Patterned & Printed Textiles

with Elnaz Javani
FIBER 628 001 | 3 credits
In-person: January 7 - 20, 2024, 9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m. EST

In this course, we examine a range of traditional and contemporary approaches to surface designing and mark making on fabric, using materials both pure and crude, to generate images. This course introduces unique approaches to image‐making and process‐based work framed with specific conceptual and historical readings on how artists and craftspeople have used dye, print and drawing to create complex surfaces. Drawing will be used as a device to access ideas and will encourage accidental discovery. We will focus on the physical relationship between drawing and printing and will use silkscreen to translate images quickly onto cloth. Direct printing techniques, such as mono printing, will be employed to transfer drawings onto unique surfaces, as well as photo‐silkscreen, hand painting, and fabric reactive dyes. In this class, fabric will become thick, thin, ridged, brittle, opaque, and transparent extensions of paper. Instruction will be supplemented by lectures on fiber and print artists including Tomashi Jackson, Sam Vernon, and Ellen Gallagher and readings such as Prints Now Directions And Definitions, by Gill Saunders and Rosie Miles, Amanda Williams’ Color Theory, Hive Mind Out of Control by Kevin Kelly, The Tiling Patterns of Sebastien Truchet and The Topology of Structural Hierarchy by Cyril Stanley Smith and Pauline Boucher, Handbook of Regular Patterns: An Introduction to Symmetry in Two Dimensions by Peter Stevens, and Randomness Rules and Compositional Structure in Design by Michael Eckersley. Students will engage in sampling and experimentation, and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to independent studio practice and projects. This class will include in‐depth discussions about students' projects, concepts, material, technical choices, and thematic interests. Students are expected to work independently on works of their choosing.

Elnaz Javani (she/they) is an Iranian artist and educator currently residing in Chicago. She works between the media of textiles, drawing, print, and installations. Her practice revolves around the fragmentation of identity and place, power dynamics and labor. Through layering, stitching and dye; she tries to construct a personal, fictional and imaginary space of existence. She holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was the recipient of the New Artist Society Merit Scholarship, and holds a BFA from Tehran University of Art. Javani is a 2023 Center for Craft Artist Cohort Grant Recipient and she was awarded Faculty Enrichment Grants from SAIC 2022-2021, and was named one of Chicago’s Break Out Artists of the year for 2022, she has received a Spark Grant from Chicago Artist Coalition (2021), the Kala Art Institute Fellowship Award and Residency Grant (2020), the Define American Art Fellowship Grant (2020), and the Hyde Park Art Center Flex Space Residency Award (2019). Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally in the USA, Spain, Iran, France, Colombia, Turkey, UAE, Germany, Canada, and Switzerland.

Handbuilding Complex Forms

with Chris Salas
CER 662 001 | 3 credits
In-person: January 7 - 20, 2024, 9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m. EST

In this intensive course, we will push the limits of sculptural and functional ceramics through large-scale form building. With a focus on the coil and pinch building methods, students will equip themselves with strategies, techniques, and practices which are helpful to hand build complex shapes, construct at a large scale, as well as make dynamic surfaces. To maximize our building time, we will be using slip, wash, stains, and underglaze to develop surfaces, with the majority of work being once-fired to cone 6. In the final days of class, we will commemorate our hard work with a communal pit firing.

We will examine and discuss the work of contemporary and historical ceramic artists such as: Raven Halfmoon, George Rodriguez, Amia Yokoyama, Viola Frey, Matt Wedel, Isamu Noguchi, Woody De Othello among many others. We will read excerpts from the books “Finding One’s Way With Clay” by Paulus Berensohn and “A Potter’s Workbook” by Clary Illian. We will also watch a short documentary on the ceramic artist Lee Kang-Hyo.

While the bulk of our studio work will revolve around hand-building a large scale, complex object whose foundation starts from many parts, we will also have a daily practice considering various aspects of complexity as well as idea generation.

Chris Salas (they/them) is an artist and educator primarily working in Ceramics. Their studio practice is a search for a particular mental state – the engaged and unconscious divergence and convergence of ideas that imbue themselves into objects. These objects become abstracted forms of personal experiences, relationships, conversations, research – all of which currently revolves around time, place, momentum, with a pervasive presence of the history of colonization of the Americas.

Chris received a BA in Chemistry from Michigan State University and an MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art. They have attended residencies at Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, MN, Ceramics School in Hamtramck, MI, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, ME, Starworks Ceramics in Star, NC, and Township10 in Marshall, NC. Chris is a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship.