Art Department announces winter speaker series
Gosia Wlodarczak: Noon Tuesday, Jan. 17
Western Gallery Walking Tour
Contact Person: sebastian.mendes@wwu.edu OR sarah.clark-langager@wwu.edu
The Australian artist Gosia Wlodarczak is known for her performative drawings. She physically works on drawings while at her chosen sites and takes into account the cultural background of her locations, the specifics of the site itself, and timely situations, such as who are the viewers that particular day at the gallery. Her materials can range from paper, walls, and table cloths to "dust covers" for furniture.
In residence at the Western Gallery January 17-27th, Wlodarczak will create an immersive, multi-disciplinary drawing installation titled Between Wander & Settlement. This series talks about human life's transitional stages, about travels, movements, and all the changes. Her installation will include: Skin of the Wall, a large drawing installation focusing on the tension between private and public spaces; The Train Trip: Szczecin-Poznan, an animated film/sound-drawing translating the views along a railroad track while traveling from Szczecin to Poznan (Poland); and Mt Baker Sound-Drawing, a new work to be developed on site.
Harrell Fletcher & Wendy Red Star
Noon Wednesday, Feb. 1
Fairhaven College Auditorium
Contact Person: garth.amundson@wwu.edu OR john.feodorov@wwu.edu
Harrell Fletcher, Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, has worked collaboratively and individually on socially engaged, interdisciplinary art and performance projects for over fifteen years. His background is varied and exciting. He studied organic farming at UCSC and went on to work on a variety of small Community Supported Agriculture farms, which impacted his work as an artist. Focusing on selected projects, Fletcher’s talk will trace the evolution of his practice and philosophy.
Wendy Red Star was raised on the Crow Indian reservation in Montana. Leaving when she was eighteen, she later earned her MFA in sculpture at UCLA. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon where she is an adjunct professor of art at Portland State University. Her work explores the intersection between life on the Crow Indian reservation and the world outside of that environment. She thinks of herself as a Crow Indian cultural archivist speaking sincerely about the experience of being a Crow Indian in contemporary society.
As part of their visit, Fletcher & Red Star will conduct an informal critique in the 494 Advanced Studio Seminar course. This event is sponsored by the WWU Cold Beverage Fund, Art Department Lecture Series, and individual studio areas.
Sarah Burns: “Better for Haunts: Victorian Houses and the Modern Imagination”
4 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 14
Fine Arts Building Room 238
Contact Person: barbara.miller@wwu.edu
Who can forget the foreboding Victorian mansion that looms over the Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho? An instant icon, this house with its Mansard roof went forth and multiplied, becoming the abode of the weird and uncanny in countless movies, mystery novels, Gothic romances, horror comics, and even Disneyland. But where did it come from, and why did it have such an impact? To probe such questions, this lecture explores the haunted house and its representation in the elite and popular arts of the early twentieth century.
Sarah Burns is Ruth N. Halls Professor, Emerita, Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Temple University Press, 1989), Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (Yale University Press, 1996), Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (University of California Press, 2004), and, with John Davis, American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (University of California Press, 2009). In addition, she has authored numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays on a wide range of topics in American nineteenth and early twentieth-century art. Burns earned her Ph.D. in the history of art at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
James Lavadour
4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 16.
Communications Facility Room 105
Contact Person: cynthia.camlin@wwu.edu
James Lavadour is a painter and printmaker who uses process-based abstraction as a means for understanding how we live and move through the land. A painting, he says, is “concrete evidence of unseen processes…a painting seems to connect into the circuitry of the world both geologically and perceptually.” Primarily self-taught, Lavadour grew up on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeastern Oregon and now lives in Pendleton, Oregon. He is co-founder of Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts, a non-profit arts organization that brings "technology, instruction and cultural exchange" to artists on the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
James Sellier
3 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 22
Fine Arts Building Room 238
Contact Person: sebastian.mendes@wwu.edu
Not one to follow traditional or academic career routes, James Sellier has practiced his own form of public art since the mid 80's. His stenciled graffiti has emblazoned alleys, streets, and all manor of surfaces in various San Francisco neighborhoods, & has recently been featured along with a host of other graffiti artists in a book Stencil Pirates. Neo Dada influences factor largely in much of his object work as well as urban street life which include ongoing work in assemblage, collage, mixed media, and a recent return to stenciling. Unable to pass a good dumpster or the odd neat thing, one still finds on the ground, he sees potential in all manner of damaged & discarded objects for use in his work; old floor linoleum, ruined toys, broken bits of statuary, rusted bits of metal. Recycling as an art-form. In the tradition of the late Mickey McGowen’s “Unknown Museum” in San Francisco, the Collyer brothers, Manhattan house as giant assemblage piece or David Ireland’s Capp Street House.
Cable Griffith
4 p.,. Tuesday, Feb. 28.
Communications Facility Room 105
Contact Person: cynthia.camlin@wwu.edu
Cable Griffith is an artist and curator based in Seattle. His paintings of complicated architectural and environmental spaces are constructed from “building blocks” of simple visual motifs in carefully orchestrated color schemes. Griffith studied painting and art history at Boston University before receiving an MFA in painting at the University of Washington in 2002. He is a member of the Seattle artist-run gallery, SOIL, and Curator at Cornish College of the Arts Gallery.
Jonathan D. Katz
3:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 13
Old Main Theater
Contact Person: garth.amundson@wwu.edu
Jonathan David Katz is an American activist, art historian, educator and writer, he is currently the director of the doctoral program in Visual Culture studies at SUNY Buffalo. He is currently co-curator with David C. Ward and Jenn Sichel of the exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery, the first major museum exploration of the impact of same-sex desire in the creation of modern American portraiture. David Wojnarowicz's video "A Fire in My Belly" was removed from the exhibition on November 30, causing controversy.
He is also the former executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Gay & Lesbian Studies at Yale University. He is a former chair of the Department of Lesbian and Gay studies at the City College of San Francisco, and was the first tenured faculty in gay and lesbian studies in the United States. Katz was an associate professor in the Art History Department at the SUNY Stoneybrook, where he also taught queer studies. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University 1996. Katz is the founder of the Harvey Milk Institute, the largest queer studies institute in the world, and the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association.
This event is sponsored by the WWU Cold Beverage Fund, WWU Diversity Fund, GLBT Advocacy Committee, the Department of Art, the Art Department Lecture Series, and individual studio areas.