(UNFINISHED) Jill McCarthy Stauffer brings back my nostalgia for the waves

31st May 2024

(April 2025 note: this post is an unfinished review of the exhibit PALINOPSIA at the University of Maryland Stamp Gallery, May 2024. The exhibit featured Jill McCarthy Stauffer, Margaret Walker, Trevan Jakaar Coleman, and Varvara Tokareva. I only finished writing about Jill McCarthy Stauffer’s pieces, and I have since lost my phone and documentation of the exhibit, but I wanted to post this anyways because I am happy with the writing.)

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The constant whisper of waves underlining McCarthy Stauffer’s electronic installations provided the only sound in the gallery. These installations used wired circuitboards and LED light to reconstruct creatures of the sand: oysters, sanderlings, horseshoe crabs beached around a glowing pearl. I’ve always lived near the coast, and the footprints in the sand mounds and the swaying sound of the sea brought me back to my family’s visits to La Jolla, Virginia Beach, Ocean City. But the vibrant lights outlining McCarthy Stauffer’s sculptures defamiliarized their wildlife, casting them into an artificial bioluminescence more saturated than anything in the natural world. These magentas and cyans were exaggeratedly manmade, an overload of RGB that couldn’t have come from anything else but a machine.

McCarthy Stauffer’s cyborg creatures glowed with otherworldly beauty and eye-catching whimsy, recalling a time in our childhoods where these creatures were alien. In the Stamp Gallery, we can relieve the first time a horseshoe crab brushed by our ankles, or the armfuls of seashells we collected from the sand because each shell was something new. The beach is an interface between land and sea, yes, but also between the tourist-packed boardwalk and the unexplored. Once upon a time, an jelly would have been as uncanny to us as an anglerfish. But we welcomed this new encounter, still too young to be scared.

The hypermediated wildlife doesn’t scare us, then, but just steps away are unsettling visuals by Varvara Tokareva. In her installation Utopia, consisting of two walls of prints and three video screens, Tokareva deforms footage from the 1980 Moscow Olympics with AI, transforming the arena into waxy meshes of limbs. The athletes appear to stand on each others’ shoulders, wearing identical uniforms, skin-tight yet sexless. Upon close inspection, some appear to be melting into each other; some are missing heads.

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draft ends here.

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