Throughout install, the students have been taking breaks to be interviewed on video to discuss their art works, and their inspiration, process and approach to creating them.  The videos will be featured on this page, along with video of the installation process and from the opening itself.  If you can’t make it to the opening (Tuesday, April 22nd - from 6-9pm) check back here to watch.

The students have been busy installing the Bruno David Gallery in anticipation for tomorrow night’s opening. Here are images of them at work:

Sculpture Students from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University collaborate with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts –

For art students, the spring 2008 exhibit at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, Dan Flavin: Constructed Light, provides a springboard for direct experience, conceptual investigation, and response to ideas regarding objecthood in the context of Tadao Ando’s architecture.

The Object in Culture, led by Jill Downen, is a seminar within the sculpture major at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts comprised of seniors and juniors. The students meet weekly to discuss ideas regarding objecthood in relation to culture, contemporary art, and their own studio practices. A consideration of the object in multiple cultural contexts, its function, its historical precedents, and its antecedents provide a framework for dialogue. This includes key texts such as Art and Objecthood by Michael Fried and The Reenchantment of Art: Making Art as if the World Mattered, Models of Partnership by Suzi Gablik. In particular, students examine the following questions: What does it mean to make or appropriate an object and place it in the world? How does the art of Dan Flavin address the use of common objects as a way to explore light and atmosphere? What forms may emerge from an anti-object position in the creative process?

The sessions allow for emergent themes and student directed investigations. Through discussions, readings, student-led presentations, writing exercises, guest speakers, and field trips, the seminar aims to broaden and deepen students understanding of artistic practice. The culminating event of the semester-long collaboration with the Pulitzer Foundation is a student directed exhibition of projects at Bruno David Gallery. Titled Light Contact, the exhibition features varied, multimedia projects that embody the students’ ideas, investigations, and perspectives about the nature of objecthood.

Jill Downen, Visiting Assistant Professor in Art at Washington University in St. Louis —

This interdisciplinary studio course explored ideas and cultural contexts of portraiture, homage, and embodiment. The exhibit at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, titled Portrait / Homage / Embodiment, provided a springboard for direct experience, conceptual investigation, and response to modern and contemporary works in the context of Tadao Ando’s architecture. The course also exposed students to a series of speakers representing curatorial, artistic, and architectural perspectives (Matthias Waschek, Susan Cahan, Judy Mann, Andrew Walker, Jamie Adams, and Adrian Luchini). Students focused on the identification of emergent themes from reading material and interdisciplinary dialogue in order to develop and exhibit their own creative projects. They considered questions such as: What systems of representation have replaced the traditional limits of portraiture? What constitutes an homage in today’s visual culture? What philosophical contexts inform the notion of embodiment? The culminating event was titled “People Watching at the Pulitzer” (April 17, 2007) and included a exhibition of student art at the Bruno David Gallery.

At the beginning of the semester, I could not predict what the students projects would look like. However, I intended to create learning experiences that would allow each student to tap into his or her creative powers and begin to identify their individual artistic voices. Students chose their own subject matter, materials, and took on the responsibility of learning.

The project results were as diverse as the student body. Students used sculpture, drawing, photography, digital imaging / printing, and installation to explore their ideas. Several themes emerged: representations of people they knew well (a mother, sister, best friend, coworkers), representations of people they knew only through celebrity or media (Mark McGwire, Liz Taylor, Kim Jong Il), and representations of a group of people or city (the victims of Hurricane Katrina or inhabitants of St. Louis). Some projects were abstract, others figurative, and still others took on forms such as advertising and movie posters.

From these themes, students learned that ideas of portraiture, homage and embodiment are often linked, used in hierarchical ways, and open to interpretation by artists and viewers alike. The following are selected quotes written by students:

“Where I really began to understand the amazing expansion of portraiture, from a physical representation of a person to a plethora of contemporary interpretations, was in the classroom. Watching the completely different directions each student took the seemingly straightforward idea of portraiture, I realized the infinite ways works fit into this category and how all three topics named in the course title intertwine.” Jenny Murphy (created shrine-like installations in homage to her parents who are professional architects).

