This Is A Long Exposure from April 23 to May 21, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Oliver Foley
Throughout my time as a docent at the Stamp Gallery, I have been fascinated by the gallery’s most notable architectural quirk: a short hallway ending in a door that never opens. Behind the wall which greets visitors as they enter the gallery lies this hallway, a subspace enclosed on three sides with a gap at the top allowing in ambient light from the primary space. This space exists in service of a door which must exist, yet is unused, like a vestigial organ of the building as a whole. The resultant alcove, often indirectly illuminated, serves as the perfect vessel for pieces which create artificial spaces. Permeation (2025) by Jeffery Hampshire is one such piece, making use of the auditory isolation and low light level to transport the viewer into a spatial imaginary.
Permeation (2025) by Jeffery Hampshire
Like an architectural womb, the nook insulates the viewer from the exhibition as a whole. Two large white curtains hang from the wall, obscuring the vestigial door behind the semi-transparent fabric. Behind this curtain is a projection of a scene through a window, alternating between the two sides of the virtual window. Along with each perspective is audio, the sounds of birds and nature when looking outside, and the sounds of plates, footsteps, and household movement when looking in. This audio corresponds to what is on the other side of the window, subverting the intuitive expectation. This subversion was not immediately obvious, yet reflects the unique role of the window to transport the user out of the space they are in. There is a distinctly peaceful quality to this piece; it feels like a moment frozen in time being viewed from an abstractly omniscient angle. The walls of the alcove shield the viewer from the ambient sounds of the building, transporting them into an imaginary space beyond a physical space.
Permeation (2025) by Jeffery Hampshire
Two projections appear: a crisp, defined image on the wall behind the curtain, and a diffuse, fuzzy image on the curtain itself. The projection takes on the materiality of the curtain and imbues it with a soft glow, giving the illusion of natural light through a window. Alluding to the title of the piece, it is not the direct projection which sells the atmosphere, but the radiance created by its permeation through the fabric. In the sterility of a gallery environment, softness in light is oftentimes lost in pursuit of clear visibility, yet the darkness of this liminal-vestigial vestibule harbors the luminous subtlety of Hampshire’s piece. The realism of soft light is present within the projection, too: the light sources in the virtual spaces themselves permeate through semi-translucent media. When looking in, a lampshade blunts the lightbulb, and the view out into nature is lit diffusely by sunlight through a tree. The window acts as the inversion of reality, a door which is visually impenetrable and functionally inaccessible. Jeffery Hampshire’s Permeation not only creates spaces, but portals into these spaces which transcend the limitations of the gallery setting.
Stamp Gallery is a modular space, whose layout and flow of movement changes dramatically with each exhibition. Moveable walls and track lights create a blank slate for each exhibition’s unique demands. Yet, the back micro-hallway remains constant, an inner space which surrounds and immerses the viewer. Permeation masterfully engages with this architectural oddity, elevating it beyond a simple video booth by harnessing the inherent liminality of the corridor. The boundary dissolves between real and imagined, inside and outside, light and shadow; Hampshire’s work illuminates the beautiful mundane of the window as a threshold.
This is a long exposure from April 23 to May 21, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Rachel Schmid-James
Déjà vu is a phenomenon very few are unfamiliar with. The sensation that one has been somewhere or experienced something before often creates an uneasy feeling within its host. This disruption of thinking is abrupt and yet fleeting- leaving just as quickly as it came. In Julia Reising’s looping short film This is a Long Exposure, she combines prose and image to examine the overlap between movement, time, and the illusion of recall. Through the various frames of the video, Reising herself or objects such as a chair and lamp are seen interacting with a red linoleum box adorned with a tile-like pattern, a mobile corner. The piece then appears again in two inkjet photographs titled Linoleum Room Landscape One and Two, which are positioned as if in conversation with one another—each on opposing walls that converge to create a corner. Though the box is present, it is intangible—never appearing in its palpable form. Its absence highlights the idea of liminality: and poses the question of “how can we feel familiarity despite never being present with something?”
Reising in a still from This is a Long Exposure, 2025, video
Since Albert Einstein first theorized that time was relative and nonlinear, but rather conceptualized through culture, not much has changed in our own human interpretations of how it functions. The human brain struggles to understand time in any way other than moving in a straight line. Our cycles influence this: all living things are born and die, an eternal circle. In This is a Long Exposure, Julia Reising plays with both time and space- challenging the way we perceive it. She questions whether anything can ever truly be still in our dimensional universe, and how medium, environment, and cyclicality can be reconciled.
