Trails

Type: Art Installation

Role: Project Manager, The Kefi Project

Client: The Senior Class Fund, English Major Association

Location: Nashville, TN

Status: Completed, February 2014

Awards: 

Project Details

Changing the path most traveled - It's easy to fall into the easy redundancy of your daily path and forget the environment that exists around you. For our fourth installation we wanted to change these familiar settings and take the Vanderbilt campus user along a trail. The installment is composed of three trails that traverses distinct pathways around Vanderbilt. Each Trail contains signs with their own overarching theme. Though the signs themselves range from the silly to the serious, all of the paths together serve to highlight the parallels we as a community share in place, feeling, and time of life.

The Three Trails

Path(Way to Give Back):  Stretching from the freshman to Main Campus, the trail in the spirit of giving back to their university, the graduating Class of 2014 looks back on the myriad of lessons they’ve learned over the past four years and shares their wisdom with Vanderbilt’s First Year Students. 

A Poet's Path: Considered a key figure in both New Narrative and New Formalism, the trail features the poems “A.M. Fog” and "Ground Swell" by Centennial Professor of English and distinguished author Mark Jarman. The pathway runs from Main Campus toward Highland Quad. 

Squirrel Crossings: Placed within Vanderbilt's Main Campus, Squirrel Crossings is an assortment of signs with interesting fact relevant to the typical campus user. 

Path(Way to Give Back):

- advice from Vanderbilt seniors to Freshman

Don't listen to "I'll sleep when I'm dead" or you may be sooner that you think. Sleep is essential. Pencil it in.

Go to organization meetings and events with free food. You may discover your deepest passion. At the very least, youʼll get a meal.

Don't do something because everyone else is doing it. Remember to be yourself.

You can skip a weekend of partying and not miss anything.

In the words of George Carlin: “Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things”

Don't freak out every time you get an email about the newest epidemic going around school. Lice, chlymidia, mono - there's always something.

Don't be afraid to be weird. I guarantee you that EVERYONE here is a huge nerd in some way or another -- they wouldn't be here otherwise.

Even when you're stressed the most, go to dinner with other people instead of making a quick munchie mart run. It'll take you 30 extra minutes and you'll leave knowing that there are a lot more important things in life than your grade in chem or on your next English paper.

Meet the most people you can at any opportunity, whether it be at a social event, within your classes, or in your extracurricular involvement, and maintain those friendships for the rest of your college career and life. It will benefit you in many ways, even unexpectedly!

A Poet's Path:

- "A.M. Fog" by Mark Jarman

Night’s afterbirth, last dream before waking,   
Holding on with dissolving hands,
Out of it came, not a line of old men,
But pairs of headlights, delaying morning.

It felt like tears, like wetted bedsheets,   
And suspended in it like a medicine
In vapor was the ocean’s presence, ghost   
Of deep water and the bite of salt.

Here you found your body again,
The hand before your face and the face it touched,   
Eyes floating, feet on invisible ground,
Vagueness like another skin.

Sent out into it anyway, because it was morning,   
To taste it, touch blind hardness
Like marble ruins, and skirt the edges,
Razors in goosedown, hydrants’ fists.

Abruptly out of it waves appeared,   
Transmuted from hanging silver ore, crafted   
Before the eyes into curving metals
That broke into soup scum, Queen Anne’s lace.

Out of a great nothing, a theology.
Out of the amorphous, an edgeless body   
Or one like a hunting mass of tendrils
That hurried down the sand, moved by hunger.

I remember a gang of friends
Racing a fog bank’s onslaught along the beach.   
Seal-slick, warm from the sun
This thing would eat, they ran laughing.

The fog came on. And they were beautiful,
The three boys and one girl, still in her wetsuit,   
And the dissolution overtaking them,
Their stridency, full of faith, still audible.

All morning bathed in a dovelike brooding.   
The fog satisfied itself by overwhelming
The meagre dew, watering the doors   
0f snails, the leeward mold, and held still.

And then near noon there was a concentration
As if the sky tried to find a slippery word   
Or remember—that’s right—remember
Where it was in an unfamiliar bedroom.

And knew. And switched the light on. Wide awake.

- "A.M. Fog" by Mark Jarman

- advice from Vanderbilt seniors