I attended Stanford University in the turbulent times of the late 1960s. We did attack the institution for its complicity with the war in Vietnam; we did do some damage, but nothing as significant as the 1906 earthquake. Way back the early earthshaking days, Stanford was principally just the Quadrangle, and this part of the campus has remained much as it was from its inception. For me, it is the heart of the university.
As a humanities major—first philosophy and then English literature—I haunted the quad's inner sanctum. In those days, Philosophy Corner was diagonally across from the English Department which was next to Memorial Church. “Back in my day,” the Inner Quad was less tame—the grounds were gravelly, and the islands, mounds of growth. They have been replaced with polygon bricks and neat walls—but walking and photographing in the spring of 2009, I found it still had the same feel, the same spiritual earthiness I remember. The space still felt as if it cradled knowledge and incubated learning. On the days I photographed, that sense of being an enclosed space for academic introspection was enhanced by the blanket of gray clouds, and the rain that fell off and on imbued the feeling with sustenance.
In the collages I produced from my visit, I have tried to capture the sense of the place as having avenues—or maybe tunnels—of learning. There are many different directions and perspectives to follow. The space had few people in attendance—it was a weekend; yet, bicycles suggest that some students had entered into the buildings, into the process of learning.
As with all of my previous portfolios, I have tried to take another step of development with this one. I’m not sure if it is progress or not. But I am more aware of moving farther into the realm of collage. While I have “practiced” with combining different sequences in a single composition, in this work, I deliberately planned to do that for each piece. In fact, in the last pieces that I created for this portfolio, I laid out an under-layer of a repeating sequence, and then I built upon that, much like a painter lays down an undercoat of white.
Myron Filene
11/11/09