APPLICATION: ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PAINTING

UNIVERSITY OF HARTFORD, HARTFORD ART SCHOOL

DOWNLOAD WORK SAMPLE PDF

DOWNLOAD STUDENT WORK SAMPLE

DOWNLOAD RESEARCH STATEMENT

STUDENT WORK SAMPLE

Assignment: Cultural Self-Portrait

For this assignment students are guided through examining the cultural influences that have shaped their unique experi-ences and performances of “self” throughout their lives. Through a series of readings, writing assignments, student presentations and group discussions, students examine these influences individually and with their peers. Intimate group discussions allow students to discover where their experiences overlap and where they diverge, fostering a new understanding of the ways in which the personal is political and how cultural biases can falsely lead us to view our own viewpoints as natural and autonomous. The project culminates in a “self-portrait” that reflects students’ insights gained through their individual and group research.

Assignment: Self-Portrait as a Still Life

For this assignment students are asked to consider how a collection of objects can carry meaning and could be considered a “portrait” of a person. Students also consider how the way a painting is made (the formal elements of composition, color and brushwork specifically) can contribute to the feeling of a painting, therefore influencing that meaning. Students choose a selection of objects they feel convey a sense of their own identity in some way and arrange them in a composition that emphasizes the message the want to express to the viewer.

Assignment: Techniques of the Observer

In his 1992 book, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary considers the problem of modernity and social power through analyzing the historical construction of the viewer and the formation of the “subjective viewer” in the nineteenth century. For this assignment, students start by researching and presenting on specific technological developments from various time periods and consider the works of art, literature, philosophy and politics that preceded, coincided with or followed these developments. Students reflect on the underlying assumptions embedded in a certain model of vision and make an artwork that examines, exposes, or plays with these assumptions.

Assignment: Painting Operations/Painting as a Verb

For this assignment, students consider painting or drawing as a verb rather than a noun and shift their emphasis onto the process rather than the product of art. In addition to providing a relief to the often pressure created through learned notions of “skill” and value” in art, this assignment also encourages students to consider the perfor-mance of the verb and the formal elements of that performance, as creating narrative and meaning rather than creating and controlling meaning through subject matter alone. Students begin by choosing a verb from Amy Sillman's Drawing Operations list from her lecture “Drawing in the Continuous Present.” Meditating on this verb, students first create an in-class presentation on a contemporary artist whose work enacts and performs that verb and then find a way to create an artwork taking on an expanded view of painting to enact rather than illustrate their chosen verb.

Assignment: Historical Remix

There is a longstanding tradition in the arts of making work that directly references canonical artworks to create a dialogue with the past to illuminate and comment on the current culture. For this assignment students choose a specific painting from the art historical cannon and appropriate it in a way that utilizes its formal and thematic elements to portray their own research interests in a new light that uses a relationship with history to converse with our current moment.

Assignment: Drawn from Memory

Memory is often falsely considered as a system of retrieval of past facts and sensory information stored in the brain in a fixed way. Neurobiology, however, reveals that memory as a creative and generative process that takes place in the highly emotional location of the hippocampus and one that is deeply influenced by past and present emotions, desires, and information. In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards gives an exercise in which students draw from memory rather than a from photo-graph and asks students to pause and consider how the task makes them feel. For this assignment, students choose a memory that they want to explore and create an artwork that uses formal devices to emphasize the feeling of the drawing and draw attention to memory itself as a subjective process.

Assignment: New Perspectives

For this assignment students are asked to break away from traditional perspectives of space and make a painting which follows its own laws of space and perspective. Through a series of research activities we consider how unconscious messages can be communicated simply through the ways that a physical environment por-trayed. Students interrogate what underlying assumptions are embedded in images based on the artist’s (and thus the viewer’s) perspective situated. Students then choose a topic that they to make the viewer to see differently and cut/paste/re-arrange its formal elements to radically alter how the viewer relates to the subject and objects contained in the painting.