Posts from — April 2009

July 13, 2008 (2008) inkjet print

Alexandra Silverthorne is an artist who uses the camera as a means to understand and explore space.  As a project evolves, the photographs often move beyond the mat and the frame and into sculptural objects, projections, and installations.  Current projects include the examination of discarded objects as a means of communication in urban public space as well as late night explorations of unfamiliar landscapes. In her studio practice, Silverthorne blends a unique mix of street & gallery, representational & conceptual, and analog & digital.

Alexandra Silverthorne’s website

All accepted graduate students at MECA who have filed their FAFSA forms are eligible for Merit Based Scholarships, MECA Grants, Endowed and Restricted Scholarships, Stafford Loans, Graduate PLUS Loans, VA Benefits, and Work Study. The Financial Aid Office may be reached at 1-800-699-1509 for more information on any of these forms of support.

This year in the MFA the number of Merit-Based Presidential (6K) and Dean Scholarships (4K) given out has increased, as has the amount provided for MECA Grants. More internally-funded professional opportunities have been created for graduate students to help them cover the cost of their education and gain valuable work experience at the same time. Three new Teaching Assistantships and five new Research Assistantships, as well as an MFA Gallery Curator position have all been developed this year. New scholarship opportunities are being developed for 2010.

Student positions are applied for at the end of each summer through a competitive process that involves an application and, in the case of Teaching Assistants and MFA Mentors, a personal interview. Typically, student positions receive tuition remissions of $1,000 – $2,000 for approximately 140 hours of work over the winter and spring semesters. Students do not hold any positions during the summer semester at all. During the non-summer months, the MFA discourages students from working more than 20 hours a week – the workload is simply too much. Full-time teachers have completed the MFA while maintaining their jobs but this requires stamina and a high level of organization.

Our congratulations go out to all of the MFA students who have been recognized by the College for their excellent work and commitment to the MECA community. In 2009-2010 fifteen of our students hold Dean’s Scholarships, three students have been awarded the MFA President’s Award, two Cummings Scholarships and six restricted scholarships have been given out, as well as thirteen MFA Grants. The MFA employs its own students as teaching assistants, writing coaches, and studio mentors for the BFA program. We have also created positions for our students to work with us as web developers, outreach assistants, admission ambassadors, office assistants, technology coordinators, and archival assistants.

When submitting graduate applications, potential students are highly encouraged to prepare their FAFSA forms well in advance so that Financial Aid awards can be given out during the acceptance process. International students please note: the US Government requires additional forms to be completed for students living outside the USA. Please contact the admissions office at MECA should you have questions about these regulations.

Students who withdraw and receive Federal Financial Aid will be subject to return of Title IV funds and/or repayment of unearned aid as specified in 34 CFR 668.22. Maine College of Art uses the Return of Title IV Funds for Withdrawn Students on-line program designed by the US Department of Education to calculate the return and late disbursement of Title IV funds.

Applications now closed. THANK YOU to BFA Faculty who submitted proposals!

GUEST LECTURERS FROM THE MECA BFA FACULTY WELCOME in summer 2009

The MFA will be teaching Perspectives as a new course this summer and we would like to invite BFA faculty to join us as paid guest lecturers in delivering course content.  Perspectives will be coordinated by an MFA faculty member who will act as a co-discussant with each Guest Lecturer during the weekly three-hour seminar course. The themes needing coverage during the summer are quite specific and are inspired by the work and writings of incoming Visiting Faculty who will be with the MFA students throughout the summer.

Below, you will find the course description and a list of suggested seminar topics that includes a link to the Visiting Faculty bios on this website. Thank you for submitting your ideas. If you have questions, get in touch with Rebecca Duclos at rduclos@meca.edu.

Jonah Freeman 1955, 2005. Digital C-print

COURSE DESCRIPTION

ST801/section II: Perspectives (2 credits)
Taught by core faculty & guest lecturers for both 1st + 2nd years

Location: On-site in MECA classroom

This seminar course is coordinated by MFA core faculty and favors a discussion-based  approach. The course instructor and guest lecturers hone in on those topics, themes, and issues that are specifically present in the work and writing of the seven visiting faculty who are in attendance at MECA throughout the summer. This course not only helps students to prepare for intense in-studio critiques, it provides the space to delve more deeply into key ideas and contexts that animate the practices of the MFA summer visiting faculty. Representing particular art historical, art critical, and aesthetic positions within the contemporary art world and employing a variety of media, techniques, and methodologies, the work of these guest practitioners becomes the focus of a series of in-depth class discussions and interviews throughout the summer.

