All posts by Rowan Rockwell, Correspondent

Arts and Entertainment, Home Page Featured News

Art is in the air

 
“Swamp The Drain” made by Art student Lacey “Rozie” Cominksy. Photo by Rowan Rockwell

In the back of the library there is a quaint and modest room that some may never have stepped foot in. Its clean white walls and large glass windows perfectly allow for the minimalistic kind of backdrop needed for an NECC student art show. Two weeks ago on a raw, rainy Thursday afternoon that’s exactly what happened.

Here in the campus showroom the students of Art 108 WIP (Work In Progress) laid out their labors, be it experimental and exploratory or driven and purposeful.

The class had spent much of the semester creating in response to prompts and getting a feel for the artistic process.

The prompts, from art faculty Dianne Pappas, ranged from making creative sense out of plastic red solo cups and coat hangers to abstract chess prompts and geometric forms.

“Untitled” is the name of this artwork. Photo by Rowan Rockwell

An intimate group of 40 or so people, artists and otherwise milled about the gallery exploring the art, reading artists statements and perusing the provided snack table.

The self-guided walkthrough portion of gallery engagement came to a close when Pappas gathered the room and delivered a final prompt to her students; to speak about their work. There was a mixture of shyness and exuberance from the artists but those who opted for silence still spoke loudly through their work.

Some of the great art on display included abstract vinyl art, inventive wire and aluminum foil combos, plaster and clay pieces, a unique interactive piece of bamboo and concrete and an art/fashion piece: a top composed of plastic insects. Those were just a few of the examples of innovation and artistic exploration on display.

Art created by NECC students on display in the art gallery in the library on the Haverhill campus. Photo by Rowan Rockwell

“I used my body.” said liberal arts major Emily Lewis, 20, referring to an intriguing plaster mold of a human torso peeling back part of itself to expose pink ribs. “It’s about body issues and feeling uncomfortable in your own skin. I used to struggle with that and that’s why I made it.”

Upon arriving at NECC Emily was studying environmental science but as she got involved with the arts program it allowed her to engage in making art and explore her creative talents like never before.

Maggie Arnold, 22, of Andover, was the artist behind the bug shirt. After dipping her toe in at Plymouth State University for environmental science in 2020 she subsequently took a few gap years and got involved in art therapy.

“I’ve always been a creative person my whole life but to me it was always just gonna be a hobby. My parents said you need to go to school and you need to do something serious, something that’s going to make you money,” Arnold said.

But after trying her hand in something more ‘typical’ to a monetarily incentivized career at Plymouth State she seized the opportunity of engrossing herself in her creative passions at NECC with the hailing of the Mass Reconnect bill.

Two pieces of art by NECC students. Photo by Rowan Rockwell

“I wanna see what I can do, I wanna challenge myself. I’m really grateful that we’re given these types of opportunities to display our work, get real feedback from people, learn how to speak about our work. I want to learn the discipline and this is what I wanna do full time in life so I really appreciate NECC for giving me and everyone else here an opportunity,” Arnold said.

One of the most ambitious and provoking pieces on display was by Lacey ‘Rozie’ Cominksy of Gloucester. She initially conceived the idea while contemplating the need for public art on campus. As she looked down on a drain and thought about where it led, she imagined being underneath it and looking up from the swamp it led to. Through both tumult and result of this contentious election cycle she channeled her energy into the creation of this reflective piece and decided to name it ‘Swamp The Drain.’

Home Page News Bytes, Opinion

Media framing and bandwidth overload

 

“Life moves pretty fast” says Ferris Bueller, and it is moving faster and faster with each day. In the modern world the children and young adults of this era increasingly feel the wrenching collapse of space time bearing down upon us.    As we age, our perceptions of reality narrow into a turbulent acceleration defined less and less by why and more and more by how.

As the fresh empty canvas of the information hungry infant brain oxidizes in the marrow of time and experience our inner quest for ‘why’ is replaced by doctrines of ‘how’ and the information we compile over time that once shone with exciting possibility, is kneaded unlovingly back down into our increasingly stimulated and insufficient minds. 

This fearsome deviation is marked by a bandwidth overload. 

As more information floods our inherently curious but incapable minds our neurology attempts to weave an explanatory tapestry of understanding but at the advent of bandwidth capacity we are simply left in states of freewheeling neuroticism or quiet fragmentation. 

The power of the mind to choose and select information of use can only remain tenable at a slow drip but the acceleration of technology has suddenly squeezed the bag at the other end of the needle in our arm making us too woozy to press the button for help on our bedside table.

Age used to be the main factor in how much one could know. Like the innumerable rings on an old redwood, wrinkles across the brow of a wise elder once represented a lifetime spent amassing information. Only with the passage of time could we steep ourselves long enough in information to be able to express and reflect on what we’d learned with true preponderance.

But now as our technology produces media capable of rapid system overload we have artificially circumnavigated the aged face and been inflicted a far more grievous psychic trauma. 

