vision is not naïve. Rather, like its fruits, its savour is a mixture of the acid and the sweet, the apples of its second Eden have the tartness of experience. [...] For us in the archipelago the tribal memory is salted with the bitter memory of migration." Derek Walcott, "The Muse of History"