The words that accompany the visual scenes of the video add a layer to the narrative Reising is building. It both starts and ends with Reising saying the phrase “And I am happy to have been here before,” intentionally inducing a sense of déjà vu within the viewer. She then comments on the foreign feeling the box activates, saying “unfamiliar. A door, a cornice moulding, a chair, a lamp.” She makes the viewer question their perception of domestic objects through their positioning in the corner, as well as our perception of where these objects fit into a space.
The diptych prints enhance this message. In one, the box is set against a green, leafy landscape, the shadow of the photographer and a branch visible and almost bleeding onto it. In the other, the box is the only object set against a stark, white wall- giving the opportunity for it to gain the viewer’s full attention. The simple backgrounds allow for reflection and for the feeling of intimacy with this inanimate object to continue to fester. By the end of the video and upon leaving the gallery, the viewer feels intrinsically tied to this intangible concept- a concept that encapsulates both the physical and the metaphorical. The ways we experience the metaphysical can be translated onto a smaller scale, as they have in this exhibition.
Julia Reising, Linoleum Room Landscape (One and Two), 2025, inkjet print diptych
The reason humans are so rigid in our unwillingness to perceive time in a nonlinear way is that it disrupts our cultural creations of life and the universe. We find meaning in these systems and their strict nature, something so cemented that we don’t understand how to exist without them. Reising seeks to meld the familiar and unfamiliar into one, pushing the bounds of what is and what could be- that one can be somewhere and nowhere all at once, that we can truly accept the message “and I am happy to have been here before.”
Julia Reising’s work is included in This is a long exposure at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from April 23 to May 21, 2025
This is a long exposure from April 23 to May 12, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Trinitee Tatum
In the quiet between moments, between internal ideas to realized words and actions, Julia Reising listens. Her work— part sculpture, part language, wholly attentive— asks us to consider not just what we see, but what we sense in the periphery, what lingers in the edges of our minds and our environments. Through tile, text, wood, and gesture, she maps the topography of home, the self, memory, and meaning.
As the exhibition title suggests, This is a long exposure– a line taken from Reising’s personal writing– the stillness and contemplation within her work emerge from the act of waiting and watching closely, mirroring the slow revelation of detail in long exposure photography, where what is hidden at first gradually becomes visible. Thus, Reising moves at the speed of the careful capture of light. Her work dwells on the overlooked, the unnoticed. Radiators, wooden banisters, linoleum floors: these architectural fragments, often existing without much fanfare, become in her hands conduits for cultural signifiers and unspoken values. She is interested in how objects and ideas hold us and how we hold onto them; what we inherit not just instinctively, but also spatially. What we pass down through the corners of our homes, the language of domesticity, the invisible codes of belonging and power.
Still from This is a long exposure (2025), Video.
Tiles reappear throughout her work in This is a long exposure like punctuation. Cool, ordered, repeatable. It speaks to both industry and intimacy, of bathrooms and boardrooms, kitchens and clinics. In one piece, a red “linoleum” corner, a meticulous replica of beloved studio flooring now long gone, appears only in photographs and video— its physicality left out of the gallery space entirely. The absence is the point. What is not there feels expansive and loud, an omnipresent force making its presence known. It is, in part, about control. About the visibility of power, and the spaces it occupies silently. Her work is full of such inversions. Stillness brushes up with animation. Emptiness becomes form. Decay is immortal.
Branch (Green and Blue) (2025), Branch, grout, ceramic tile, wood.
Reising molds and casts not just objects, but echoes, memories. Tree limbs and stumps contend with tiles, drawing precarious lines and alliances between nature and manufacture. The result is often eerie, liminal, familiar, yet unsettled. Memory, too, plays in this register. Not memory as in strictly nostalgia, but as structure. What stirs memory into being? How does context shape what we remember, and what quietly slips away? Reising uproots sentimentality and instead holds space for the complexity of recollection, contemplating the idea of self-affirmation and the existence of multiple truths. Memory here is not a return, but a reframing.
Exhibition View of Linoleum Room Landscape (One and Two) (2025) and Stump (2025).
Collaboration extends this inquiry outward, becoming a way of grappling with the in/visibility of power and control. It’s about the give and take, about depending on someone else to help you affirm what is reality, our perception of reality, our memory of reality. There is a deep humility and vulnerability in this. A willingness to admit that we do not shape the world alone, that our truths are numerous, that meaning is not fixed but fluid. Reising’s work makes room for this. For uncertainty, for multiplicity, for the poetry that happens when form and thought meet halfway.
