If you are interested in concentrating in Graphic Design the portfolio review for entry into the concentration will be held on Friday March 8th. Please print out this application form, fill out all that applies and bring it with you to the review. Follow this link to sign up for a time slot.

 

Sharon Hayes moved to New York City in 1999 and quickly noticed a relationship between art and activism. Her work touches on the ideas of romantic love, queer theory, activism, and politics. She uses various mediums such as recordings, speeches, songs, and letters, in combination with her own writing, to produce multi-channel video installations. Her interest in public space stemmed from her interest in public speech and she hopes to interrogate the intensely intimate and profoundly public relationship of speech and action.

Sharon also delivers political texts in the form of on-street recitations to further analyze the intersection of history, politics, and speech. Through this work she seeks to answer the question of how does the protest sign create meaning? She also aims to understand the positionality of the sign-holder, so she often holds the sign herself. She uses political slogans from the past, as she’s interested in seeing what conversation it will create in the present. When people approach her and ask what she’s doing, she doesn’t tell them she’s an artist or doing a performance because when someone hears that, they tend to have a ‘Oh I get it, art is weird’ response and carry on; this inhibits real conversation and questions from arising. By telling them she’s just interested in protest, she is able to create genuine conversation and raise questions that go deeper into the given topic and parallel the typical questions people ask about art and performances.

Sharon explained that she is also interested in ever so slightly disrupting the concept of time and does her best to do so in her performances and artwork. When she showcases her work, the video installations are projected on a surface with a 7-degree angle toward the audience. She believes that this method is a strategy used in documentary film but that she does not classify her work as documentary.

Students were given the chance to hear Sharon speak to all of this in person, as well as pick her brain about both her work and art in general, at the opening reception that was held for her on Monday, February 25^th.

 

Protests, Proclamations, and Celebrations: 
Sharon Hayes

Part Two of Four Acts

 

 

Artist Sharon Hayes is part of our four part exhibition, Protests, Proclamations and Celebrations. She addresses ideas of romantic love, queer theory, activism, and politics. Incorporating recordings, speeches, songs, and letters along with her own writing, she describes her practice as “a series of performatives rather than performance”. She will be participating in an artist talk and opening reception from 5 pm to 7pm on Monday 25th in the Art Building at UCONN. Please join us for refreshments and conversation with the artist.

 

Ricerche: Three, 2016, Film Still

 

Fingernails on a Blackboard: Bella, 2014, Video Still 

 

We Cannot Leave This World to Others, 2014, Video Still

 

Ricerche: Three, 2016, Installation Shot

 

Protests, Proclamations, and Celebrations: Shen Xin

Part One of Four Acts

 

 

Shen Xin delivered an artist talk to the UCONN community followed by a reception at the Contemporary Art Galleries. Shen also met with the graduate students for individual critiques. 

 

Installation view of Shen Xin’s Escape Forms: Prologue, 2016 and Provocation of the Nightingale, 2017. 

 

Still from Provocation of the Nightingale, 2017

 

Shen Xin speaks at the Thomas J. Dodd Center

Nathan Fox, an award-winning illustrator, held two talks and a public critique for UConn students on February 19^th.  He is co-creator and artist on THE WEATHERMAN and is Chair of MFA Visual Narrative, a low-residency graduate program in visual storytelling. He works with clients such as NYTimes, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Wired, Scholastic, MT, Nike, and more.

 

Tim Saternow joined us at the Arena Gallery on February 19th to discuss watercolor painting.

Tim Saternow is an American painter whose watercolors explore the lost and forgotten areas on the edges of the urban scene. His paintings encompass the industrial streets of New York City, to the empty lands of Joshua Tree, California, to houses of Provincetown, MA. Tim got his BFA at SUNY Purchase in New York and his MFA from Yale University. Formerly, Tim was a Professor both at Carnegie-Mellon University from 1992 to 1996 and here at UConn from 1996 to 2006, where he taught graduate level Theater Design and Art Direction. When Tim was in his MFA program, he wasn’t taught how to create watercolors even though he was expected to use it as a medium and in film– this inspired him to teach it here at UConn when he was a professor. He loved creating watercolors so much that he decided to move to New York City to work full-time as a painter.

