Creative Practice Showcases
University of San Jorge
Undermining Gender, Religious and Cultural Norms in Contemporary Israeli Art : Palestinian and Jewish Women Artists from Israel in the Exhibition - Trespassing, Jerusalem, 2020
Creative Practice Showcase Sigal Barkai
As the curator of the Exhibition Trespassing, which was exhibited at the Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem in 2020, I share extensive field research I conducted during the years 2017-2020. My journey included studio visits, curatorial mentoring and in-depth conversations with 15 women artists hailing from a conservative, religious, and patriarchal background, who created bold art that confronts the conventions of the society from which they come. I presented the results of this process in the exhibition at the museum, while trying to coordinate the spirit of the works with the visual language and the design of the exhibition space. During the session, I demonstrate the main theme of the exhibition using the artwork of the participating artists. Their contemporary artwork, created especially for the exhibition, was done in various mediums such as sculpture, hyper-realistic painting, photography, installation, mural, video and more. I show how each of the works used the medium and the artistic media in a refined and complex way, in order to simultaneously converse with the historical and cultural conventions of the artist's community of origin, while negotiating the contemporary existence of the artists as citizens of modern and democratic Israel.
Culture Mapping In Creative Domains: Arts and Study Abroad View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Heidi Powell
Sensorial encounters of memory and mapping in unfamiliar places is about the journey. Often, without knowing a language, cultural nuances, and education culture specific to a global region, discovering places of identity and cultural resonance through the senses, enlivens research and pedagogical practice. This creative practice showcase demonstrates pedagogical tools one can use while teaching or researching abroad. Situated in several global spaces, teaching abroad offers a new way of experiencing dynamic learning immersion. This showcase discusses my researching and teaching journey with students who were eager to learn about visual art, as we moved forward in learning together through culture mapping, Virtual Exchange (Piggybacking), and exploration, we all had to leave presuppositions and assumptions behind, that both disturbed and invigorated what we would come to know about ourselves, cultures, known and unknown, and art. Using our senses, findings common understandings of meaning and identity, This presentation describes journeys, give examples, and shares how we can come to know through memory, the senses, and culture mapping.
"Hungry Man": Songs of Hubris and Transformation View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Lisa Parkins
"Hungry Man" is a series of songs based on “Erysichthon,” a mythic tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This presentation considers the creative process and aesthetic choices used to re-envision the ancient narrative. In Ovid’s telling, an arrogant king cuts down a tree in the sacred grove of Ceres. The goddess curses the criminal with insatiable hunger. To finance his ravenous appetite, Erysichthon sells his daughter over and over again. In the end, the all- consuming king devours himself. "Hungry Man" deconstructs Ovid’s text. Set in the twenty-first century, Erysichthon is a developer who destroys a community park for a real estate project. Although his daughter is again sacrificed, she asserts personal agency–choosing to leave her father to suffer his own fate. In Ovid’s time, the myth was intended to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of mortal hubris towards a powerful goddess. Today, “Erysichthon” can be understood as an allegory for unbridled consumerism and the catastrophic consequences of our human-made climate crisis. "Hungry Man" will be analyzed using an interdisciplinary approach informed by environmental studies, literary theory, and psychology including: Timothy Morton’s concept of dark ecology; Linda Hutcheon’s theory of parody; and Carl Jung’s understanding of participation mystique. The presentation includes listening to excerpts from the project.