Discussion topics might include research into the history and practice of collaborative processes, site specific interventions, social-interventionist practices, performance and performativity, radical or recuperative feminist practice, museological critique, public art, perceptual cognition, immersive installation, etc. Students will use part of this course to prepare for their interviews with visiting faculty. These interviews will be recorded for the MFA archives and used in subsequent course development.

Paul Butler's Reverse Pedagogy common room, Banff Centre 2008
(photo: Scott Rogers)

Dates and Topic Keywords for Seminar Proposals

Wednesday 24 June (Paul Butler visiting)
Seminar covered: Mark Clintberg, Concordia University

Wednesday 1 July (Amelia Jones visiting)
Topics: body art, performance theory, Feminist critiques, performative critical writing, recuperated (art) histories

Wednesday 8 July (Jane Wildgoose visiting)
Topics: artists as museologists, cabinets of curiosity, Victorian mourning traditions, human remains + cultural institutions

Wednesday 15 July (Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay visiting)
Topics: popular culture as autobiography, queer masculinity, appropriation + parody, the languages of love, signals +  semiotics

Wednesday 22 July (Ken Lum visiting)
Topics: Identity + image production, post-coloniality and assimilation, ethnic representation in public spaces

Wednesday 29 July (Jonah Freeman visiting)
Topics: crypto-museology, artists + fiction, immersive installation, archival interventions, phantasmagoria

Wednesday 5 August (Brian Dunn visiting)
Topics: hedonic preferences, mind-body connection, aesthetic pleasure and cognition, neurology + visuality

Cabinet detail from Wildgoose Memorial Library, London

Guide to submitting proposals

1. Please read the Faculty Bios since the Perspectives topics are keyed into the issues and ideas present in the work of each week’s visitor.

2. Select a week and a topic from the list above that you feel matches your interests and expertise and prepare a one page proposal that includes:

* a brief outline for 1 hour lecture (+90 minute group discussion)
* thoughts about how your own practice links to the topic at hand
* selection of references consulted
* indicate whether you will use visual or audio material

3. Deadline for proposals: Monday, May 18th (to rduclos@meca.edu)

4. Proposals will be reviewed by the Student Advisory Board and those guest lectures selected for further development and delivery will be notified the week of May 25th.

There is a $200 honorarium given for each guest lecture and lunch following class.

Thank you to jake moore and Lauren Fensterstock and all the guest critics who attended the four days of thesis vivas. The reviews were filled with intense and expansive discussion and we are all very grateful for the time and care that went into both preparing for and participating in this important moment.

The final thesis Viva Voce for all graduating students in MECA’s MFA program welcomes Lauren Fensterstock as an internal reviewer and jake moore as exernal reviewer. All students are also given the opportunity to invite a guest critic to attend.

Parterre 2008 installation view at the Bowdoin Museum College of Art

Brief Biography for Lauren Fensterstock

Lauren Fensterstock is an artist and curator based in Portland, Maine. Her work has been featured broadly across the US including recent shows at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Kohler Art Center, Portland Museum of Art, DUMBO Art Center, Boston Center for the Arts, MASS Art Gallery, and Albany Airport. Lauren holds degrees from The Parsons School of Design (BFA 1997) and SUNY New Paltz (MFA 2000). Outside the studio, Lauren is currently Interim Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art.  Recent freelance curatorial projects include AFI: Upside Down which will debut at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece in April 2009.

____________________________________________

Reverse Engineering 2008 installation view at the FoFA Gallery, Concordia

Artist Statement for jake moore

jake moore is an intermedia artist currently living and working in Montréal, Quebec. She teaches in the Departments of Studio as well as Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. She is the Interim Director of the University’s Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery.

