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Freeze!: Material Cultures of Movement Main Menu Start the Journey A Guided Tour News and Events Bibliographies and Further Readings Acknowledgments

Make Your Own Moves

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Freeze!: Material Cultures of Movement Yusi Liu
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Start the Journey Yusi Liu
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Freeze!: Material Cultures of Movement Yusi Liu
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Eadweard Muybridge, Plate 617. Nude man riding white horse from series Animal Locomotion A nude rider sits calmly on a jogging grey horse, whose legs churn as its mane lifts and settles in the breeze. Rather than a single image of a horseback ride, this plate contains twelve photographs, taken seconds apart.   Eadweard Muybridge’s “Animal Locomotion” series, produced in Philadelphia, contains hundreds of similar photographic sequences, showing people and animals engaging in ordinary activities in front of the gridded backdrop of Muybridge’s outdoor studio. These experiments, which have fascinated artists and scientists alike, relied on new photographic technologies like faster shutter speeds, which provided clearer action shots. They offered their original viewers fresh insight into the mechanics of motion.
"Nike Tying her Sandal," Relief from Balustrade, Athena Nike Temple, no. 973, Acropolis Museum, Athens The face of Nike, the victory goddess, is lost to damage, but her rippling gown and lifted foot seem to pop off the surface of this print. Resting her weight on her left foot, she bends down and reaches out adjust her sandal.   This slab from the Temple of Athena Nike on the Athenian Acropolis was found in 1835 —just four years before the official invention of photography. Artists have imitated Nike's momentary pose for millennia, and this object relies on a long process of reproduction and translation. Platinum, used in the printing process, lends shimmer and depth to the two-dimensional image, suggesting the weight and presence of the goddess.
George F. Morgan, Annular Eclipse This composite image captures multiple stages of a solar eclipse. It documents the path of the sun across the sky and the movement of the moon in front of the sun. Haverford astronomy professor Karen Masters observed that the skyline looks strikingly like Cornell University’s clock tower and Sage Chapel. A Cornell lecturer recently confirmed that the photo shows a 1925 solar eclipse seen from Ithaca, NY. How the photograph moved from Ithaca to Haverford is a mystery. However, its subject and history reflect an effort to situate human experience in relation to the motion of the solar system.
Maurice Seymour, Publicity Portrait of Kathryn Lee for Allegro For all its dramatic composure and control, the pose of Broadway actress and dancer Kathryn Lee must have been brief. Balanced on point, arms outswept to mirror the extension of her leg, this photograph holds her in a fleeting moment of grace and balance. The photographer, Maurice Seymour, once wrote that, “When the camera catches the dancer before the movement reaches its climactic pose, the picture is likely to be pointless.” Seymour was not interested in the mechanics of motion, but in capturing finished and expressive bodily lines. He thought these lines, punctuated by the shape of the costume, told the truest story of the dance.
Akala (Tire Sandals) Shoes may be functional, but they can also express a person’s personal style and socio-cultural domain. Akala are Kenyan sandals made from recycled materials. While designs from smaller villages are often plain, shoes made and sold in larger communities tend to be more elaborate, with colorful beads, bigger tacks, and thicker treads.  The soles of these sandals are made of rubber tire cuttings, and the straps of flexible tire ropes. These repurposed materials, first used as wheels, then as shoes, have helped people move from place to place.
Harold Eugene Edgerton, Diver A diver in a hot pink swimsuit soars above a shaking board, then plunges into the water below. His form is taut and disciplined, but his expression shows first the strain of the jump and then the breathless wonder of his brief flight.  Harold “Doc” Edgerton was a professor of electrical engineering at MIT. He captured this image using stroboscopic technology, which generates multiple, high-speed flashes of light within the time of a single shutter opening. In a darkened setting, the flashes illuminate a series of actions, which are imprinted on one piece of film. Here, Edgerton uses cutting-edge technology, not simply to further scientific knowledge, but to frame moments of ecstasy and inevitability.
Reproduction Mycenaean Seal Ring Two horses race over the surface of this seal ring, pulling a chariot. The front figure in the chariot leans forward eagerly, drawing an arrow across his bow. The target, a frightened stag, looks back as it flees. The hunting scene is frozen mid-action like a candid snapshot.       This 20th-century brass replica captures a slice of aristocratic life from 1400 BCE Mycenae. The original ring would have been used as a stamp indicating ownership, authority, or personal responsibility in administrative and business transactions, pressed into clay documents to track the movement of products and records from one party to another.
George Vaux X, Collection of 24 Travel Photographs Two mounted cowboys thunder alongside a horned steer. Hooves pound the dust as one rider lunges to capture the running animal. This rodeo photograph captures an aspect of the cowboy culture associated with American westward migration. It is also a vacation photograph and part of a collection of snapshots, featuring smiling hikers and stunning vistas, which documents an East Coast family’s journey into the mythic Wild West. The photo’s dynamic depiction of the stereotypical American rodeo reflects the nationwide fascination with the western part of the continent as a wild and unexplored land of adventure and opportunity. However, the United States’ increasing westward sprawl, driven by the fantasy of Manifest Destiny, often threatened the indigenous peoples who already lived in these spaces.