“In addition to expanding my knowledge and understanding of Portrait, Homage, and Embodiment, I was able to apply that knowledge in my own art. I created a piece that has tremendous meaning to me, and I had the privilege of seeing that work hung in a gallery. I feel that I learned about the mental and physical processes of making art and also about the processes of being an artist.” Lainie Turkish (created “Katrina”, a series of 30 ephemeral portraits of victims of the hurricane, including her own father)

While this summary cannot comprehensively address the depth of learning that occurred for the eleven sophomore students in the class, I can say that the semester was meaningful in numerous ways. First, the collaboration allowed Washington University students access to the Pulitzer Foundation’s resources. The expertise of Matthias Waschek, Tim Reichman and Rachel Gagnon helped students break down their preconceptions and discover new perspectives on the meaning of portrait, homage, and embodiment. Most importantly, the students built relationships with people in the St. Louis art world both inside and beyond the academic classroom. Bruno David was particularly generous in hosting the student exhibition. He took time to speak to each student about the projects, offered critiques, taught students how to install their work and interacted with them at the opening reception. During the panel discussion at the Pulitzer on April 17, students had an opportunity to publicly discuss their ideas and projects. The validation that came from experiencing the public response to their art in a commercial gallery was beyond measure, and the viewer interaction provided new ways of understanding the fullness of the creative process.

In sum, the collaboration was meaningful for me because I was able to witness students’ growth through real world experiences. It also gave me much pleasure to share my professional relationships with the students. The success of this collaboration resulted from the efforts and enthusiasm of all the people who played a part, they are numerous and I am grateful to all of them.

Click here to read further about this program, and student responses to works of art in the Portrait/Homage/Embodiment exhibition

Photographs of the installed student exhibition, on view April 17, 2007 at the Bruno David Gallery 

I re-created a vintage movie poster for Raintree Country, a 1957 film that starred Elizabeth Taylor. In my version, I projected Taylor into present-day, modifying her portrait to fit into Hollywood’s modern beauty standards. In doing so, I hope the viewer will reflect on how the media’s shifting portrayal of “celebrity” has been so dramatic that my grossly exaggerated portrait isn’t so far from reality.

I kept rather close to the system of traditional portraiture. I digitally altered a posed publicity portrait that Liz Taylor sat for while she was promoting her film, using an actual representation of her from the past. I found that portrait artists have often exaggerated or changed features of their sitters throughout history, so I thought my method really fell within the traditional realm of portraiture.

Throughout my investigations, I learned that by tweaking an image in very specific manners, I tread the line between homage and mockery. I learned that through this method, I could create something that the viewer may look at for a long period of time and still be unsure whether I am paying homage to a celebrity of if I am mocking the institutions that have formed the foundation for fame. The key is in the believability of the modifications, something that I learned from researching the works of John Currin and Cindy Sherman.

The work “Reflection” is a piece of galvanized steel hammered into a complex curve with one side polished to a near mirror finish. I chose to represent the idea of me seeing myself in my grandfather via the reflective surface of the polished metal.

Non-traditional methods of portraiture have the power to speak volumes about a subject as much, and in some cases more, than representational portraits or photographs.

“Dave” is a portrait of one of the wood shop technicians at my university. After collecting the emptied food cans he threw out this semester, I made molds around the cans using a mix of pulped construction paper and wood glue. The molds were later removed from the cans and laid out in a roughly 5′ by 10′ grouping that was intended to create a portrait and embodiment of the subject.

For “Dave,” I chose to represent someone whom I’ve met but know very little about. I was thinking about what the audience would gather from the piece through abstraction, regardless of having met my subject.

My project consists of 60 small-scale, high-resolution images and 3 large-scale, low-resolution images face of my best friend. Each photograph is a close-up and cropped part of her face that is unrecognizable and unidentifiable. With this project, I aimed to push the boundaries and limits that people create in their minds about the definition of “identity”.

In using such small images, I was able to create a certain level of abstraction. Because I experimented with scale, proportion and orientation to such a extreme degree, I forced viewers to stand in front of a nose and question, what is this? This was on of the main ideas behind my piece; to force viewers to reconsider that which they associate with the word “identity” and to change that which is familiar, to unfamiliar.

I used hair to mimic a textile in Mary Ann and the Fitzgeralds and to act as a line drawing in The Ties That Bind. Both pieces utilized the deeply layered properties of hair as a means of representing close relatives.

Mary Ann and The Ties That Bind both used nontraditional materials in addition to varying degrees of abstraction. The latter was particularly evident in Mary Ann, which featured purely geometric shapes.

In representing someone you know well, I think that material choice becomes particularly important. At the same time, though, this choice is often easier in such a situation because your subject often leads you to a material itself.