Tim came back to UConn on Tuesday, February 19^th to talk to our MFA students about his journey as an artist, the process of creating his watercolors, how he mounts his work, and how to navigate the world of residencies and gallery showings post-MFA. His creation process begins with him making a value sketch that focuses on the light and dark, and negative and positive aspects of the scene. If the sketch interests him at this level, he moves forward to create a finer detailed sketch, then a colored sketch, and then the watercolor itself. When he makes the transition from colored sketch to watercolor, he first creates a grisaille (a gray monochrome painting). With the aim of deconstructing the image so as to not duplicate a photograph, he then splashes water and bursts of color on the painting. He works with those splotches and adds more local color until he feels like it’s done.

Tim has a series of work called PARK—  each watercolor was of different parking garages in New York City and had the work ‘park’ somewhere in the painting. He advised the MFA students to market their artwork in terms of a theme, showing PARK as an example. He said the theme could even be the medium used to create the artwork, but that typically having a theme is the best way to get people interested in showing your work at galleries.  He also advised them to focus on forming connections with others, as this was how he got to show work in many of the galleries his work has been in.

Tim’s work is so stunning and unique. Our MFA students were able to see his paintings first-hand and have the opportunity to ask him questions that resonated with where they’re at in their artistic careers. Thanks Tim!

 

Apply for the UConn IDEA Grant now! The next application deadline is Monday, March 11th. It is open to all undergrads and to all majors so please apply!

If you are in New York on Saturday, February 16th, please stop by for one of the last days of this sumptuous exhibition by Mumbai based artist Sujith S.N. at Aicon Gallery on Great Jones Street.  Kathryn Myers will be doing a gallery talk with him. You won’t want to miss it!     

 

 

Shen Xin, the current artist featured in the Protests, Proclamations & Celebrations exhibition in
the Contemporary Art Gallery, visited an MFA seminar to allow time for the graduate students to
ask questions about her artwork, the processes behind it, and her career path. Their dialogue
covered a range of topics, one of them being her transition from MFA to post-MFA to life as a
professional artist as that resonated with the graduate students. She also spoke on how her
work has changed since being out of school, how she casts people for her videos and the
fluidity of her movie making process. She touched on some of the personal challenges that
she’s faced as an artist, how she handles negative comments and critiques about her work, how
to navigate and seek out funding, and highlighted the relationships she’s formed through her
work. She expressed her passion for teaching in the future and mentioned that she has a gallery
in Shanghai.

Please join us for the opening reception of Prismatic, a reflection on transgender and non-binary experience, on February 18th from 6-8pm in room 109 of the Art Building! This IDEA Grant will be on display in the VAIS Gallery from February 18th to the 22nd

 

Thursday February 7, 12:15-1:45 pm 
Branford House, UConn Avery Point

This will be a discussion among UConn students, faculty and staff about sexual violence and consent.It will be offered in conjunction with a gallery installation featuring the work of UConn graduate student Jeanne Ciravolo, and is based on UConn’s Humility and Conviction in Public Life’s “Encounters” reflective, structured dialogue model. This discussion will include a variety of experts: representatives from Safe Futures, UConn’s Counseling and Mental Health Services and UConn’s Women’s Center.

Lunch will be served.

February 7th
9am to 11am
Dodd Center Konover Auditorium

Shen Xin was born in Chengdu, China and currently is living and working in London
and Amsterdam. She graduated from La Salle College of the Arts in Singapore and
earned her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Provocation of the Nightingale , 2017 and Forms Escape: Prologue , 2016, are two of
Shen Xin’s exhibited multichannel media works that are complex and profound, and
require time and concentration to decipher. Both works avoid linear narrative and the
use of irony, for Shen Xin does not want to restrict viewers’ freedom to make their
own assumptions. “It’s a very sensory experience when things are complex because
you have to be open. That’s why I want to move away from irony because I want to
explore how to be even more engaged with that ability to open up space when
viewing the film.” You are continually challenged to assess how you come to believe
and form opinions about something. For Shen Xin, that something is connected with
notions of love, suffering, emotional pain and spirituality along with afflictions of
contemporary capitalism’s relationship with power and how Buddhist philosophy and
everyday life interconnect.

