2020 Arts Award: Darius Russell Kish
by Ally Lardner ‘21
Junior Darius Russell Kish reflects on his journey as an artist, and how his analytical skills transfer into making brave new artistic leaps.
Darius Russell Kish ’21
Major: Computer Science and German Studies
Minor: Studio Art
2019 Advanced Study Grant Recipient
Exhibition Technical Assistant: "Mass Ave, Cambridge: Photos by Karl Baden”
Exhibitions: Gallery 203, “Through the Looking Glass”
How have you been involved in the arts at BC?
“Who am I / Why am I”
My sophomore fall, I took a class with Karl Baden on darkroom photography. I was interested in it more for the technical side than anything, but it became clear pretty much immediately that there was a lot more to think about on the artistic side. Before sophomore year, in all honesty, I’d never understood art. I’d always been a science person, and not too focused on the humanities.
But that class pretty much opened it up for me that art was a different way of documenting and comprehending what’s going on in the world.
I started taking classes with Greer Muldowney, who has a much more theoretical approach to art than other professors of the practice that I know in the department, and that really works for me. Being a science person, theory is in my wheelhouse; it's more analytical.
I’ve helped Greer with her exhibition series, Undergraduate Photography Now, which is a student show for the New England area that’s juried by her and a guest juror. They pick around 15 students to show pieces, and you can get invited to a photo review, where curators, gallerists, and photographers in the Boston area can look at your portfolio. That’s a really great experience to build networks, not only with galleries and curators, but also with your fellow students at other schools. While working behind the scenes, I met everyone who was showing that year, and they’re all really great artists and I talk to a bunch of them still.
I got involved with the Senior Show last year. Not with any of the design decisions, but I would just help people bring their work to life, bring their exhibition to life, show it off in a way that they’re happy with. I've been a little more behind the scenes than showing myself, except for in the fall with Ziyang (Xiang ’20).
“Ich hatte gerne eine Tochter.”
With Through the Looking Glass, Ziyang and I wanted to show something a little more conceptual than we’ve seen at the Carney Gallery. We wanted to push the envelope as far as what we’ve seen the general BC population consume. We both came up with pieces that have to do with introspection and perception of space and self. I thought a lot about the work of the artist Dan Graham. He’s famous for all these large one-way mirror installation pieces that people walk through, and it’s all about perception, how you perceive yourself, and how other people perceive you. . . and then with all the mirrors, you get all these weird loops of you looking at yourself, and other people looking at you looking at yourself. I had a piece that was kind of based on that, but also rooted in surveillance culture — a little more playful than it was sinister.
We wanted to push the boundary a little, while keeping it visually interesting. It was cool to get a show together for ourselves: designing something from scratch, being responsible for putting it up, that was all really interesting and felt crucial for us as student artists.
What have you seen influence your work as an artist?
Middle Eastern art has been a big motif in photography for the past ten years or so in contemporary photography, and even contemporary installation art or conceptual art. This past summer was the tail-end of this exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, a big show of a mix of Western, Israeli and Palestinian artists analyzing Israeli-Palestinian relations along the border. It's a geographical area where I’ve seen some really interesting and relevant work coming from.
With photography, you really see all these different ways for someone to analyze and work through their life in relationship to their situation.
That’s really cool to me. While you don't really have the same geography here in Boston as you do in the Middle East, the ways they approach the subject of the relationship between the person and the land is interesting.
In this book, Genius Loci: towards a phenomenology of architecture, one of the theories introduced is that the way humans interact with their landscape influences the architectural styles of their buildings. In the Middle East, you have these vast geometric buildings, and it’s because the landscape of the Middle East is so vast, and the way sand dunes are formed is so geometric. Meanwhile, in Denmark, the buildings are almost subscale. The theory connects that with how Scandinavian folklore is fairy-based — so, smaller than human-scale. So their architecture is smaller than human-scale as well. I’d say thinking about that relationship with the land has had an influence on me as an artist.
Walid Raad, one of my favorite artists, though he doesn’t necessarily do photography, has also definitely influenced the way I think about art. Raad is skeptical of the museum, skeptical of the idea of an exhibition itself, and what it means to show work as an artist. That’s really been influential to me.
What would you say has been your most meaningful experience with the arts at BC?
Student Art / Not Student Art
The show with Ziyang is definitely up there. The very end of last spring, during the Senior Show, was also one of my most memorable experiences. I helped the seniors help their stuff installed, and I think that’s when I felt the most sense of community in BC arts: all of us working towards getting the exhibition together was a big highlight for me.
What are you thinking of doing next year in the arts as a senior?
I’m on the cusp of being a Studio Art major or a minor, and it depends on what coursework I can fit in.
Either way, I want to keep doing photography, installation work. It’s hard to tell right now how things are going to go, but I’d like to see what sort of shows I could work on, either on campus or in the Boston area.
Senior year is really the time to push outside of your university and try to get a bit of a foothold. I’ve always been a little more behind the scenes than trying to be in the spotlight, and I’m excited for the Senior Show next year. Helping out my peers figure out what they want to do with their project is really fun. I love critique.
How has your work in the arts influenced what you want to do after graduation?
Coming into BC, I never considered having anything to do with art post grad, and now I really want to either get an MFA, or stay involved somehow, even if it's just helping Greer with UPN in future years.
A kind of pipe dream of mine is doing conservation work in museums. It’s something I’d want to try out first, with an internship or something, because you have to have a PhD in it. As of now, though, it’s so fun to watch. MoMA, when they were doing their remodeling, posted a video series on their YouTube channel about the behind the scenes of conservation, which I think everyone should watch. It’s so cool to see how museums run, especially a big one like MoMA.
I definitely want to stay involved in the arts somehow, whether through curating or showing my own work. I’ll probably be in school for computer science first, but who knows? After that, maybe I’ll have time to do a bit of both.
What advice would you share with underclassmen about getting involved in the arts?
Dive in headfirst.
Find a faculty member you like; they’re all really great in their own mediums. And read a lot. See a lot of art. Go to the First Fridays at the McMullen. Look at new work. Try and meet student artists from other schools. Just dive headfirst.