My work is site installation and immersive environments informed by textile and sculptural traditions. In it, narrative has a place as referent to either literary, mythological, or other forms of social texts. The poetic is readily available as I assemble together in structured environments: common objects, culturally informed materials, and phenomena like sound, light or scent. Their affect is found in the viewer’s own associations and beliefs in relation to the objects as well as in the objects’ relation to one another. Thus, the western desire to structure narrative and to perceive image as text is played out. The work is about you. And me. And the space between us, with our thoughts as presence mediated by the object, and the objects serving as points of stillness, or, as locations of arrival and departure simultaneously.

My belief that we interpret the world through our sensorial capabilities and that those capabilities are limited has lead to an invested consideration of materiality as a communication technology. In my world, all media are viewed as an expansion of the sensorium and each have infinite potential as sites of exchange. It is our limited abilities as homo sapiens that have structured our relation to the world. Culturally, westerners have chosen a relativist path as one of superiority with “man as the measure.” I am suggesting that while the relativist reading is understandable, by nature of how our bodies function and have been culturally determined, that it needs radical revision. We are limited capability transceivers that send and receive information in the forms of emotion, gesture, and language. We humans are a means of measure, but of our capabilities alone.

This employment offer is now closed. Thank you to all who submitted for this position. Shortlisted applicants will be notified by May 15th.

Please note: All applicants must be qualified to work in the USA

The Maine College of Art (MECA) in Portland ME seeks candidates for an adjunct professor to teach in its low-residency, interdisciplinary Master of Fine Arts in Studio Arts. The successful candidate will carry a 1.5 course load during the two-month summer intensive on-site at MECA and will teach 2 distance courses during each of the non-residence winter and spring semesters, respectively. Enrolment for the MFA is between 20 and 25 students; each core faculty member supervises 5-7 graduating students in the second year. Instructors are expected to maintain consistent communication with both students and MFA faculty/staff throughout all teaching periods within the academic year. In addition to the summer session, participation in two shorter intensives on-site in late December and early May is also required. During the academic year, instructors in the graduate program live in their home communities but are in residence at the College for nine weeks in the summer and ten days during both the winter and spring intensives. The MFA provides on-campus accommodation and additional compensation for instructors during each residence period.

Qualified candidates will be rigorously engaged studio or project-based practitioners with a strong understanding of curatorial practice, critical writing, and cross-disciplinary thought that is international in scope. Particular attention will be paid to those candidates who carry out active research within their own studio practice and have demonstrated their research capacities through exhibitions, publications, or special projects. A background in intermedial practices is preferred, as is the ability to teach courses in aesthetic research methodologies, contemporary visual culture, interdisciplinary practice, and critical writing within a studio-based arts program.

The successful candidate will be one of two core faculty in the MFA working within a larger program that includes the MFA Director, the MFA Program Coordinator, a series of summer Visiting Faculty, and individual studio mentors located across North America. The MFA also works closely with MECA’s Institute for Contemporary Art, the Curator of Porteous Exhibitions, and the MFA Archive and Moth Press. The adjunct professor position promises to be a dynamic one within a revamped curriculum focused on developing and re-defining the role that research can play in expanding and strengthening studio and project-based practices. There is scope for new course development and further refinement of on-line curriculum delivery. Course-planning duties will commence June 15^th with full instruction beginning on Friday, June 19^th, 2009.

Qualified candidates should send a letter of application, a curriculum vitae, images of current work, and sample syllabi for courses related to cross-disciplinary/intermedial practice or research methodologies. Demonstration of distance teaching will be an asset. Also included should be a selection of student evaluations, as well as exhibition catalogues, copies of research publications, and/or addresses of relevant web sites. Please provide names of three references.

Deadline for receipt of applications is:
Monday, May 4th 2009 (US applicants)
Friday, May 8th  2009 (international applicants)

Please send materials to:
Rebecca Duclos, Director
Maine College of Art
522 Congress Street
Portland, Maine 04101

For electronic submissions: employment@meca.edu

Only shortlisted applicants will be notified by May 15th

MECA is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, and is a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. Maine College of Art does not discriminate on the basis of sex, sexual preference, handicap, race, age, color, national or ethnic origin in hiring and employment practices.