Works
Comfort (Metal, fabric, safety pins)
Associations (Sound art/installation)
Chairs are set up in a circle with speakers on two opposite sides. The audience is invited to sit, with one empty chair for the artist. The artist issues instructions from the center of the circle:
The audience will close their eyes and listen.
They will call out words that they associate with the sounds they hear, at any volume they wish.
If they like what someone else suggests, they will repeat the word verbally.
After reading the instructions and making sure everyone’s eyes are closed, the artist takes their seat in the circle and begins the audio.
Value my brain (Fabric, Arduino, LED lights)
Collaboration with Lawrence Castillo, featured in KOllision Fashion Show, 2019
favela (intaglio, watercolor) and empty hunter (intaglio)
featured in Activating the Urban Campus exhibition at Hunter College, 2018
Confrontation (digital photography)
Printer (video)
The Altered Sign (digital photography)
Beauty Standards (digital photography)
Process (Experiments)
Sculpture
Painting
Zines/Poetry
Printmaking
Collage
Self (About)
Vanessa Sun is currently doing a lot of soul-searching about her art practice.
She primarily create performances, installations, sculptures, zines, and poems/short memoirs, although some of these mediums are difficult to work with or paused due to her COVID precautions.
Current themes in her artwork highlight both a condemnation of the academic systems that inflicted pain upon me while studying mathematics as an undergraduate and celebrate the rich mathematical culture and community that has uplifted me. The duality of these two opposing motifs illustrate an internal struggle of loss, shame, and abandonment, that eventually give way to the beginnings of a rediscovering of joy and healing, still wrought with sadness and longing for what once was. These works seek to disrupt mathematics spaces and she positions herself to confront mathematicians in a very in-your-face fashion. There is no advice she imparts to mathematicians in these dialogues— she only wishes to highlight her anguish, asking them to face her, to feel what students have to go through, and to truly see her in the spaces where she once felt invisible.
She also working on creating works by following artist scores/instructions, particularly Yoko Ono’s grapefruit and creating videos that document the journey.
Vanessa has worked with film photography, printmaking (intaglio etching), graphic design, interactive installations, video, wood and metal sculpture, oil and watercolor painting, drawing (her favorite medium for drawing is charcoal), physical computing, and digital illustration. Her artwork was displayed at Hunter College for the Activating the Urban Campus project and at the Sweet Flypaper Gallery.
She is also a poet and self-published a poetry zine called Ale at 17. She had a poem published in Teen Ink.
During exhibits/critiques
With artists at Hunter College
Guerrilla Girls costume during a painting class held on Halloween night
While creating
