Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A studio course presenting topics in art-making practices as they relate to practical, conceptual, aesthetic and historical issues in contemporary art. This course may be taken more than once for credit under a different topic.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course looks at ideas and approaches concerning both pictures and words in contemporary art. What are the individual conditions of pictures and words as separate categories of phenomena? What contexts do they share? While this course is premised on pictures and words in relation to one another based on a presumed similarity, our work in this course will look at pictures and words as distorted versions of one another with varied impacts on readers and viewers.

Materially, this course will look at the wide range of outputs available to produce pictures and words from the conventionally artistic, such as paintings, photographs and books, to the products of consumer culture, such as mugs, puzzles, rugs and advertisements. Of particular interest to us will be the use of text within exhibition spaces and how these texts produce an image of authority. Viewers in exhibitions often orient themselves to texts before works, and are likely to spend more time with the words than the works themselves.

Using various cost effective production methods, students will produce studies and works about both pictures and words. It is expected that each student will research a production service of interest to the class topic and make a work using this service. This will result in a class resource about production services that will be made available to students at 611. This will require students are capable of doing fairly simple work in image and text editing software and that they can prepare files for technicians who will produce the materials according to student specifications.

Students will take their experiences from this process, and the knowledge they have learned from one another, and create two projects for critique. These works will be in traditional artistic media such as painting, photography, or printmaking, or they will be in contemporary media using varied materials and digital outputs such as video, sublimated printing, direct to film printing, or plotter cut vinyl, in addition to many other options.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

• Growth and development over the course of the semester

• Resourcefulness (thoughtful and inventive problem solving)

• Tenacity (especially the ability to pull oneself out of a place of disappointment with a stage in the process and move on to a place of interest)

• Collaborative skills (using the classroom as a community of peers as part of problem solving and knowledge development

• Ability to keep up with projects by working outside of class when necessary.

• Timely completion of studio project and other assignments

• Proper handling of studio tools, equipment

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Students will be expected to possess general tools for use in a studio environment. Some are available though these are limited. Materials are assessed on a project to project bases and students are responsible for the purchase of any material that may be needed for the completion of any project.

REQUIRED READING NOTES: