Film Still from Steven Spielberg’s Close encounters of the Third Kind
Topics 3D: Close Encounters:
PUFA 3230 (CRN: 6681)
Wednesdays 9:00am – 2:40pm
Ad Reinhardt once said, “Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.” How do we challenge this notion? Is the painter’s remark a slight on the medium’s extraneous nature? Or is it praise of sculpture’s stubborn in-the-way-ness as another body to be contended with? In this course students are invited to work experimentally to explore the possibilities of sculpture in an experiential continuum and to build on the critical and practical tools necessary to make and contextualize challenging work. Studio process will be emphasized so that students gain a significant understanding of how things are made, so that students may develop the confidence to embrace a risk-taking approach to art-making.
This course will explore the haptic and psychological presence of objects and interventions, with particular attention paid to the ways that context and situation can at once create and destabilize a meaningful art experience. We will address questions such as: How should an artwork behave? What does the conceptual space a work occupies have to do with how it sits in a room or meets the world? When does it become an intervention? Can awkward and uncomfortable proximity create friction and/or value?
Students will be introduced to a range of contemporary artists whose work exemplify these questions, including Shannon Ebner, Rafa Esparza, Maria Gaspar, Tyree Guyton, Senga Nengudi and Pope. L.
Faculty Bio:
Dave Hardy is an artist who works primarily in sculpture. He received a BA from Brown University, an MFA from Yale School of Art and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Hardy’s work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. In 2018 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He has taught at New York University, Sarah Lawrence College and Pratt Institute, amongst others, and he was resident faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in summer 2018. His work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal… and has been articulated as performative, nasty, elegant, depersonalized, corporal, abject, vulnerable, improvisational.
