Material Worlds, Spring 2007

California College of the Arts
“Object Agents: Contemporary Sculpture and the Social Life of Objects”
Spring 2007 Lecture Series
curated by Stephanie Syjuco in conjunction with the Graduate Seminar class “Material Worlds”

Sponsored by the Graduate Fine Arts Program.
With additional support from the Textile Program and Ceramic Program.

What does it mean to be an object maker in a world already glutted with object-products? How does the mechanical or mass production of object-products inform or create friction against the intimately handmade? If the “dematerialization” of the art object has resulted in new forms of social practice and conceptual strategies, can focusing attention back onto “things” create new and vigorous dialogues on place, circulation, economic and cultural globalization, and the very act of making? From sculpture and installation works, craft-based investigations, to utilitarian objects and large scale public projects, this cross-disciplinary lecture series focuses on artists and thinkers attempting to deal with “active” objects and their potential for social and metaphoric agency.

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INVITED SPEAKERS
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TAVARES STRACHAN
Tuesday, January 16, 7pm, Timken lecture hall
Presented in conjunction with The Luggage Store Gallery

http://www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/strachant.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/02/DDGD8MN9S21.DTL
http://www.luggagestoregallery.org/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/

Tavares Strachan’s sculpture and installations address issues of place, migration and home, virtual reality and myth, as well as alludes to early 60s conceptual works.

His exhibition “Where We Are Is Always Miles Away,” at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco was an ambitious project involving the transport of a hermetically sealed 6’ x 6’ portion of New Haven, Connecticut into the gallery’s 2nd floor. His “Arctic Ice Project—The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want,” involved extracting a 4000 pound piece of ice from an Alaskan River and shipping it to Nassau, Bahamas in a refrigerated container. From there, it was exhibited in a glass vitrine and kept frozen using solar energy.

Strachan is originally from Nassau, Bahamas, and holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been exhibited at the CAC in Cincinnati, SAFN Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland, Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn, and Ronald Feldman Gallery in NYC, among other venues. He lives and works in New York.

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LIBBY BLACK
Thursday, February 1, 7pm, GC1 (graduate building), San Francisco campus

http://blog.stayfreemagazine.org/2005/09/interview_with_.html

Known for her handmade paper replications of prized consumer goods such as Hermes Hustler King Roller Skates and Louis Vuitton luggage, Black has co-opted symbols of consumerism and style by focusing her imagery on pet objects such as the Hummer, a Chanel surfboard, and a custom Burberry Skateboard with Powell-Peralta emblem. Mixing high style with low-end materials, she created a doppelganger Kate Spade store within the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for Bay Area Now 4, and opened up her own handmade Louis Vuitton boutique at Manolo Garcia Gallery in San Francisco. Part consumerist critique and part loving homage to “the good life,” Black’s drawings and paper sculptures reference fleeting wants and objects of desire that, in the end, are just objects.

Libby Black was born in Toledo, Ohio, and raised in Plano, Texas. She received her BFA in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1994, and MFA in painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1999. Black has shown her work in the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, as well as at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, Manolo Garcia Gallery, Gallery 16, Spanganga, Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles, and is represented by Heather Marx Gallery, San Francisco.

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SIMON STARLING
Tuesday, February 13, 7pm, Timken lecture hall
Presented in conjunction with the Graduate Fine Arts Program

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize/2005/simonstarling.htm

Based in Copenhagen and Glasgow, Simon Starling is a consistently interesting, inventive, and incisive working artist. Starling’s practice involves reframing, reconfiguring, or remaking objects with profound attention to both the context and consequences of this process. For “Tabernas Desert Run,” Starling built a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered bicycle and rode it across Spain’s Tabernas Desert in an eco-friendly homage to Chris Burden’s infamous motorbike trip across Death Valley. He then used water produced from the fuel cell to make a watercolor of an Opuntia cactus, a species introduced into the Tabernas from Death Valley.

Starling has presented solo exhibitions at Neugerriemschneider in Berlin and the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, among other venues, and was the recipient of the 2005 Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious award for contemporary art.

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JOSIAH MCELHENY
Tuesday, February 20, 7pm, Timken lecture hall
Presented in conjunction with the Graduate Fine Arts Program

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/mcelheny/index.html
http://www.albrightknox.org/acquisitions/acq_2003/McElheny.html

Sculptor and glassblower Josiah McElheny invents complex new works of art that engage both eye and mind. “An End to Modernity” (2005), for example, consists of a 12-foot-wide by 10-foot-high chandelier that links modernist design and the Big Bang theory. Other work juxtaposes Roman Imperial glass, 20th-century fashion, 16th-century Italian painting, and the designs of Adolf Loos.

McElheny graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and was an apprentice to master glassblowers Jan Erik Ritzman, Sven-Ake Carlsson, and Lino Tagliapietra. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. McElheny received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006.

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JACOB DAHLGREN
Wednesday, February 28, 7pm, Timken lecture hall

http://www.jacobdahlgren.com

A 10-foot high “endless column” of stacked IKEA coat hangers ; a checkered floor of bathroom scales; a vast wall of dartboards creating an optical pattern: Jacob Dahlgren makes fun, ambiguous objects, often from found materials, that echo the masterpieces of modernism but “give randomness, mass production and play” precedence over their highbrow origins. Drawing on both high art and pop culture, his varied work creates spaces for interaction–a lifelong collection of striped t-shirts forms the basis of his hard-edge paintings; items from discount stores supply the raw material for his sculpture; his installations have been used as playgrounds for pre-teens hopped up on sugar.

