Joseph Buckley

This course will explore the potential of figuration within contemporary sculptural practice. What can we achieve by incorporating a humanoid figure into our sculptural works? How far can the human form be pushed while remaining legible? Who controls and is invested in this legibility? What do histories of figuration have in common with objectification and dehumanization? And can we extract utility, today, from these dynamics? Alongside material demonstrations, lectures, readings, and critiques, we will investigate unpopular media in order to explore the work of contemporary artists alongside ideas and genres such as the uncanny valley, horror, science fiction, and more.

Once upon a time, sculptors struggled in their studios with wood and clay and felt and wire. They still do, of course, but now we have access to tools and technologies that until very recently were the preserve solely of science fiction. We can scan a physical object and remake it wholly and digitally, simulated within a digital modelling environment. Inversely, we can take an object that has only ever existed as series of digital coordinates and remake them as a singular physical, plastic object in the real world. Privileging the real, this course of study will explore and investigate these newly available strategies for artists working in sculpture. How are other artists, at the cutting edge, dealing with these technologies? What can we achieve when working with these new tools?

This course will explore the potential of figuration within contemporary sculptural practice. What can we achieve by incorporating a humanoid figure into our sculptural works? How far can the human form be pushed while remaining legible? Who controls and is invested in this legibility? What do histories of figuration have in common with objectification and dehumanization? And can we extract utility, today, from these dynamics? Alongside material demonstrations, lectures, readings, and critiques, we will investigate unpopular media in order to explore the work of contemporary artists alongside ideas and genres such as the uncanny valley, horror, science fiction, and more. 

This class will explore various methods and techniques for sculptural moldmaking, ranging from the traditional to the experimental. Alongside the technical development of skills and workflows, there will be a series of lectures, readings, and discussions wherein we tease out the conceptual, poetic, and psychic implications and potential of moldmaking in a radical and expanded sense. What does the mold represent as an object? Is it a tool or a work unto itself? How far can we stretch the definition of moldmaking? How widely can we apply its processes?

How have artists approached the object, materiality, texture, and thing-ness in video? How have systems and practices been articulated, elaborated, described, deconstructed, and torn apart on the screen? What does it mean to tackle this ugly dynamic through the language and sensibilities of art making as opposed to the formal languages of cinema or journalism? In this course we will closely observe seminal and semi-forgotten exemplars of these messy materialistic tendencies in video art. Based around screenings and discussions, the course will culminate in a public screening series of student works.

Taking the planning and design of an exhibition as its conceptual departure point, this class will come together to consider the role that sculpture might play in the near to long-term future. What do we, as artists, owe to a changing world? How will the structures in which we have invested change? What can we do to prepare? Working through contemporary, historical, speculative, and fantastic examples, we will explore and negotiate the roles, risks, and responsibilities of artmaking in a world that lurches endlessly and unrecognizably, with ever greater speed, from one extreme crisis to the next.