REVIEW: HVCC’s Multimedia Exhibition “How We Get Here”
02/06 - 03/01 @ Hudson Valley Community College
“Through video, poetry, graphic design, and other multimedia works, the exhibition transforms routine experiences into artistic expression.”
There’s an oddly artistic beauty in the mundane. Daily life's seemingly pointless and endless moments often hold the key to creativity, exploration, and expression. This is exactly what students from The Student Art League, Graphic Design Club, and Darkroom Club at Hudson Valley Community College aimed to showcase in their new multimedia exhibition, How We Get Here, on display in the Teaching Gallery of HVCC’s Administration Building through March 1st.
How We Get Here challenges artists and their audience to dive deeper into the everyday, exploring the often-overlooked nuances of commuting to campus, transforming routine travel into a subject of artistic reflection in order to find meaning in what often feels mindless. Coordinated by Student Art League members A.J. Robert and Sara-Anne Blackwell, the exhibition features a variety of artistic perspectives. Through video, poetry, graphic design, and other multimedia works, the exhibition transforms routine experiences into artistic expression.
One piece that I was pulled to was a short film called Liminal Highway by Blackwell herself. The film doesn’t follow a traditional storyline; instead, it throws you into a swirl of light, motion, and overlapping layers that feel like perception itself is glitching in real time. The film has some killer lines, but my personal favorite was, “What comfort it is to be moving, to be becoming, even if we don’t know where.”
Blackwell pieces together lights, shadows, and exciting visuals, bending time and space into something impermanent and hypnotic. “I wanted to invite disorientation, to embrace the ephemeral nature of visual experience,” she explains. And honestly? She nailed it. The film is mesmerizing, a little disorienting in the best way, and left me wanting to sit there and let it wash over me again. “What comfort it is to be moving…”
Thoughts, On Commute by Perci Denley, was another standout piece in the exhibition. A recorded poetry piece played over the radio, intimate, unfiltered, and pulling you straight into Denley’s thoughts as they navigate their route. The poem’s rhythm mirrors a stop-and-go commute—red lights, green lights, turns, and traffic not only interrupt their reflections but shape them. The brilliance of Thoughts, On Commute is how it captures the way our minds drift while driving, how mundane directions intertwine with deeper, more existential questions.
“Who am I without her? Turn left at the light. Who am I?” was one line that stuck with me. The transitions felt natural, even inevitable, as if the road itself was guiding the speaker through their thoughts.
Another line really resonated: “Maybe I should start over… Slow down...” The instruction could be about driving or about life itself – maybe both – but as the poem unfolds, the lines between action and reflection dissolve. The voice in the recording isn’t just navigating streets but navigating memory, loss, and identity. The commute becomes a metaphor for motion in all forms – physical, emotional, and philosophical. Maybe that’s the point. Movement is movement. To drive is to be in motion. To live is to be in motion. “Turn left at the light…”
Still King of The Mountain by Summer Brookover and Think Human by Erin Sweeney immediately grabbed my attention. These inkjet prints mimicked vintage Volkswagen ads, but a closer look revealed critiques of automobile culture, capitalism, and environmental destruction.
Brookover aims at how electric vehicles are marketed as a green solution while ignoring the environmental cost of lithium battery production, which, ironically, generates more greenhouse gases than gas-powered cars. And electricity is most definitely not infinite.
These cars still require power, which must come from somewhere. On top of that, they’re priced as a luxury, making sustainability something only the wealthy can afford.
“America seems to have this overreliance on the need for everyone to have a car. Instead, we should look into restructuring what our roads and towns look like so there is less reliance on vehicles in general,” Brookover says.
Sweeney’s Think Human calls Volkswagen out for shutting down German factories, outsourcing production to places with exploitative working conditions, and leaving thousands of workers jobless. “The car you’re looking at is a Volkswagen. Once it was a car built with pride and craftsmanship. Today it’s a vehicle produced by exploitation and greed,” Sweeney writes. “Unmade in Germany, Unmade with pride.”
Another piece that pulled me in was I Ride and I Ride by Harlough Dingman. It’s an enamel-on-aluminum diptych that looks like your standard accessibility sign, except it’s not. The familiar blue figure in a wheelchair is split across two panels, creating this cool sense of movement, like they’re rolling forward. Right in the center, colorful sound waves burst through, bringing the whole thing to life.
“I ride and I ride because I have no other choice,” Dingman writes. The waves reflect a moment in Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” when he sings, “I ride and I ride.” For Dingman, it’s about momentum, music in their ears, the world blurring past, until the van stops and a familiar face is waiting.
It’s clean, powerful, and full of meaning. There’s movement, music, and that in-between feeling of going somewhere but not quite being there yet. It turns a routine ride into something cinematic. “Because I have no other choice.”
Each of these works takes something familiar and transforms it into something unexpected. They challenge the way we see routine, how we move through the world, and what we take for granted. These pieces don’t just depict movement; they ask us to reconsider what it means to move. Through space, through life, through change.
The exhibition, open to the public, runs from February 6 to March 1. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; 1–7 p.m. on Wednesday; and noon – 4 p.m. on Saturday. For more information, visit www.hvcc.edu/teachinggallery.
Student leaders from each club played a crucial role in organizing the exhibition:
Student Art League Officers: Mathias Mojallali and Perci Denley (co-presidents), Iris Robert (secretary), and Meredith Bingham (treasurer).
Graphic Design Club Officers: Aujai Tomlinson (president), Summer Brookover (vice president), Aries Raphael (secretary), Jeanine Mahony and Erin Sweeney (co-treasurers).
Darkroom Club Officers: Ava DelVecchio (president), Estelle Ayotte (vice president), Marlowe Cilia (secretary), and Anthony G. Burt (treasurer).
The exhibition is supported by faculty advisors Assistant Professor Justin Baker (Darkroom Club), Assistant Professor Jason Kates Van Staveren (Graphic Design Club), and Professors Thomas Lail and Fracalossi (Student Art League).