Multi-Level Painting: Form, Process, & Meaning

January 7–22, 2027
11:00 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. EST/10:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. CST

Untitled, 2026, oil on canvas, 45 x 36 inches

Multi-Level Painting: Form, Process, & Meaning

with Magalie Guérin

This course for beginning to advanced students will include extensive experimentation with materials and techniques through individual painting problems. Emphasis will be placed on active decision-making to explore formal and material options as part of the painting process in relation to form and meaning. Students will pursue various interests in subject matter. Students may choose to work with oil-based media. Demonstrations, lectures and critiques will be included.

Pricing Information: Tuition & Fees

Registration Information: Monday, November 16, 2026

SAIC/For Credit Course Code: PAINTING 605 001 | 3 credits

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About the faculty artist

Magalie Guérin (she/her; b. Montreal) is an artist based in Marfa, Texas. She works primarily in painting and ceramics and describes her work as shape-oriented, with the experience of foreignness and color relationships at its core. She holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011) and is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in New York, and Galerie Nicolas Robert in Montreal. She has exhibited internationally, and her work is in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, Speed Art Museum, DePaul Art Museum, Hydro-Québec, and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. She is the author of NOTES ON, a compilation of studio writings published by The Green Lantern Press in 2016 (second edition, 2019), and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the College of DuPage. Guérin is the recipient of two Pollock-Krasner grants (2024, 2018), a Pace Award at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (2019), and a Chinati Foundation residency (2018).

Chaos Temple

January 10–23, 2027

Chaos Temple

with Elijah Burgher

What happens when we pick up a stick of charcoal or brush dipped in ink If we take seriously William S. Burroughs’ dictum that “all art is magical in origin [...] Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen”? Magic offers artists a set of imaginative tools with which to think otherwise about the work they do. In this course, students will examine concepts and imagery from witchcraft, hermeticism, alchemy and the occult and then focus the materials, processes and psychic investments of the studio through the lens of spellcraft. Drawing will be emphasized as a research methodology and unique medium of expression. As part of a larger inquiry into symbols, we will study various examples of “unknown languages” such as the myth of Odin’s discovery of the runes, Austin Osman Spare’s sigil magic, the Martian scripts of the 19th century spiritual medium Hélène Smith, and the automatic techniques of the surrealists through slide lectures and guided drawing exercises. James George Frazer’s principles of sympathetic magic will be used to think differently about both figurative representation and the specificity and history of materials and tools in drawing, collage and painting. Additional themes will include origin myths, ritual, sacrifice, mimesis, divination, and chance. We will look at the work of artists including Jesse Bransford, Atis Rezistans/Ghetto Biennale, Judith Noble, Marjorie Cameron, Wifredo Lam and Emma Kunz. Readings will include excerpts from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and "Thee Splinter Test' by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge; and screenings will include films by Maya Deren and Scott Treleaven. Using James George Frazer’s “law of contagion” to think about source materials and wish fulfillment, students will use scissors and glue as magical weapons with which to resurrect failed artworks and discarded imagery as talismanic collages. This class will culminate in an indoor or outdoor installation of finished pieces.

Pricing Information: Tuition & Fees; $175 lab fee

Registration Information: Monday, November 16, 2026

SAIC/For Credit Course Code: PAINTING & DRAWING 606 001 | 3 credits

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About the faculty artist

Using painting, drawing, and printmaking, Elijah Burgher (he/him) works at the crossroads of representation and language, figuration and abstraction, and the real and imagined. Drawing from mythology, ancient history, the occult, and ritual magick, Burgher cultivates a highly intimate code of symbolism to investigate the personal and cultural dynamics of desire, love, subcultural formation, and the history of abstraction. He was featured in Block Party at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania (2023); Scrivere Desegnando at the Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneva (2020), Queer Abstraction at the Des Moines Art Center (2019), For Opacity at the Drawing Center in New York City (2018), and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, among others. He is the co-author of Sperm Cult with Richard Hawkins, published by Bad Dimension Press in 2017. Burgher received a MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. He is represented by PPOW in New York, Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Ivan Gallery in Bucharest. Burgher lives and works in Berlin.