Ox-Bow offers currently enrolled MFA students the opportunity to an independent study at Ox-Bow over the winter session. Students have their own studio and can work on a project of their design, either in response to the specific environment of Ox-Bow or to prepare for their thesis show.

Corin Hewitt will be the Visiting Artist doing studio visits and facilitating group critiques

 Jonas Sebura will be the Technical advisor doing demos on welding, woodworking and helping grads work on other techniques to help them realize their vision.

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Students of any level are invited to participate in this two-week course exploring a Maximalist Aesthetic with drawing, mark making, embroidery, appliqué, and beading. Taking inspiration from “outsider” artists, as well as contemporary art world models, students spend the first week loosening up and learning a bevy of surface embellishment techniques; improvising to create new methods of accumulative marks. Starting with contemporary drawing exercises combined with traditional embroidery techniques, students quickly develop their own vocabulary of mark making and additive processes. Drawing and sewing machines will take these ideas further, offering vigorous and immediate ways of making continuous lines and textures. The richly layered landscape and altered environment of Ox-Bow serve as both backdrop and jumping off point. Collaborative and individual projects are supplemented by a survey of contemporary art as well as historical examples, Individual and group critique keep things moving quickly.

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For this interdisciplinary class, Ox-Bow’s wintry landscape serves as a metaphor and inspiration for thinking about the cycle of death and rebirth, as emblematized in the Greek myth of Persephone and Hades. As with this myth, art has long served as a way to make meaning of the difficult and unknowable aspects of human existence. The experience and process of mourning, the desire to transcend death, and beliefs about the afterlife are reflected in the history of art. Through studio projects, readings, screenings, lectures and group discussions, this course examines differing understandings of death across time and cultures, mourning and loss, putrefaction and entropy as formal strategies, melancholic relationships to the past, and the supernatural. Materials and considerations of media are individually driven in consultation with the instructors.

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