No longer capable of storing vital information in our own brains we have outsourced our most prized intellectual possessions to an artificial entity we may one day meet a fate of becomingly only host to as our reliance on these tools develop. 

Today we have started to make the mistake that the access to information is greater than its acquisition. 

To acquire information requires you to be ready to receive it and in turn wield it with purpose and intent. If you ingest information without the hardware to employ it not only will there be inherent frustration as a result of impotence but attempting to actualize information without the proper knowledge of its applicability will cause harm and confusion for you and everyone around you.

As a metaphor, imagine having the blueprint to build a house without knowing how to drive a nail with a hammer (frustration). Or on the other hand imagine a child watching their parents be brutally executed by a psychopath (confusion).

Learning of how things are without a developed understanding of why things are will result in trauma and psychic disturbance. 

Of course these metaphorical examples I have given have occurred to people in one way or the other the other and houses still get built and children still live happy lives but turning that type of metaphor over onto the vast majority of human beings results in a mass state of irreparable harm as the majority of people alive today exponentially consume information beyond our understanding at a rapidly unhealthy rate. 

With the increase of psychic trauma caused by overexposure to information both irreconcilable to our understanding and complicated in our ability to integrate it we have started down a dark path. 

This is the path to ‘un-enlightenment’. The enlightenment era was a time where information illuminated our understanding so we could grow and exceed but it has become such a commodity in our world that it now either numbs us from experiencing our core values and realities or it unrealistically inflates our understandings and drives us mad. 

The only thing that can save us is delineating the value of knowledge and information if there is ever a hope of turning around and walking back into the light.

Note: Rowan Rockwell wrote this for an assignment about the media framing communitcation theory in the Intro to Mass Communication course. 

News, Slider

A Boomwhackers boon

 
A group of students playing music with buckets
Music event featured Boomwhackers and drumming. Participants try out drummng during an event at the Tech Center on Oct. 3. Photo by Rowan Rockwell

This Fall the music department at Northern Essex is getting into the swing of things with their annual Boomwhackers event, one of the many school functions looking to put the ‘community’ back into Community College.

In the Tech Center on Oct, 3 music department faculty Alisa Bucchiere and Abe Finch stood eagerly around a large circle of orange 5-gallon buckets passing out drum sticks to students as they filed in getting ready to participate in a rhythmic extravaganza.

Finch led the drum circle portion of the event commanding an impressively cohesive call and response type activity as the group pounded away at a medium tempo Samba.

Between activities Finch expressed the value of nonverbal communication in the drum circle event stating, “everybody’s equal and listening to each other — it’s a together event it’s not a showcase on anybody — that is probably the gist of the whole thing.”

“I liked it,” said Brianna Bardales, a first-year liberal arts major studying music therapy at NECC. “It’s like very stress relieving, because you know, I work full time and go to school so obviously it’s so hard to balance both, so coming here to just like play the drums even though I don’t know how to play the drums, it was really nice to … let a little stress out.”

Bardales’ sentiments are empirically reflected by many scientific studies, including one by the National Institute of Health whose research found statistical evidence of a reduction in stress and anxiety in patients involved in drum circles.

“This is a lot of fun, little bit of a workout,” said Sean Gaff an NECC music major emphasizing the benefits of exercise involved in such an event.

“Hopefully people find out that we do fun stuff like bang on buckets and get together and have fun and build community, more community at the community college. That’s what it is man, in a nutshell, get people together.”

– Professor Abe Finch

As the students rocked on participants were asked to seize hold of a musical device known as a boomwhacker, a colorful plastic tube that can variate in size and pitch, and were instructed to play along to a whimsical arrangement of songs such as Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and Ghostbusters, cued note for note by a karaoke-like play along tutorial up on a projector.

It was reminiscent of a more childlike activity you would have been familiar with in kindergarten or primary school but took a higher degree of attention to focus on playing the right notes at the right times as everyone had a boomwhacker that was tuned to a different pitch.

Although the second portion of this events communal revelry had a more childlike essence to it than the drum circle you could feel an effort in the organization of the event and its participants to create a space where people felt free to express themselves and have fun, an attribute not only foundational to children but adults as well.

The event was seemingly a success for all those that attended but Finch expressed a need to expand these events and their communal impacts to a broader portion of the student body.

Most of the people in attendance did have some affiliation with the music department and Finch expressed he was “not sure that the advertising gets out generally very early” further stating that “there’s tons of music events and they’re all open to the public, (it’s) community college but like it’s commuter college, it’s hard to get a community when everybody just comes on campus to take their class and then they drive home, but its name is community college because  it’s in your community but like where’s your community?”

Finch makes a point. Student and staff all share the same facilities and resources but there can be a tendency to overlook the importance of what truly connects us at a core level in these shared spaces. Each other.

“Hopefully people find out that we do fun stuff like bang on buckets and get together and have fun and build community” said Finch, “more community at the community college. That’s what it is man, in a nutshell, get people together.”