ARTS 290 Art Outside the Bounds: Wanlass Artist in Residence
Visual Art Exploring Intersections of Home and Land
This course will examine personal, social, and institutional relationships to home and land and how they intersect in the work of Indigenous makers. These concepts will be explored through an Indigenous lens, in relationship to Professor Mercedes Dorame's art practice and cultural work, and the work of other first peoples of Southern California. It will include visiting artist conversations and site visits in Tovaangar to build context and understanding.
As a studio art course, we will be working on sculptural, and lens-based projects examining each participant’s development of visual and written language around these concepts. This class will be grounded within the Fall 2023 exhibition at Oxy Arts, composed of Tongva and other Southern California Native artists, and will collaborate with the related Art History 295 Course: “Indigenous Art and the Lineage of Color in California”. Additional Core Requirement met: US Diversity.
In Praise of Shadows
This course is about perception and takes its inspiration from Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s classic text, which profoundly illuminates the significance of shadows in our sensory experiences, via Japanese aesthetics. The course works through the premise that shadows and darkness do not just produce conditions that hide/conceal/obscure, but also that they can reveal and illuminate. Using photography, printmaking and hybrid sculptural forms, we will experiment with various artistic strategies that explore the nature of the contingent relationship between shadow and light. Our experiments will extend to questions and explorations that help us unpack social and cultural conventions and hierarchies that exist. Additionally, visits to studios and workshops around LA will enhance our hands-on activities. We will not only approach the theme of shadows through artistic practices, but also through philosophy, physics, literature and anthropology, so students from all disciplines are encouraged to enroll to maximize a diversity of ideas and fields of knowledge in our explorations.