For the next few weeks starting Wednesday, an exhibit in the Flagg Building will cover its walls with photos of an unusual muse: knees.
The photographs of the bruised legs of GW athletes make up the exhibit “KNEES” by senior MC Daubendiek, a fine arts and art history double major, as part of the Luther Rice Undergraduate Research Fellowship, which provides research funding for Columbian College of Arts & Sciences students. Daubendiek said the exhibit, open on afternoons from Wednesday to Saturday until Oct. 1, examines examples of bodily wear and tear caused by athletics, a topic that resonated with her as a volleyball player at GW.
“In my art practice, I think a lot about the body, my body, other people’s bodies,” she said. “As an athlete, that’s especially true.”
Daubendiek said the knee photos are meant to turn the body parts into “formal objects” that reveal the damage that athletes’ bodies face. She said the exhibit seeks to harness art as a medium to help people understand college sports.
“I think I would want people to take away just a small, just a little bit more of a nugget of understanding of athletes and athletics,” she said.
Upon entering the exhibit, visitors are greeted on their left by a large, hot pink wall punctured by scrappy holes. A video of Daubendiek playing adjacent to the wall shows the artist punching holes in the wall with a dumbbell. Eleven neutral-toned square fabric prints of bruised knees line the perimeter of the room.
Daubendiek said she decided to center her exhibit around the athlete’s body because she has received many injuries and other “sports-related chronic issues” from playing volleyball, sparking an interest in how recovery from an injury impacts a person’s identity. She said she settled on knees as the focus of her exhibit because scars and scabs on the joints can resemble a history of people’s injuries.
“My sport is my job, and that job comes with certain levels of risk, ranging from a scraped elbow to broken bones,” Daubendiek said in a text. “Through examining my own body, and then expanding that to looking at the athletes around me, I noticed that knees are a locus for visible injury and healed scars and present a sort of object history. They act like a fingerprint or a portrait.”
Daubendiek said she pursued the exhibit via the Luther Rice Fellowship because putting together art projects like “KNEES” can be expensive. She said she received $5,000 through the fellowship, which she used to buy cameras and support herself over the summer.
Applying for the fellowship carried a bit of Daubendiek’s eventual exhibit theme: injuries. She said she got hit in the head during a volleyball game and wrote her funding proposal “incredibly concussed.”
Daubendiek said her research process included thematic work to flesh out the concept of the piece and material work to bring her ideas to life. She said part of the process included interviewing GW student-athletes about what they would say if they had “a soapbox” to discuss collegiate athletics. These interviews didn’t initially give her the results she hoped for because she didn’t find a common experience between the athletes’ stories, she said.
“I realized I was approaching this all wrong, because everyone’s story and everyone’s experience is different,” she said. “I was digging for some common thread. And the common thread is that we’re all just geographically here. There is almost nothing else that is exactly the same between two different college athletes.”
She said she also experimented with different tools to integrate sports into the creation of the art — though maybe not the materials one expects to find in an art studio, as she worked with athletic equipment like dumbbells to create the video aspect of the exhibit.
“I was casting dumbbells, I was making wrappings with athletic tape of different parts of my body, I was cutting up gear and embroidering shoes,” she said.
She said all her time playing volleyball at GW has been filmed, but taking videos of herself hammering for the exhibit allowed her to review her performance in an artistic setting, like how she reviews tapes of volleyball practice.
“Volleyball, there’s kind of nothing you can do by yourself,” she said. “And so I think this performance element is almost the antithesis of all of that.”
“KNEES” is on display in the Flagg Building 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday until Oct. 1. A reception will be held for the exhibit 8:30 to 10 p.m. Thursday.
