Art Department

Events Spring 2015

Senior Thesis Exhibition, Spring 2015

Reception: Friday, May 8th, 2015 - 5-7 pm
Exhibition: Saturday, May 9th - Monday, May 18th
Open weekdays 10 am - 5 pm
Open weekends 1 pm - 5 pm

Studio Art Building, Edith Feldenheimer Gallery
Free and open to the public.

Featuring work by:

Cancy Chu
Eli Coplan
Megan Finley
Kaori Freda
Kira Jacobson
Anna Laura Kastama
Marissa Katz
Tiphanie Laney
Rebecca Shafer
Amy Stewart

Studio Art Thesis Poster

Ethan Rafal, "Shock and Awe"

Reading, Free Pie and Tea: Thursday, April 9th, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Studio Art 201

Join us to celebrate the release of Ethan Rafal's Shock and Awe. A twelve-year, autobiographical project examining the relationship between protracted war and homeland decay, Shock and Awe is a meticulously crafted image, text, and found object journal that blurs the line between author and subject, and personal and authoritative histories. Completed over countless years traveling the United States, the project pulls from the traditions of documentary photography and writing set on the American road. 

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the work, the book presentation is both a reading, and a show-and-tell. The performance will last approximately 40 minutes, followed by an open discussion about the issues explored in the project. 

Ethan Rafal is an artist and photographer based in San Francisco. His work deals with the individual and collective experience of violence, and the ways in which subsequent representations of violence inform personal and national mythologies. Photography is an essential ingredient in his practice, due to the unique relationship between image and violence, but his work employs performance, installation, video, new-media, and social-practice methodologies. He teaches, mentors, helps run an art space, and collaborates with Art For a Democratic Society in the Bay Area, where he has been based since 2007. He attended Reed College. 

This event is free and open to the public. There will be walnut pie. 

More info about the project:
http://ethanrafal.com/

Video: https://vimeo.com/49786000

Solveig Nelson, "From Selma to Stonewall: On Civil Rights and Early Video"

Wednesday, March 18th, 7 p.m. PAB 320

In 1973, critic Gregory Battcock proclaimed, “video is art that will stretch the boundaries of the art world.” Solveig Nelson, art critic and PhD candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, asks what precisely did video art promise to expand and how did it transform both American art practice and art criticism? She proposes that video in the U.S. emerged out of the nexus of three image-based practices within modernism: the televisual as it was assimilated in art works and criticism, shifting notions of performance, and strategies of mediation in nonviolent direct action. Martin Luther King, Jr. imagined nonviolent direct action as a provocation of violence against oneself through nonviolent means with the aim of “dramatizing” injustice. Nelson argues that the modes of performance in direct action during the early ’60s, when “direct” bodily interventions were re-conceptualized as televisual events, carried over into the televisual performance of video art. Such a confluence of factors puts the art movements of the ’60s precisely in the context of civil rights, rather than in its wake. In this lecture, works such as Ken Dewey’s mixed media installation about the Selma to Montgomery march, Selma Last Year (1966), and the experimental workshops of Anna and Lawrence Halprin (1966–71) provide a point of entry for considering contact, a discourse of direct/indirect address that Nelson locates in both political activism and art works. Nonviolent direct action, the particular instantiation of politics that Nelson argues is most relevant to video’s conceptual frameworks, will be positioned as a creative act in its own rightSponsored by the art department.

Solveig Nelson

Sinem Casale, "Kiss both his eyes for me/Take good care of my prince" The Reception of Safavid Child Hostage Prince at the Ottoman Court

Monday, March 9, 4:45 p.m., Psychology 105

Sinem Casale, assistant professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, focuses her research on the history and visual culture of earlymodern Islamic courts (Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals), with a special focus on issues of exchange, materiality, gift-giving practices, courtly rituals, and picture theory. Prof. Casale received a PhD from University of Minnesota in art history, with a thesis, "Gifts in Motion: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange." Based on that study, her current book project investigates the ceremonial exchange of gifts between the Ottoman and Safavid courts, and explores the potential of objects to act as agents in diplomatic negotiations. Sponsored by the Cooley/Gray Art Fund.

Sinem Casale

Emergent Art Space "Translations"

Presented by Emergent Art Space
Hosted by the Reed College Art Department

Round Table Conversation: February 7, 2015 - 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm
Reception: February 7, 2015 - 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm
Exhibition: January 20 through February 20, 2015, 11:00 am to 5:00 pm 
Studio Art Building, Edith Feldenheimer Gallery

Free and open to the public.  Online exhibition, as well.

Emergent Art Space is proud to present its fourth International Juried Exhibition, hosted by the Art Department of Reed College, on the theme Translations, featuring the works of 44 students and emerging artists from 20 countries. 

More than 300 young artists from around the world responded to the Call for Art we launched last August, and 46 works were ultimately selected by the jury for this exhibition. 

Translating refers to bringing across, transporting, and transferring. It is a process that aims to make ideas and information understandable from one language to another, to make them accessible from one culture to the next. Translations facilitate communication and expand our understanding. Moving between languages, forms, times, and identities, translations make us more acutely aware of differences and similarities, and force us to see and address them. Translations remind us that understanding is never easy or granted, and that it always requires effort, patience, an open mind, and courage. What is lost in translation and what is found?

You are invited to join Geraldine Ondrizek, Professor of Art at Reed College, Grazia Peduzzi, founder and director of Emergent Art Space, and several artists from the exhibition at the round table and reception.

Emergent Art Space is a non-profit organization whose mission is to connect students and young artists around the world, and to foster dialogue and communication, through the visual arts, across cultural barriers and boundaries. Emergent Art Space encourages diversity, values traditions, and welcomes the new and experimental. It showcases the richness and diversity of young artists in the contemporary, global world.

translations