SculptureX Symposium 2013
Performative Objects and the Everyday Spectacular
Discussions on collaboration, performance and time-based sculpture
WHEN:
Saturday, October 12, 2013
10:00 AM – 4:30 PM
WHERE:
Columbus College of Art & Design
Canzani Center Auditorium
60 Cleveland Ave.
Columbus, OH 43215
Columbus College of Art & Design, in partnership with The Sculpture Center, hosted the 2013 SculptureX Symposium, an annual catalyst for discussion about the state of sculpture among art institutions in our region. In 2013 symposium #4, PERFORMATIVE OBJECTS AND THE EVERYDAY SPECTACULAR, looked primarily at performance, collaboration and time-based sculpture.
On Friday evening, October 11 attendees listened to a scholar’s talk by art critic, curator and poet John Yau and visited the openings of three exhibitions at CCAD’s galleries, including My Crippled Friend, exploring the recent history of the intersection of painterly abstraction and the object, and Everyday Spectacular, with sculptural work by MFA students and recent graduates of the region.
On Saturday October 12 participate in the symposium, PERFORMATIVE OBJECTS AND THE EVERYDAY SPECTACULAR. This event was a full day of presentations, panel discussions and performance, with the keynote address by Martin Kersels, an accomplished sculptor and installation artist and associate professor at Yale University School of Art. The keynote presentation was open to the public, but registrants received priority seating. A reception followed the symposium.
All events and the symposium were held at the Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, Ohio.
The SculptureX symposia, founded in 2010 by Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, The Sculpture Center, the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Erie Museum of Art, are intensive learning events that encourage collaboration among arts educators and artists, and addresses evolving ideas about sculpture within a broad cultural context.
See the full two day schedule and register here.
The Keynote Speakers
Martin Kersels
http://art.yale.edu/MartinKersels
http://www.acmelosangeles.com/artists/martin-kersels/
Mr. Kersels was born in Los Angeles and attended UCLA for both his undergraduate and graduate educations, receiving a BA in art in 1984 and an MFA in 1995. His body of work ranges from the collaborative performances with the group SHRIMPS (1984-1993) to large-scale sculptures such as Tumble Room (2001). His interest in machines, entropy, sound and dissolution has produced work that examines the dynamic tension between failure and success, the individual and the group and the thin line between humor and misfortune. Since 1994, Mr. Kersels’s objects and projects have been exhibited at museums both nationally and internationally, including the 1997 Whitney Biennial, the Pompidou Center, MOCA Los Angeles, the Tinguely Museum, Kunsthalle Bern and the Getty Museum. A survey of his work, entitled Heavyweight Champion, was organized and exhibited by the Tang Museum in 2007 and the Santa Monica Museum in 2008. His room-sized sculpture, 5 Songs, and an accompanying performance series, Live on 5 Songs, were on view in the 2010 Whitney Biennial of American Art. Before joining the faculty at Yale he was a faculty member and Co-Director of the Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts. Mr. Kersels was appointed Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale in 2012.
Chido Johnson
Detroit artist, originally from Zimbabwe. A recent 2009 Kresge Fellow, as well as a 2009 MacDowell Colony Fellow. Received both his BFA degrees in Sculpture in 1996 and in Painting with a minor in Drawing in 1997 from the University of Georgia, Athens. He obtained his MFA Sculpture degree from the University of Notre Dame in 2000. Chido has worked, exhibited, and taught both nationally as well as internationally. He currently is the section chair of Sculpture at the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan.
The Panelists
Terry Smith
Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. He was the 2010 winner of the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA), and recipient of the 2010 Australia Council Visual Arts Award. During 2001-2002 he was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, and in 2007-8 the GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Research Centre, Raleigh-Durham. From 1994–2001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney. He was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). A foundation board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, he is currently a board member of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. In 1996 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Membré Titulaire of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art.
His major research interests are contemporary art of the world, including its institutional and social contexts; the histories of multiple modernities and modernisms; the history and theory of contemporaneity; and the historiography of art history and art criticism. He has special expertise in international contemporary art (practice, theory, institutions, markets), American visual cultures since 1870, and Australia art since settlement, including Aboriginal art. Current graduate students under his supervision are working on topics such as critical global practices, new media art, alternative avant-gardes, artists’ collectives, the history of conceptualism, aspects of cultural policy, and histories of art writing. He teaches the undergraduate course Introduction to Contemporary Art, and a graduate seminar on theories of modernity and contemporaneity. He is the convener of “Defining Contemporaneity, Imagining Planetarity,” a four-year workshop, conference, exhibition and publication project supported by the Humanities Center, University of Pittsburgh, and the Humanities Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, 2011-14
Youmna Chlala
Youmna Chlala is an artist and writer born in Beirut. Her work investigates the relationship between fate and architecture through drawing, video, books, installation and performance. She received her MFA at the California College of the Arts where she was also the Founding Editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. She has exhibited and performed her work in the US & Canada, the Arab World and Europe; and at the San Jose Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, National Arab American Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She participated in the roaming Tehran Biennale and read her fiction for the NPR project at the 2008 Whitney Biannual. She has received residencies and fellowships at the Headlands Center for the Arts, CAMAC: Center for Art and Technology, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Triangle Arts Fund via AIWA and Makan House, the Goethe-Institut and the European Cultural Fund. She is currently visiting faculty at the Pratt Institute in New York.
Osman Khan
Osman Khan, is an artist interested in constructing artifacts and experiences for social criticism and aesthetic expression. His work plays and subverts the materiality behind themes of identity, communication, economics and public space through participatory & performative installations and site-specific interventions. Khan was born in Pakistan and grew up in New York City. He received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University in New York, USA in 1995. He served as Creative Director for Elliance, a Web development company, until 2002. He completed his MFA at UCLA’s Department of Design | Media Arts in 2004. He joined the faculty of the School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2009, where his teaching focuses on computational and kinetic mediums. He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
His work has been shown at Shanghai Biennale, China; ZeroOne Festival, San Jose, USA; L.A. Louver, Los Angeles, USA; Witte de With, Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Ars Electronica Center, Linz, Austria, O.K Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; Socrates Sculpture Park, NYC, USA SIGGRAPH, San Diego, USA; Bank, Los Angeles, USA; telic, Los Angeles.He is a recipient of an Art Matters grant, Ars Electronica’s Prix Ars Award of Distinction and The Arctic Circle 2009 Residency.Articles about his work have appeared in Artforum, Artweek, Art Review, I.D., LA Times, the Wall Street Journal and Artnet.
Lilian Beidler
Lilian Beidler is a composer and new genres artist born in 1982 in Switzerland. She completed her Masters Degree in Contemporary Arts Practice from the Bern University of Arts in 2010. She has been an artist in residence in the US, Finland and China. She regularly performs and shows her work internationally at sound art and performance festivals as well as in galleries and visual art fairs, such as ZKM Karlsruhe DE, Fondation Beyeler in Basel CH, Substitut in Berlin DE, “Taming Technology” in Florence IT, “jungkunst” in Winterthur CH, “Contemporary Art Ruhr” in Essen DE, Penclub Gallery in Budapest HU, “Arteles Creative Center” in Hameenkyrö FI and “I-Park” in East Haddam USA.
Sound being a fundamental component of her work, she ranges from installation, performance and acousmatic composition. She is interested in the relation between sound and body and object as mobile parameters in a particular space. Functional objects like machines or devices with modified uses often serve as basic materials for her artistic interventions.
