Art Lecture Series

The Evergreen State College

Page 21 of 21

Susie Lee: Wednesday, December 1, 2010 11:30-1 Lecture Hall 1

Susie Lee was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania and grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota. She was awarded a Bachelors of Science in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and a Masters in Education at Columbia University. She received her MFA at the University of Washington and currently resides in Seattle. Susie is represented by Lawrimore Project in Seattle and Galleria Tiziana Di Caro in Italy.

Although often ephemeral, my time-based works have always been deployed in conjunction with a commitment to materiality and always firmly rooted in the context of something that exists to the touch. While still sensitive to the “hand,” my practice has expanded to more integrate my background in molecular science and urban education.  Through a series of progressive, though infinitesimal, steps, matter, ideas and relationships are transformed, sometimes towards decay and sometimes towards definition. As teacher and researcher, I shift towards a practice based upon collaborations with, and outward observations of, others. Inherently, these connections take time, and it is through watching, listening, and conversing that the center of works emerges.

Matt Browning: Wednesday November 3, 2010 11:30 am to 1:00 pm, Lecture Hall 1

The work of Matt Browning calls attention to the ways ritual, conquest and competition inform identity.  Activated by observation and collection, Browning confronts the complexities of tradition and material expectation, generating pieces that operate somewhere between devotional objects and performative relics.

Description of recent exhibition in Lawrimore Project:

Matt Browning is taking his time.  More precisely, his new work is taking its own sweet time and asks the viewer to do the same.  It even takes time to simply locate his work within the gallery.  For his first major one-person exhibition with Lawrimore Project, Browning defies the typical expectations placed on a young artist given such an opportunity by presenting the entire body of work humbly unlit and almost-not-even-there, tucked in the very back corner of the gallery.  “Tradition As Adaptive Strategy” is a series of small sculptures similarly executed, though each unique, installed on what was formerly the gallery’s fireplace mantle.  Painstakingly carved from solid pieces of fir in the tradition of whittled ‘whimsies’, the 34, funnel-shaped objects were then filled and coated with pine sap the artist gathered and transformed into pitch through a process of heating and filtering.   Conceptually, the work flows from many sources—from folk art and native culture traditions to scientific and philosophical tracts on time, fire, homeostatsis, homeorrhesis, and Phlogiston Theory—but, most specifically, it was inspired by the “Pitch Drop Experiment”, the longest continuously running scientific experiment in the world.  Begun in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell to prove the viscosity of seemingly solid substances, the experiment simply consists of counting the number of drops of pitch flowing from a glass funnel.  In the 80 years since its inception the experiment has yielded just 8 drops, a minor return in terms of data: investment.  This glacial, ‘drop-per-decade’ notion can analogously be tied to Browning’s patience with the reception and ramifications of this body of work, recognizing that what takes time is the preparation, research and experiences leading up to the creative act and, now, perseverance in the spaces after and between the drops where we find meanings and become their steward.

Harrell Fletcher: Wednesday October 20, 2010 11:30 am – 1:00 pm, Lecture Hall 1

Harrell Fletcher received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from California College of the Arts. He studied organic farming at UCSC and went on to work on a variety of small Community Supported Agriculture farms, which impacted his work as an artist. Fletcher has produced a variety of socially engaged collaborative and interdisciplinary projects since the early 1990’s. His work has been shown at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Wattis Institute, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Sculpture Center, The Wrong Gallery, Apex Art, and Smackmellon in NYC, DiverseWorks and Aurora Picture show in Houston, TX, PICA in Portland, OR, CoCA and The Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, WA, Signal in Malmo, Sweden, Domain de Kerguehennec in France, The Royal College of Art in London, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Fletcher has work in the collections of MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, SFMoMA, The Berkeley Art Museum, The De Young Museum, and The FRAC Brittany, France. In 2002 Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, a participatory website with Miranda July. A book version of LTLYM was published in 2007 by Prestel. Fletcher is the 2005 recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts. His exhibition The American War originated in 2005 at ArtPace in San Antonio, TX, and traveled to Solvent Space in Richmond, VA, White Columns in NYC, The Center For Advanced Visual Studies MIT in Boston, MA, PICA in Portland, OR, and LAXART in Los Angeles among other locations. Fletcher is an Associate Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.

Nicholas Galanin: Wednesday October 13, 2010 11:30 am – 1:00 pm, Lecture Hall 1

Art by Nicholas Galanin

Nicholas Galanin (b. 1979)

Tlingit/Aleut/ Multi-Disciplinary Artist

Born in Sitka, Alaska, Nicholas Galanin has struck an intriguing balance between his origins and the course of his practice. Having trained extensively in ‘traditional’ as well as ‘contemporary’ approaches to art, he pursues them both in parallel paths. His stunning bodies of work simultaneously preserve his culture and explore new perceptual territory.

Artist Statement 2010

I work with concepts, the medium follows.  In the business of this “Indian Art World” I have become impatient with the institutional prescription and its monolithic attempt to define culture as it unfolds.  Native American Art can not be commonly defined as our work moves freely through time.  The viewer, collector, or curators’ definition will often convey more about themselves than that of the “Native Artist”.  In the past I have struggled with this title, though I now embrace my position as a contemporary indigenous artist with belief that some forms of resistance often carry equal amounts of persistence.  My current collection of work presents visual experiences in hope of inspiring creative dialogue with the viewer.  I work with an intention to contribute towards contemporary cultural development.  Through education and creative risk taking I hope to progress cultural awareness both in and out of this Indigenous world.

His work is in the current exhibition, It’s Complicated – Art about Home at the Evergreen Gallery.

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