CRN: 1944
Credits: 3
Slippages invite shifts between categories, meanings, and material states, unraveling expectations and opening pathways to new effects. In this studio course, we will explore the significance of relinquishing control, engaging with material processes that extend beyond our intentions, and embracing improvisation and responsiveness as foundational approaches to making. Students will investigate the physical and formal properties of materials alongside their historical, socio-political, bodily, and ecological dimensions, understanding them as interconnected systems. This inquiry will take shape through hands-on sculptural practices—including casting, metalwork, and assemblage—alongside other forms of material alchemy, such as cooking and composting. The course will delve into assemblage theory and philosophies of materiality from thinkers like Jack Halberstam, Jane Bennett, Mel Y. Chen, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Jasbir Puar, in conjunction with critical art discourses on sculpture and formlessness to deepen material investigations. We will contextualize projects through discussions of contemporary artists such as Carl Chang, Dora Budor, Dieter Roth, Kara Walker, Helen Marten, Lygia Clark, Robert Morris, Delcy Morelos, Mark Lecky, Carolyn Lazard, Eva Hesse, and Jack Whitten, among others. Throughout the semester, we will examine the limits of representation and explore what emerges through experimentation and abstraction, considering the capacity of artworks to act, decay, affect, evolve, or transform.
Course Description:
Slippages invite shifts between categories, meanings, and material states, unraveling expectations and opening pathways to new effects. In this studio course, we will explore the significance of relinquishing control, engaging with material operations that extend beyond our intentions, and embracing improvisation and responsiveness as foundational approaches to making. Students will investigate the physical and formal properties of objects and materials alongside their historical, socio-political, bodily, and ecological dimensions as interconnected systems. This inquiry will take shape through hands-on sculptural practices—including casting, metalwork, and assemblage—alongside other forms of material alchemy, such as cooking and composting.
The course will delve into assemblage theory and philosophies of materiality from thinkers like Jack Halberstam, Jane Bennett, Mel Y. Chen, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Jasbir Puar, in conjunction with critical art discourses on sculpture and formlessness to deepen our investigations. We will contextualize projects through discussions of contemporary artists such as Carl Chang, Dora Budor, Dieter Roth, Kara Walker, Helen Marten, Lygia Clark, Robert Morris, Delcy Morelos, Mark Lecky, Carolyn Lazard, Eva Hesse, and Jack Whitten, among others. Throughout the semester, students will examine the limits of representation and explore what emerges through experimentation and abstraction, considering the capacity of artworks to act, decay, affect, evolve, or transform.
Faculty Bio:
Catherine Telford Keogh (b. Toronto; lives and works in Brooklyn) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with sculpture, installation and contingent materials. Mining material life cycles, environmental histories and commercial language and design her work explores the desires and promises of commercial objects as they break down, take on – or shed – familiar meanings through biological and material processes. Selected exhibitions include: Carriers (Gravity-Fed) in GTA24 Triennial, MOCA Toronto, Toronto (2024); Shelf Life, Helena Anrather, New York (2023), Circuit Trouble, Erin Stump Projects, Toronto (2022), Nervous System, Helena Anrather, New York (2020). Recent group exhibitions include those at Galeria Fidelidade Arte, Lisbon; Franz Kaka, Toronto; Public Gallery, London; Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris; Someday Gallery, New York; Bronx Museum, New York; Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Thkio Ppalies, Cyprus; and Interstate, New York among others. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art and a MAR in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Yale University.
Image Credit:
Nina Canell. Perpetuum Mobile (25 kg), 2009, basin, water, cement, and ultrasound. Photo by Robin Watkins. All images courtesy of the artist, Daniel Marzona, Mother’s Tankstation, and Galerie Barbara Wien.
