2026 Undergraduate Student Work Exhibition

Nathan Ringger - "This is Time"

This project, This is Time, is a durational performance exploring repetition, attention, and the passage of time. Over five weeks, I wrote the phrase “This is time” continuously by hand for 45 minutes, once a week at the same scheduled time. Each session followed strict rules: no phone, no music, no talking, and no breaks. The performance was documented with an overhead camera, creating time-lapse footage and a growing stack of handwritten pages. The process became less about the phrase itself and more about committing to time. Repetition shifted from mechanical to meditative, and small variations in handwriting, pace, and focus became more noticeable. The piece is influenced by various performers and thinkers who we learned about in Intro to Performance Studies.

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Stella Zhu - "Butterflies rest on their Fingertips"

The final project use fingertip art—nail design—to address the contemporary beauty labor of all genders. It will depict the various nail art choices made by people of different social classes and genders.This focuses on how people performatively present and think about their identities, selves, and social cognition in the face of social expectations. Through this project, I investigate how nail art serves as a social performance—a tiny, private platform that allows people to express their uniqueness, identity, and sense of belonging. It looks at beauty work as a performative reaction to social norms as well as a personal ritual. I connect with a NYU classmate to help out with the photography, John Monaco. He is into street photography, so we are both very confident with collabing on street. We successfully approach around 11 volunteers who agreed on collaborating with us, and got rejected by 2 people—one we had conversation and the other one just walk off. What we observed throughout the process is that people specifically women evenly distributed their interests in choosing extension/manicure/press on. What is so interesting about people’s choice; when women are choosing to wear press on or extension, their style of the day we can tell they put more effor. For example, one of the woman we interviewed and capture her hand with a Christmas vibe nail style, she is with full make up. Another example, a woman with extension on she is wearing Christmas hat, so very festive. Following Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire, each nail design can be seen as containing a “finger repertoire” — a lived, bodily archive of aesthetic and social meaning. And we see through the art inside of each nail that present festive element. One girl response to our question why this style? She response, “it is festive and also Another artist we capture at the washington square park was very interesting, he is usig a classic typer in the 60s maybe, like the very o.g. Style. What he is doing is typing and improvise poem for customers that is stopping at his station. When we go up and kindly request if we can capture his moment using his hand to type the poem he improvise the poem and type of apple shape of paper. He commented, “I am hispanic and my last name means apple in english” and he follows “why do you want to capture hand?” I explained “I observed in recent days, wo put alot of attention decorating our hand, like rings/nails” he respond backing saying“ I sometime hate my hand.” I mean, I don’t know what he really means, but after he said this he put on his ski gloves.

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