Gabriela Salazar

Artists throughout time have used nature as both inspiration and medium. This course will explore art about our human relationship to the environment through to the natural trajectory of art that engages with our current climate crisis. What role are artists and art institutions taking in helping raise public consciousness about issues like climate change? As cultural producers, what is the responsibility of artists to sustainability or to the environment? We will discuss the ramifications of these questions by examining some of the history of artists working in and with the environment and nature, through taking field trips to relevant art works and installations, through dialogue with practitioners in the field, and through some hands-on creative exercises in making art within these themes. Concurrently, individual research in a topic of interest will lead students to a final project where they will make/propose/analyze/curate an environmental art project of their own. No previous experience in studio arts classes is required but could be helpful.

Like the body, a sculpture is always somewhere. Movable or fixed, permanent or ephemeral, sculptural work is indivisible from the space in which it is experienced—a space that we, too, inhabit. Over the semester, students in this course will engage in progressively complex interactions with object, space, and site. Our first site will be a sheet of paper for “conversational” works with a partner. The course will end with students engaging in independently conceived interactions with a specific site (thinking of “site,” broadly, as the place where the work “resides”). Throughout, we will look at diverse examples of “installation” from throughout art history and a range of texts that take on the relationship of artist and site. And we will make at least one trip to museums and galleries in New York City. We will also discuss the process and possibilities of documentation (through photography, video, writing, and even speaking) as a part of the life and experience of the work.

“...[O]ur bodies are large collections of oscillating entities existing in an environment made largely of diverse populations of other oscillating identities,” posits the philosopher Manuel DeLanda in column #10, Matter Singing in Unison, of his “Matter Matters” series in Domus Magazine (2005). Within the scope of those oscillations, our physical surroundings and the material of our daily existence hold inherent resonance and association within and upon our memories and bodies. As artists, how can we learn to tap those often invisible vibrations that course through stuff? How can the materials that we use in our work be encouraged to speak their own realities and histories? And how do we deepen our understanding of material in order to amplify this effect or, even better, understand what is already there? This semester-long course will explore diverse strategies to mine this “invisible” information. Broad (and messy) experimentation, collaboration, readings, and creative research in the first part of the course will lead to the creation of a series of two- and three-dimensional works that use the inherent assets of material (both physical and psychological) to create new forms and meanings. Reassembling, repurposing, recombining, relocating, and deconstructing will be examined as process filters through which we can push materials to communicate their histories and properties. Regular group discussions and critiques will allow us to learn from our own experiments and those of others. Prior experience in visual art courses is helpful, though not required. Please bring examples of relevant work to the interview, and expectations of what you hope to gain from the course.