As an architectural practitioner of feeling, Reising builds with absence as much as substance. Her materials speak, but they also listen. Her objects point to what is evident but not always seen. Her spaces remember. Her words extend. To view her work is to step into a kind of threshold, the in-between of the visible and the vanished. And it is there, in that hushed middle ground, that her art takes shape, not as a statement, but as an offering.
Julia Reising’s work is included in This is a long exposure at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from April 23 to May 12, 2025
This is a long exposure from April 23 to May 21, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Olivia DiJulio
When viewing and creating digital art, how can we see beyond the glass? With image-making, how can we elevate the flat nature of screens? Transcending the medium of the digital realm, This is a long exposure explores the methods and artistic revisions in reframing environments and reshaping the everyday with digital and analog means.
Photography, videography, and digital projection are deeply integrated in this exhibit as central conveyors of time. These mediums are concentrated on generating and controlling visual phenomena. The camera and the lens have the power to capture light into a still image, and putting those images together in a sequence creates the motion picture. However, there is often a predictability in the traditional presentation of video feeds. In a hyper-digitized world, the novelty of screens has become an everyday interaction. As users of technology, there has been a standard expectation of clarity and instantaneous feedback.
Suspension by Jeffery Hampshire aims to reconfigure these notions of viewing into sources of motion, angles, and change. The piece features four monitors, each with custom acrylic castings to mount the transparent film. Both the acrylic mountings and film have a digital quality to them, almost replicating refresh effects of CRT TVs. The film itself was made using inkjet printing techniques, and is the highlight of this work. Each video feed features looping video feeds of suburban sights. There is something inherently human and man-made, featuring construction, architecture, a fallen e-bike, and a small forest clearing. The familiar sights combined with the unorthodox presentation create a unique composition within the genre of video installations.
Video art as a medium speaks to the very form of light. In combination with film and physical optics, Hampshire works by rebending, refracting, and changing our perspective of reality. Rather than just isolating the feed, the negative and positive space created with the film forms new dimensions to the piece. The contrast between the video feed and the transparent film seeks to form optical tension.The literal layering of images also speaks to the processes of filmmaking and digital art creation. Digital artists often work in layers to have control over the independent aspects of the piece. Layers are meant to be invisible, unnoticed, and embedded into an artwork. However, Suspension turns this workflow into a tangible outcome, by refracting and distorting the video feed below.
Quite fully, there is a visual hierarchy at play. The physical barriers and materiality of the film used in Suspension challenge the viewer to reconsider the ways we perceive the world. The film, being transparent, is not necessarily erasing what is there, but recontextualizing it into an ever changing viewing experience. It is more so an interruption rather than a deletion. You will never get the full image when looking at the piece head-on, and viewers are encouraged to move and find the spaces between the video and material.
Hampshire challenges the traditional linearity of observing video installations by adding additional visual depth to his work. Exploring the transformative nature of video, he promotes the ideals of the ever changing states of reality. Our environments will never be static, and neither is the dynamic form of video and multimedia works. Rather, there is always motion in the perceived stillness of the mundane. Suspension emphasizes the role of physical materials in shaping how we understand time and imagery. The physical materials remind us that what we see can always be filtered by tools and contexts. Through this lens, Hampshire opens up a broader conversation about the optics of perception, questioning not just what we see, but how we can reconsider the driving factors of attention and perception in the world around us.
[detail] Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) by second-year MFA candidate Clay Dunklin, is available for view at The Stamp Gallery’s MEDIA LUX exhibition through May 19, 2018.This is the fourth installment of the MEDIA LUX artist interview series. MEDIA LUX features work by Clay Dunklin, Mason Hurley, Irene Pantelis, Monroe Isenberg, and Gina Takaoka.
Clay Dunklin | Second-Year Master of Fine Arts Candidate | Exhibiting in MEDIA LUX from April 2nd through May 19th, 2018 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Interview by Grace DeWitt
To start with some background, where are you from, and what brought you to the MFA program at the University of Maryland?
Really, I came here for location. I grew up in the middle-of-nowhere in East Texas where there is virtually no arts culture or art opportunities and then spent the last several years in Orlando, FL. Orlando is great but the contemporary art world there is still in a stage of infancy and opportunities are few. Here we sit in this nice place between Baltimore and Washington–even New York and Philadelphia are in close proximity. So there’s a lot to engage with and see. I really wanted to be someplace where I had all of that at my fingertips.
Can you briefly summarize the focus of your artistic practice?
