Global Arc

Photography has evolved under changing socio-political climates, technologies, and market pressures, and artists using photography today continue to address their interests and concerns using formal innovations. The medium reminds the viewer that representation itself is unstable. How can artists who use photography address broader societal concerns in a way that honors the poetics of the medium, while that medium has a troubled relationship to the record? This course will coincide with a fall symposium and exhibition. Class discussions, creating photographs, and visits with working artists will expand approaches to the medium.

This course focuses on the variety of ways filmmakers have imagined and represented the relationship between the virtual space of screens (primarily in the cinema but also on devices and in the art gallery) and the physical places we encounter in our daily lives. How do various approaches to the creation of moving images reconfigure our ideas about natural landscapes, cityscapes, geography, architecture, home, outer space, and the screen itself? Students will produce a series of three videos (5 to 10 minutes each) engaging various conceptions of place for the space of the screen.

In Alternative Fictions students will analyze and produce films that challenge preconceived notions of storytelling, character development, preformatted structures, and the division between documentary and fiction filmmaking. The course merges conceptual ideas and practical hands-on instruction to foster the successful development of three group exercises and one individual project. Classes include theoretical discussions, equipment demonstrations, in-class exercises, film screenings, and presentations with critical feedback of assignments.

Through a series of short exercises students will learn the craft, history and theory of alternative modes in documentary filmmaking. We will emphasize experimentation with various formal strategies to probe the impulse to engage the "real". Topics in this course will include portraits, interviews, ethnography, space and place, narrativity, personal film, re-enactments and performance. Students will be encouraged to draw unexpected connections and use experimental approaches in their aesthetic pursuits.

Create your own unique books! An experimental book making class that correlates texts and books into sculptural form. Students will acquire skills of various bookmaking techniques, enhance their writing skills, and focus on sculptural craft with different mediums to think beyond traditional binding methods. We will learn about various artists that include bookmaking as part of their practices, the artist's book organizations, independent publishers and book fairs. Guest visits and field trips to book art spaces will support in expanding the possibilities of bookmaking.

This course will examine the relationship between the carceral apparatus, i.e. the matrix of police, prisons, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, etc., and the commercial/industrial cinematic apparatus which has historically valorized and naturalized hegemonic constructions of crime and punishment for popular consumption. Instruction will consider paradigms of crime, policing, prisons, resistance, rebellion and abolition in relation to questions of innocence and guilt, racialized criminality, property relations and the potential for a socially transformative cinema.

This intermediate-level studio course will build on the foundations of animation covered in Animation I. Students will investigate a wider range of techniques and technologies, while experimenting with varied modes of audiovisual storytelling, time-based collage, and motion graphics. For the final project, each student will direct a short film using a blend of analog and digital materials and tools, explored during the semester. Screenings and class discussions will dive more deeply into the history and potential of animation, as well as its connections to other forms of visual art, filmmaking, computation, and design.

Students will investigate ceramics in relation to the archive through numerous studio-based projects, museum visits, historical precedents, and understanding contemporary ceramics as a serious artistic pursuit. Ceramics serves as an ideal archival material and therefore has been a record of time and place over thousands of years. Students will research source material from the history of ceramics, and by creating their own personal archives. Student projects include analysis of bricks as universal symbols of the grid, image in ceramics, ornament and narrative in historical vessels, and using clay as a meaningful record of the body.

Students will create objects inspired by nature and its encompassing myths through learning sculptural techniques and forms. Studying sacred sites, paranormal locations, plants, formations of canyons, and more - students will learn from ancient narratives to present and future topographies. Artworks made will reflect in unique inquiry and stewardship of natural surroundings thinking critically and poetically about the relationship to land, water and the environment. Students will learn tools in the woodshop and basic metal work. Guest artist visits and field trips will support in expanding ideas in relation to art, myths, and nature.

This interdisciplinary studio class will explore the deployment of beauty across a range of disciplines, using the flower as our guiding symbol. The flower is an image often cited as universal, but slippery in its meanings and interpretations in practice. Tracing the image and material use of flowers in poetry, sculpture, performance, and political movements through a series of critiques, in-class experiments, lecturers from visiting artists, and field trips, we will consider how to wield beauty intentionally, incisively, and effectively--and what we can learn from failures to do so.