CRN: 13370
Credits: 3
Painting and speculative fiction are unlikely but kindred spirits. Both routinely explore alternative temporalities and potential futures, peering into the unknown, the alien and the monstrous while reflecting the pressures of developing technologies and envisioning new ones. This class attempts to forge a further dialogue between these two creative pursuits, using passages and ideas culled from speculative fiction, horror and weird fiction as prompts for discrete painting projects. What can the writings of JG Ballard, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, James Tiptree Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, Meg Elison, China Miéville, Cixin Liu, H.P. Lovecraft and other notable speculative fiction writers offer the contemporary painter? This course will explore how literary and speculative conceptions can be expressed visually while developing the student’s knowledge of the materials and techniques of painting but also its expanded sense. For instance, what does it mean to critically engage painting today? Do we define this practice through the medium of paint on canvas or, in a timely update, through digital, experimental, and conceptual approaches that reflect the mediated and tumultuous nature of our lived experience? Just as urgently, how do we continue to keep this besieged practice vital given its recurring deaths, rebirths, technical mutations, financialization, and dispersion through online media? Throughout, our discussions will consider the history of painting and its current debates, highlighting the key differences and bridges between art, illustration, and other fields exploring speculative motifs. A course for painters and interdisciplinary artists interested in painting in its larger sense, this class will ask students to imagine painting as something that can model alternative histories and societies while keenly critiquing our own.
Faculty Bio:
Peter Rostovsky is a Russian-born artist and writer who immigrated from the former Soviet Union to the US as a political refugee in 1980. He works in a variety of disciplines that include painting, sculpture, installation, digital art, and graphic narrative. His fine art has been shown widely in the United States and abroad and has been exhibited at such venues as The Walker Art Center, MCA Santa Barbara, PS1/MOMA, Artpace, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, The ICA Philadelphia, the Blanton Museum of Art, S.M.A.K., and a host of private galleries. His writing and art criticism, under the pen name David Geers, has appeared in October, Fillip, Bomb, The Third Rail Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, and Frieze, and often focuses on the convergence of art, politics, and technology. Meanwhile, his illustrated fiction and comics-based work have appeared in the Third Rail Quarterly, Unbag, Topic, and Devil’s Due’s much-publicized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Freshman Force and Talk Bernie to Me anthologies, as well as the Ringo Award-nominated Pandemix anthology. His debut graphic novel, Damnation Diaries (Uncivilized Books, 2023), received a 2023 MoCCA Award of Excellence, praise in Publisher’s Weekly, Artforum, Hyperallergic, BOMB and other venues, and was listed by the New York Public Library as one of 2023’s Best Comics for Adults. It was also nominated for the prestigious 2024 Ringo Comics Industry Award in the Best Artist category. Rostovsky currently teaches at Parsons New School, New York University, and Clark University.