Freeze Exhibition Graphics Collage A
Babylonian Cylinder Seal On this small, stone cylinder, a seated figure raises one hand, acknowledging the smiling crescent moon that hovers above. But that’s only part of the picture. To discover the rest of the scene, you must roll the seal out onto a soft surface, like clay. Two more figures emerge, standing to the left, their edges blurred. On either side, vertical lines of cuneiform text frame the scene. The picture probably depicts the presentation of worshippers to a god, a common scene for seals like this, which would’ve been rolled across clay to mark important transactions. Like the zoetrope, cylinder seals require motion to make their imagery fully visible.
Sue Lewin Posed on two crates in the artist’s studio, the model Sue Lewin leans all the way forward, as though adjusting her right shoe. However, Lewin is barefoot. Clad in tunic and tights, she is posing for a study that Maxfield Parrish would later use in a mural that he painted for Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Long Island studio. Parrish used glass positives like this one to project images onto the spaces he was going to paint. He could then trace or edit the projections, moving them around and incorporating them into larger paintings. Lewin’s pose recalls a famous carving from a temple on the Athenian Acropolis that shows the goddess Nike adjusting her sandal.
Casket with Morris Dance and Maid Marian On the top of this “casket,” six figures, rendered in bold, energetic lines, perform a moresca dance, a predecessor of a traditional English folk entertainment called Morris dancing. Although the object looks like a functioning box, it is a fictile ivory, or plaster cast, modeled after a medieval casket in the collections of the Louvre Museum.     In addition to its solid plaster latch and lock, the cast has a hollow bottom. Its model is one of several fifteenth-century ivory and bone boxes decorated with similar images of courtly leisure. Although the parts of this object do not move independently, its form and imagery attest to a long history of visual and material translation.
Zoetrope Drum This metal zoetrope drum may not look like much on the outside, but if you were to peer through its slits, the still images in the inner reel combine, like a modern GIF, into an illusion of repeating motion, bringing the scenes to life with each revolution.      Invented around 1833, zoetropes became popular as toys several decades later. Their reels show a wide range of activities, from dancing, to acrobatics, to swimming. They were made as light-hearted objects of play, but the imagery on some reels, including some of those in Bryn Mawr’s Collection, preserves antiquated and harmful biases.
2021 GIF rendered by Mallory Fitzpatrick after an original from ca. 500 BCE - ca. 475 BCE (BMC P.95)
Attic Red-Figure Plate with Kottabos Scene On this red-figure plate, a kottabos player prepares to fling the dregs from his kylix, or wine-cup. Kottabos was a game frequently played at Greek symposia, or drinking parties. Though we can’t be entirely sure how the game was played, there seem to be at least two common variants. In both the players flick their wine dregs hoping to either knock a bronze disc off a stand or to sink small dishes floating in a basin. Winners often got to claim a special prize. This plate is one of Bryn Mawr’s most famous collection pieces and even gave the Bryn Mawr Painter his name. Perhaps it was even used at a symposium like the one it depicts. It only seemed fair to include it in ours! With a little help from modern technology, we can even bring the player into motion to help imagine what a kottabos game may have looked like.
Ivory Sculpture of Three Rabbits Taking Dumplings to the Rabbit in the Moon Three delicate, red-eyed rabbits ferry pastries to the mythical rabbit in the moon. In Japanese legend, the man in the moon came to earth disguised as a beggar and asked several animals for food. Sad that he could only offer grass, the rabbit threw himself onto a fire to be cooked. The beggar, awed by this sacrifice, revealed his identity and took the rabbit back to the moon. Legend holds the rabbit still appears there, pounding mochi, or Japanese rice cakes, at each full moon. Versions of the story appear in the art, myth, and ritual of several Asian cultures, framing celestial movements as fables.
Cowry Shell Coins
Freeze Exhibition Poster
Freeze Exhbition Graphics Collage B
BMC 13th Biennial Symposium Poster
2022 GIF rendered by Mallory Fitzpatrick after an original from 1887 (HC2016-403_3)
SEPTA Token
Tourmaline and Malachite from the Bryn Mawr Vaux Collection These minerals formed through the movements of naturally occurring elements. The pink and green tourmaline is a cross-section of a larger crystal, formed as magma slowly cooled, depositing layers of crystal enriched in different color-causing elements, like manganese, lithium, sodium, iron, or calcium. The bright green malachite, a byproduct of copper oxidation, comes in many different morphologies. Most malachite crystallizes and “grows,” moving steadily up and out from a central starting place. These specimens, mined in Arizona, are from the collection of George Vaux, Jr. (1863–1927, HC 1984). An enthusiastic amateur geologist, his diaries vividly describe the activities of hot springs, geysers, and other natural formations. Collaborations between the Geology Department and Special Collections already underway aim to research the provenance of the College’s Rock and Mineral Collections, in order to better understand the historical power dynamics that shaped the mining and collecting of these specimens. Students can participate in this work next fall as part of a 360° course cluster, “Minerals, Museums, and Western Colonialism.”