Posts from — October 2009

MECA MFA will be attending the San Francisco Graduate Portfolio Reviews on Saturday Oct 17th. Drop by and see us!

Location: San Francisco Art Institute
Time: Saturday, Oct 17, 2009 noon-4 p.m.

Exuberant Pattern: Caroline Lathan-Stiefel, Piper Shepard, Merle Temkin, Huguette Caland, and Astrid Bowlby
Towson University
Friday, October 9 ­– Saturday, November 7
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 8, 7:30 – 9 p.m.

Exuberant Pattern features the work of Caroline Lathan-Stiefel, Piper Shepard, Merle Temkin, Huguette Caland and Astrid Bowlby. Lathan-Stiefel creates architectural installations using pipe cleaners and other re-purposed items of the post-industrial, commercial and global economy. Shepard creates lace patterns by printing and hand-cutting patterns in lengths of fabric. Her sources are varied and range from nineteenth-century Belgian lace to Islamic tile work. Temkin uses her left index finger print as a kind of self-portrait, exploring issues of identity and creating paintings and collages that emphasize the pattern of her unique print. Caland is a painter and sculptor who has also worked in fashion design and filmmaking. Her work demonstrates a love of color and pattern that is influenced by her Lebanese heritage, as well as her years in Paris. Bowlby produces black-and-white drawing installations that are sculptural and interpret decorative patterns.

Self-Location Project: Proprioceptive Biograms
Kaw Valley Arts & Humanities Gallery
756 Armstrong, Kansas City
October 9 – November 5, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday October 9, 5-9pm

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Biogram, 2008-09
oil pastel, pastel, graphite, charcoal, conté crayon, and watercolor on paper

MECA MFA will be attending the New York City Graduate Portfolio Reviews on Saturday Oct 3rd. Drop by and see us!

MFA Director Rebecca Duclos is the recipient of a Research Fellowship at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.

Following a year of interview-based research, Duclos will collaborate with the Faculty of Fine Art Gallery at Concordia University to organize a two-day symposium entitled “Artists and Information: new paradigms for research” in November 2010.

Here is an excerpt from Duclos’s research proposal:

I am interested in what library scientists call the “information-seeking behaviours” of artists—how and why arts practitioners pursue research, often in the form of primary source archives, objects, and interviews, but also from sources as diverse as statistical records, song lyrics, scientific data, archaeological reports, amateur film, architectural plans, found documents, unpublished recordings, and so on. While not necessarily new, this desire to examine, extract, and enfold “real world” information into artistic practice is a phenomenon that, in my twenty years as an artist, curator, art historian, and now MFA director, I have seen intensify significantly in recent years.

As a Fellow in the Jarislowsky Centre, I have proposed a close study of contemporary work being produced in Canada since the mid-1980s as a way to begin assessing what I see as a new vigour and rigour driving artists’ research. I hope to document and analyze not just the “what” and “how” of these information-seeking behaviours (which is the domain of library science) but the why of artists’ in-depth investigations. Do research-focused practices find affinities with process-based artworks prevalent in the 1970s? Are these methodologies, in part, informed by a rejection of a 1980s artworld so heavily invested in post-structuralist theory? Are we seeing a return to the tangibilities of material culture and archival evidence as a counterbalance to the performativity of relational aesthetics in an era Nicolas Bourriaud has recently described as the “alter-modern”?

My research diverges significantly from claims made by theorists who variously see creative practice as a form of research or who aim to infuse traditional research practice with “creative methods” derived from the arts. My approach is perhaps closer to what Paul Carter has called material thinking (“how ideas are turned into artworks”) in that I wish to develop an analysis of interpretive studio processes that embrace a research-based posture to recuperate micro-histories, investigate obscure archives, and locate esoteric ephemera. I am also interested in documenting artists’ own methodological vocabularies that describe research processes that are often intuitive, associative, synchronous, non-linear, and highly subjective.