Collections, Obsessions, and the Display of the Other.
Faculty: Mary Ting
Within Mary Ting’s varied art practice of installation, drawing, photography and video, the prevailing emphasis is the use of the fragment within a nonlinear narrative. Her work inhabits the realm of temporality, private obsessions and the sensual. Layered with stories, glimpses of memories, metaphors, her animals, figures, limbs, and cropped forms are both personal and allegorical. Mary Ting’s artwork has been exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad since 1986. Mary currently teaches sculpture, drawing and paper, 2D/3D, and bookarts for Pratt Manhattan, SUNY at Nassau Community College and CUNY- John Jay College. She lives and works in New York City.
Workshop Description:
The collection, documentation, study and display of other creatures, cultures, and objects dates back to earliest civilizations. This tradition continues today in an updated interactive look. Within contemporary art, the critique of the institution both as content and form has become a well-established trend.
The workshop will combine presentations of historical and contemporary models with daily hands on activities suitable for all art forms. Historical models such as wonder cabinets, medical libraries, natural history museums will be examined for their cultural and political significance and the ongoing obsessive desire for the consumption of other cultures and life forms. Contemporary examples that mimic, comment, subvert and utilize these systems and display methods will also be presented. Students will discuss and examine these models, systems, research, and create a work specific to their medium and interests.
Goals:
Via examination of historical models and contemporary examples, participants will develop their own inventory and angle of inquiry.