Ox-Bow Summer School of Art and Artists Residency

For Ox-Bow’s fourth winter program, we have designed three exciting courses to take advantage of Ox-Bow's unique setting and small classroom environments. Free from most distraction, these classes are ideal for the serious student who needs the time and space to take their art to the next level. With only eight students in each course, those enrolled will have unparalleled access to faculty for guidance and critique. The Ox-Bow environment is made for experimentation, these courses allow students a safe and nurturing environment for pushing boundaries, and moving beyond one set material or process. The three courses are designed to complement each other, to allow for unprecedented collaboration and exchange. Faculty members Carl Baratta, Jesse Bransford, Jonah Groeneboer, Anna Mayer, and Claire Sherman will create an environment for learning that you can't experience in the traditional classroom. Each course is designed specifically to make the most of Ox-Bow's unique landscape and attitude, as well as to offer students the opportunity to look at those issues in artmaking that are most important to them.

The dates for the 2010 Winter Session are January 4-January 17.

The 2010 Winter Course Offerings at Ox-Bow:

CER 623 001
Fast & Nasty: Actions on Clay
Instructor: Anna Mayer
3 credit hours
$150 Lab Fee

Looking to both performance and sculpture histories and practices, this course will capitalize on clay's malleability in order to explore the idea of "performing objects." Using clay as our primary material, we will create performances/actions/live events that emphasize tactility, sensory experience, and exchange. While students will learn and employ fundamental hand-building techniques (no wheel throwing), the emphasis will notbe on producing traditional ceramic works that function only within the binary of "hands-off" rarified artworks or familiar domestic objects. Rather, students will mine those ceramic traditions, as well as those of conceptual art, relational aesthetics, object performance, body art, feminism, and collective experiences such as activism, in order to establish a diverse conceptual framework for all class endeavors. With special attention to using clay in all its states- dry, fired, liquid, smashed- the medium's plasticity will allow for students to work along a rich spectrum of time: on one end, ephemeral indexes, and on the other, lasting props that can survive any natural disaster. Clay's usefulness as a material will never be taken for granted, but rather will provide the "ground" upon which we'll meet as a group of critical thinkers, makers, and performers. Given our location of Ox-Bow, we will give special consideration to site-specific performance work within varied landscapes, as well as the important legacy of earthworks in the U.S. and beyond.

DRAWING 615 001
The Singular, the Multiple, and the In-Between
Instructors: Jesse Bransford and Jonah Groeneboer
3 credit hours
$100 Lab Fee

In one conception of installation art, it is imagined between the unique quanta of the moment and the replication of moments in temporal space. In this course the concept of installation and site will be situated between the unique state of the drawing-object and the multiform space of the print/multiple. Single actions of mark will be extrapolated into the aggregate space or the repeated action (exemplified in the print) and used as a guide for exploring the more nebulous spaces installation offers. Short theoretical readings (Walter Benjamin, Rupert Sheldrake, Michel Foucault, Miwon Kwon, etc.) will be paired with more literary ventures (Arthur Rimbaud, William Hazlitt, Dennis Cooper, etc.) in an interdisciplinary approach to printmaking and drawing, often resulting in installation. Notions of space-time, generosity, excess and habit will be guides in autonomous prompts that will terminate in a large work or works built on solutions to problems and questions asked by the ideas and materials encountered. Site exploration walks, discussions of readings, and exercises in print, drawing, and installation will inform the self-directed final project. Artists of note to the ideas in this course include (but are not limited to) Walead Beshty, Joseph Beuys, Carol Bove, Santiago Cucullu, Albrecht Durer, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Alfred Jensen, Sol Lewitt, George Maciunas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Adam Putnam, Fred Sandback, and Robert Smithson.

PAINTING 626 001
Encounters at the End of the World: Investigating the Landscape
Instructors: Carl Baratta and Claire Sherman
3 credit hours

The title of this class is taken from Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, a film which focuses on the lives of people in the isolated and harsh landscape of Antarctica. As a class we will investigate the historic and contemporary strategies landscape painting has used to create psychological spaces, ranging from the apocalyptic, tragic, and sublime, to the mundane, banal, sarcastic and absurd. Given that Ox-Bow isn't as cold as the Antarctic, this course will include exploratory fieldtrips using Ox-Bow's unique wintry woods. In addition to outings, the scope of this class will also incorporate a variety of lectures, discussion, and studio work with a focus on artists, writers, and filmmakers who use landscape. All painting and drawing materials will be supported, with demonstrations on techniques and material properties of oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolor, and collage. Students will need to bring their gathered source material on their laptops and in their portfolios.