Congratulations to Art History student Adrienne Krueger and BFA Photography/Digital Imaging student Nate Francis for presenting their Undergraduate Reseach Projects at this year's Virtual Symposium!

In her presentation, The Commune in Commodities: Bruno Braquehais's Photographs of the Paris Commune of 1871, Adrienne Krueger explains "My research reframes Bruno Braquehais’s photography of the Paris Commune by analyzing it within the context of the surviving album in which it appears, Siège de Paris. With reference to the conventions of travel photography of Paris and Victorian travel photography at large, I argue that Braquehais’s photographs of the Commune are distinctly unrevolutionary because they commodify the Commune and Otherize their Communard subjects."

View her presentation on the Office of Undergraduate Reserach website.

Faculty Mentor: Lela Graybill

BFA student Nate Francis explores themes of the queer body in the Utah geographic and cultural landscape in In Place: A Study of Loneliness in Utah's Landscapes. Francis shows the cumulative results of his artistic research at an exhibition at the Finch Lane Gallery from March 12 to April 22, 2021.

"Coming out as queer after living as a member of the Mormon faith and serving a two-year mission for the organization was a wake-up call for myself, my family, and my friends. My work is concerned with the experience of living in Salt Lake City as a gay ex-Mormon.

Utah’s desolate geography serves as a metaphor for those experiences. The physical emptiness and desolation of the red rock deserts and expansive salt flats are symbols of the emotional and mental isolation of queer people in Utah’s cultural landscape.

Through the use of the camera, my body, the land, and the photo studio, I capture the relationship of my identity to my surroundings. I rearrange my world to make sense of it and re-capture it, again and again, my fragmented figure a constant reminder of the difficulty of being verbally dissected by the people around me. I carry the weight of otherness along with me internally. I feel a physical burden pulling my body down, down, down to dust.

I see fulfillment in a future outside of Utah and cling to it with every stroke of energy I can muster. The camera is my guardian angel and tool for self-creation, carrying me from day to day until I find that future."

Faculty Mentor: Jaclyn Wright