My practice is very much project-based and contextual–I create a lot of parts but they really need to be installed and viewed together to make relationships and begin to make sense. I’m also not really media specific. I mean, my background is in drawing and I still think of all the work in terms of drawing, but my practice is not really just drawing, or sculpture, or video. It’s all of that. I guess I use whatever media feels right for the work.
Are there any artists you are following right now, or any specific artists who have inspired your work so far?
I’m really into Mark Leckey right now. He won the Turner Prize a few years ago and does video, image-based, and object-based works. He creates these great installations with found objects usually in front of a green screen. This really influenced the current piece, Catatonic Tomography Cycle, with the painting of that flat color on the wall and the flatness of the prints. His work made me think about achieving a kind of compression of the objects or alternatively a slight dimensionality as if just beginning to poke out into space. This is aided by the one-sided viewing of the work–even though there are objects it’s not really in the round like in Leckey’s work.
I’m really drawn to Jannis Kounellis’ work as well. For me, his installations sat in this really beautiful place between complexity and simplicity. Objects would be hung with rope from the ceiling or piled on the floor or he’d just fill a gallery with live horses–it was very straightforward like that. But the scale and the way he could fill a space was pretty awe-inspiring.
I also have a bit of a crush on Anicka Yi. Her exhibition at the Guggenheim for the Hugo Boss Prize was pretty fantastic. The piece Maybe She’s Born With It is like this huge inflatable plastic dome with tempura fried flowers in it. I kind of want to live in there.
I understand that you underwent a pretty extreme medical illness about this time last year, which plays a role in your work now. Did your practice focus on the body before this illness? How would you say your direction changed because of this experience?
Yeah, it was pretty scary actually. I had several extended stays in the hospital with this weird and kind of rare neurological disease. Most of my time in the hospital was spent just trying to figure out what this was. Then I got put on these wacky medicines that took my mind to weird places and really affected my body and how my body reacted to external stimuli. It was a wild ride for sure. I took a bit of time trying to figure out what to do with that whole experience in terms of my work and I honestly tried to avoid it. It couldn’t be helped though, it just began to creep into the studio, so I gave in and decided to just see where it takes the work. And I think a year was enough time to sort of process and be ready to talk about it. However, I don’t think it totally uprooted the direction of my practice. I’ve always been working with body as subject in some capacity–I come from a very heavy figure drawing background so I guess that is just kind of ingrained in me somewhere. I’m interested in the body as this sort of mediator between us and the world. It’s how we contextualize and make sense of everything. But I think technology is really redefining that role as we’re becoming more and more cyborgian with our phones and such. But your body still has to interface with technology so that specifically is where I want my work to be situated–that little meeting point between body and technology.
Can you share some information about the title of your MEDIA LUX installation, Catatonic Tomography Cycle?
This piece deals with my experience of being sick in a pretty overt way. Here I’m using some of the more conceptual elements of the work to steer the formal qualities and I think this becomes really evident through the title. A catatonic state is an altered mental status that can be brought on by neurological disorders. This is what I experienced several times throughout my illness. It was like being a zombie or something. I have little to no memory of those times but apparently I wouldn’t speak or even move really, like being frozen. This is referenced in the stillness of the image-based components and in the slow looping videos that maybe start to reference time as something structured in layers and less linearly. This directly relates to tomography,which is a kind of imaging used most commonly in the medical field where the whole is broken up and viewed as layers (think MRI images). Again, this is referenced in some of the actual physical medical imagery used, but, it is also labeling all of these individual components as layers or slices of the whole that still contain information about the whole, and then compressing all of that into a kind of flatness (back to the Mark Lackey reference). And cycle goes back conceptually to the cyclical nature of the disease but also formally to the looping of the videos and as an indicator of the singular installation being composed of many parts: like an opera or song cycle in music composition.
Detail from one of two looping videos in Dunklin’s Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) installation in MEDIA LUX at The Stamp Gallery.
We’ve talked a little bit about how the footage in your installation touches on ideas of creation. Can you go into further detail about how the footage builds into the more complex idea of the MEDIA LUX installation as a whole?