SIBYL KEMPSON

 

Sibyl Kempson’s plays have been presented in the United States, Germany, and Norway.

She launched the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr & Perf Co in 2015. Productions include Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag (Abrons Arts Center, NYC), Public People’s Enemy, an adaptation of Enemy of the People, (Ibsen Awards and Conference in Ibsen’s hometown of Skien, Norway), Sasquatch Rituals (The Kitchen, NYC) and 12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens, a 3-year cycle of rituals for the new Whitney Museum of American Art in the Meatpacking District of NYC, begun on the Vernal Equinox in March 2016, recurring on every Solstice and Equinox through December 2018.

Other current projects include true pearl, a new opera with David Lang for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston premiering in October 2018 and The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. premiering in NYC in 2019.

Kempson is the recipient of a 2018 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for American Playwright at Mid-Career. She is also a 2014 USA Artists Rockefeller Fellow and a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow. She received four Mondo Cane! commissions from Dixon Place between 2002-11. I Understand Everything Better, with David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group, received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production in 2015, the same year her play Fondly, Collette Richland, penned for Elevator Repair Service, premiered at New York Theatre Workshop.

Her plays are published by 53rd State Press, PLAY: Journal of Plays, and Performance & Art Journal (PAJ). MFA Brooklyn College under the instigation of Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney. She teaches and has taught experimental performance writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Brooklyn College, Victoria College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne, and the Eugene Lang College at the New School in NYC.

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/2234839566769949/

J.R Uretsky

Visiting Artist Presentation

Thursday, November 1, 2018, 3:30pm

Artist Presentation – Storrs Campus, Art Building, Room 222

J.R. Uretsky weaves performance, video, puppetry, and sculpture into emotionally charged, affective artworks that shift seamlessly between autobiography and fiction. Uretsky’s work confronts viewers with expressive confessions that test the bounds of comfort, personal space, and acceptable presence. The characters that emerge through her performances are relatable yet also alien and non-specific, forging an ambiguous space where emotion is the remaining constant.

J.R. Uretsky curates independently and is a performing artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues in New York, Los Angeles, Finland, and Germany. Her work was included in the 2013 DeCordova Biennial at The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. She has also performed and exhibited at Art Basel Miami, FL, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Rhode Island School of Design Museum as well as the Museum of Art and Design in New York. Uretsky’s work has been published in print, online and video journals such as Headmaster Magazine, Gaga Stigmata, Big Red & Shiny, and ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art.

The Aggressive Love Project (2011-2013) featured in 2013 deCordova Biennial, curated by Lexi Lee Sullivan,  DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA—a series of video documentations and sculptures from site-specific performances—explores the darker side of generosity through acts of invasive gift-giving.

 

 

Bromance was a performance that used puppetry and video to showcase white, male anxiety through interviews with men. I relocated interviewee’s stories from their white, male bodies to a strange, non-gendered object. Bringing the “Bro” into a conflicted body that is queer because of its multiplicity, fluidity, and failure.

 

 

Feeling Feeling a collaborative exhibition by Emmy Bright & J.R. Uretsky showed at the Distillery Gallery in Boston from September 8 – October 14, 2017

Feeling Feeling: a series of dubious choices, earnest efforts, collaborative installations, missed opportunities and new works on paper, wall, and in time.

UConn’s annual MFA Art Sale is live! The sale, which supports MFA thesis exhibitions in New York City, offers a range of 2D and 3D work by faculty, current graduate students, and alumni, all at affordable prices. Drawn from the interdisciplinary studio art program, the work spans a breadth of media, including photography, painting, ceramics, screen printing, lithography, illustration, and performance documentation. The MFA Art Sale runs continuously, with special promotions offered around the holidays.

UConn’s MFA Art program supports a broad range of art making including painting/drawing, installation/performance, photography/video, printmaking, and sculpture/ceramics. Its international faculty and superior facilities in a rural environment are centrally located in Southern New England for easy day trips to New York, Boston, Providence, Hartford, and New Haven. The three-year program culminates with an exhibition in a New York City gallery and a thesis exhibition in UConn’s William Benton Museum of Art.

Visit the sale and subscribe for updates at uconnartmfasale.com.