Caption: Promession®#1’ (2016) Detail view. Image Credit: Courtesy the artist + Galerie Antoine
ADVANCED PRACTICE: NON/HUMAN ECOLOGIES
PGFA 5305, CRN: 14565
Friday 12:10-2:50pm
Taught by: Catherine Telford Keogh
Course Description:
This course explores interdisciplinary practices that prob the human-nonhuman boundary in the context of current socio-ecological conditions. Students will critically and speculatively engage with science and scientific methodologies as creative sources that complicate distinctions between nature, identity, and culture. Collaborative dialogue and class visits will be held with scientists, technoscience scholars, and artists to bolster studio practices. The course introduces a variety of topics including the ethics of working with live subjects, constructions of nature, transformations of waste and the Anthropocene. We will look at how artists (eg. Doreen Garner, Jes Fan, Anicka Yi, Black Quantum Futurism, Lu Yang, Kevin Beasley, Critical Art Ensemble, Teresa Margolles, Mel Chin, Dora Budor, Nina Canell, Queer Ecology and Wangechi Mutu etc.) use science and science fiction to re-imagine racial, sexual, gendered, and colonial organizations of life. Individual and collaborative studio practice and research will be complemented by immersive field trips to local sites that include salt marshes, urban farms, and landfills to perceive and feel at different scales from the microscopic to the planet at large. Reading across the natural sciences and science fiction from feminist, queer and decolonial perspectives (including texts by Karen Barad, Myra Hird, Astrida Neimanis, Kim TallBear Vanessa Agard Jones, Ursula K Le Guin, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Kathryn Yusoff among others) will inform discussions, experiments, field trips, and studio practices. Through independent work and prompt driven projects students will question and re-configure the enmeshed relationship of human and nonhuman life.
Open to MFA Students and Senior BFA students with instructor’s permission.
Faculty Bio:
Catherine Telford Keogh is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Her work is concerned with the fantasies and promises embedded in objects that breakdown through an amalgam of material relations and biological processes. Telford Keogh received an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art and an MAR in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Yale University. She has held recent solo exhibitions at Erin Stump Projects (Toronto); Helena Anrather (New York); Roberta Palen (Toronto) and University of Waterloo Art Gallery (Waterloo). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Galeria Fidelidade Arte (Lisbon);Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris); Bronx Museum (New York); Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran (Montreal); Seattle Art Museum (Washington); Thkio Ppalies (Cyprus), and Interstate (New York); among others. She has received selected grants from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council and was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2020. Her recent fictocriticism, Difference is Spreading, written in response to the work of Anna Solal, was included in the artist’s collaborative book L’enfant chiffre published by JMS Press and Cassandra Cassandra in 2021. Telford Keogh is an artist-in-residence at the Pelling Laboratory for Augmented Biology at the University of Ottawa where she is currently examining the biodegradation of petrochemical products. http://www.catherinetelfordkeogh.com/