This work has really taken on a kind of language all its own, as I think most works tend to do, and if you understand the artist as mythmaker, this language becomes inherently mythological. So I am constantly reflecting on the relationship between what is a deeply personal mythological language and a more universal one. I was reflecting on this relationship between creation and destruction and how water or fluid can act between those two modes. I think about the Grand Canyon where water has destroyed the landscape yet simultaneously created a new one or how this fluid around my brain acts as protection yet is the main antagonist in the story of my illness. Newborns emerge from a fluid incubator in what is a very traumatic process. None of this is new. But how do we reference these ideas that are inherent to our body in a relevant and deeply personal way? What kind of contemporary Athene can emerge from the fluid site of the head? The Native Americans around what is California today had a creation myth of humans being made from clay of the earth, as most cultures did, but with the added idea that the creator-god mixed spit with the earth to give humans life. So again, what does that mean for a contemporary body as a fluid site?
I’m interested in hearing more about your photographic/record-keeping processes and preferences. Could you highlight some other works of yours that applied captured imagery to installation? What are your intentions when it comes to image resolution and image manipulation in your work?
Like I said earlier, I’m interested in this intersection of body and technology and specifically how we negotiate those two as mediators between the self and the world. We’ve really embarked on a time where we’re beginning to experience everything through tech, even things we’re physically present for. Think about a concert where people snap every single song. Yes, now all of your friends can experience that too through an app on their phone but also you as the physically present viewer are experiencing a live event through compressed, digital, pixelated images and videos via your handheld device. That’s fascinating to me. It’s becoming second nature to understand our world through compressed images. So in terms of the work, I’m not intentionally after low quality images verging on pixilated abstraction just like I’m not intentionally after the most high quality images aimed at some kind of illusion. I don’t care about the illusion. If the image even slightly or in a subversive way recalls a quality of imagery experienced in the everyday then it brings it into that space of body/technology interface. It also begins to recall or make visible the process of the image-making, similar to how the process of tomographic imaging is inherently stamped on the images it produces simply because of the kind of images it produces. It’s a performative process where the thing is the action of its own doing and in this way, the images now become objects.
Detail of water images, blacklight, and clay component in Dunklin’s Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) installation.
Thinking back to the installation at The Stamp Gallery, what drew you to the use of those dark water images, applied directly on the left portion of the installation wall?
Those images come from documentation of a previous project where I was changing or obscuring the surface of my body by applying charcoal powder. I would then wash that off and be left with this deep dark charcoal water. From that, I began to pull paper thinking that these new surfaces and objects could be made from my body sluff. So the water became a transformative site where something new could emerge–this goes back to your previous question about creation and the metamyth. I had prints of these images and it just kind of hit me that they needed to be included with this project. The water references fluid around the brain but also starts to resemble images of space. That push and pull between something recognizable and something alien interests me and speaks to cosmic or magical thinking and some of the mental imagery conjured while on medication that was making me totally loopy. The application and composition of the prints is pointing to digital glitch in a way. The long linear format of each print is kind of filmic but really isn’t about time as we perceive it. As said earlier, it’s about something layered or sliced and reassembled.
Detail of wall sculpture in Dunklin’s Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) installation.
MEDIA LUX is an exhibition that presents five artists’ interpretation of, or association with, light. How does light relate to your concept in Catatonic Tomography Cycle?
Light is really a formal element here. When the decision was made to have the gallery dimly lit I thought that was great because video work is self-illuminating. For the rest of the installation I had to be more strategic about lighting. I knew the sculpture emerging from the wall was the one thing I wanted to be lit pretty intensely. Then the blue glow of the black light was again a formal and strategic color choice as it stands in relationship to the warm yellow of that spotlight. So that really was a further iteration of the colors found in the video works.
Detail of wall drawing in Dunklin’s Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) installation, available for view through May 19, 2018 in The Stamp Gallery.
Is there any advice you have for undergraduate artists or others at the beginning of their art careers?
I think one of the biggest things that I needed to hear as an undergrad was to really invest in the learning processes. It’s easy for people who have some talent to take the time in studio for granted or to not really put themselves out there because they’re afraid of failure. Make a ton, experiment a ton, be confident even in ‘failure,’ and pull everything you can out of your instructors and fellow students. Otherwise, you’ll likely only be performing at a slightly higher level than when you started college. How much good will that have really done you?
I know you have an installation up right now at VisArts, yolk | shell | source | system, a collaborative with another UMD MFA student, Bekí Basch. Anything else you have going on or coming up that you’d like to promote here?
Yeah! This was actually my first collaborative project and it was really the best experience. It’s a huge 70 foot long window display a couple of blocks from VisArts. So it definitely presented its own set of challenges but made for some great experimentation. We had a reception and artist talk for that on May 4th, and the installation will be up through June.
Clay Dunklin’s work is included in MEDIA LUX at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from April 2nd through May 19th, 2018.