Born in 1970, Dahlgren lives and works in Sweden, and has shown in galleries and museums across Scandinavia and northern Europe, and was included in the PS1 exhibition “Altered, Stitched and Gathered,” in 2006.

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ANNA VON MERTENS
Thursday, March 15, 7pm, GC1, San Francisco campus

http://www.annavonmertens.com

Anna Von Mertens uses hand-stitching to translate the external to the personal, to see information from a different perspective, in a different timeframe. Her most recent body of work documents the star rotation patterns above violent moments in American history, each piece acting as a memorial, as a means to experience a moment in history from a specific point of view, but ultimately simply showing an impassive natural cycle that is oblivious to the violence below. Previous work uses mapping systems and the site of the bed with the traditional medium of quilts as a kind of orientation marker: bird migration patterns, ocean floor topography, energy dispersion patterns of a nuclear explosion, all build a set of reference points to create a whole.

Von Mertens has had solo exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum; University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach; Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco; Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles; and the University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara. and has been included in shows at the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York; White Box, New York; Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Long Island City, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She received her BA from Brown University in 1995 and her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2000.

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MAREK CECULA
Thursday, March 29, 7pm, Timken lecture hall
Presented in conjunction with the Ceramic Program

http://www.marekcecula.com/
http://www.modusdesign.com/

Equally at home in the arenas of gallery bound visual art, mass produced industrial design, and hand crafted functional ceramics, sculptor, designer and educator Marek Cecula investigates the role that ceramic objects play in contemporary society. Updating ceramic practice from past notions of earthen bound craft into its current relevance of ever-present industrial material he asks us to question not only the objects around us, but how they function in our material culture.

Born in Poland in 1944, Cecula currently lives and works in both New York City and Poland. From 1985 to 2004 he was Head of Ceramics at Parsons School of Design in New York City and is currently teaching at the Bergen National Academ?y of the Arts in Norway. He is represented by Garth Clark Gallery in New York and his work is produced by Modus Designs. He is collected by museums in the US, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands and he is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany fellowship

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JOHN ROLOFF
Wednesday, April 4, 7pm, Timken lecture hall

From a recent artificial environment beneath a freeway in Seattle that resurrects the local climate before the freeway was built, to an architectural “performance space for nature, between two open windows in Venice Italy, a collaborative environmental project using frozen designer waters in the sea ice off Kemi, Finland and large-scale outdoor kilns of the 1970’s-90’s engaged with the interface between geology and ceramics, John Roloff is a visual artist who has worked conceptually with site, process and natural systems for over 25 years. Based on a background in science, his work engages poetic and site-specific relationships between material, concept and performance in the domains of geology, ecology, architecture, ceramics, industry and mining, metabolic systems and history.

Before becoming an artist, Roloff studied geology with Professor Eldridge Moores and others during the formative days of plate tectonics in the mid-1960’s, he has staged solo exhibition and projects in the US, Canada and Europe, and is currently Chair of the Sculpture Department the San Francisco Art Institute. More information at: www.johnroloff.com.

http://www.johnroloff.com/recent_proj_page.html
http://greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-52.html

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SONYA CLARK
Tuesday, April 17, 7pm, Timken lecture hall
Presented in conjunction with the Textile Program

http://www.mmoca.org/mmocacollects/artist_page.php?id=6
http://www.beadedprayersproject.com/
http://www.giganticartspace.com/artist.html?id=113883731571896298&ex=21&from=artificialafrika

Sonya Clark is an internationally known artist working with materials such as combs, beads, hair, thread, copper and cloth. Sensitive to the “meaning in the material,” Clark carefully crafts works that suggest cultural, historical, political and poetically charged narratives. Her work has been exhibited in venues in the UK, Brazil, South Africa, Canada, Taiwan, Austria, Australia and throughout the USA in museums such as the Newark Museum of Art, UCLA Fowler Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art and the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Clark is currently chair of the Craft/Material Studies Department at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond Virginia.

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PANEL DISCUSSION
Wednesday, April 25, 7pm, Timken lecture hall

*PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED!

Jennifer Marshall, Assistant Professor, Art History Dept., Stanford University
Jennifer Marshall’s research focuses on issues of materiality and modernity in early twentieth-century American art and aesthetics. In projects devoted to the role of ordinary things in modern museum display and the critical reception of American sculpture during the interwar period, her abiding concern has been to investigate how three-dimensional objects serve either to fix or destabilize the emerging social relations of industrial mechanization. Her dissertation, “The Stuff of Modern Life: Materiality and Thingness in the Museum of Modern Art’s Machine Art Show, 1934,” offers a critical history of this landmark exhibit, explaining how the display of three-dimensional objects ventured a concrete foundation for understanding modern formal abstraction.

At Stanford, Professor Marshall has developed a series of courses related to American art and culture in the early twentieth century. In addition to a survey of artistic practices in the United States from 1900-1945, her other courses include, “The Harlem Renaissance,” “Regionalism in the American Imagination,” and “Material Culture Studies: Theories and Methodologies.” Jennifer Marshall completed her Masters and Ph.D. in the Art History Department at UCLA in 2005.

Steven Wolf, art dealer and gallerist, San Francisco
http://www.stevenwolffinearts.com