Evergreen Art Lecture Series

Alison O’Daniel works weave narrative between films, objectmaking and performance. Utilizing sound and its synesthetic displacement onto materials, O’Daniel builds a visual, aural and haptic vocabulary through varying levels of access to sound, color and material. O’Daniel’s previous feature-length film Night Sky premiered at the Anthology Film Archive in conjunction with Performa 11 and the exhibition Walking Forward-Running Past at Art In General, New York. Night Sky has been presented with live musical accompaniment by various musicians or with live Sign Language accompaniment at The Nightingale (Chicago), MOCAD (Detroit), NYU, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Jurassic Technology and other venues. She is the recipient of grants from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Art Matters, the Franklin Furnace Fund and the California Community Foundation.

Recent solo exhibitions include Samuel Freeman Gallery in Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include Untitled Art Fair, L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice, CA, and Zic Zerp Gallery in Rotterdam. Writing about O’Daniel’s work has appeared in ArtForum, the L.A. Times, L.A. Weekly, and ArtReview. She is currently working on her second feature length film, The Tuba Thieves.

Matthew Offenbacher seeks constructive, positive positions at often difficult intersections of individuals, communities and institutions. His work has been called “freakishly egoless”, vulnerable, funny and queer. Offenbacher grew up in Portland, Oregon, and currently lives in Seattle, Washington. He runs a press which publishes ‘zines and books by Northwest artists. His essays include Green Gothic (2009), which has become a landmark in Pacific Northwest art history. Recent exhibitions and projects include The V&A at Veronica, Deed of Gift at the Seattle Art Museum, and Flower Painting at Lather Daddy Laundromat. Other notable exhibitions include The Gift Shop (2009-10) at the Henry Art Gallery.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          His “Decor for Interstellar Flight” is included in the exhibition “Sensations that Announce the Future” in the Evergreen Gallery.

Born in Peekskill, NY,  Dannielle Tegeder currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and maintains a studio at The Elizabeth Foundation in Manhattan. She received a BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase (1994), and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (1997). For the past fifteen years, her work has explored abstraction. While the core of her work is paintings and drawings, she has recently begun to include large-scale installation, sculptural objects, video, sound, and animation.

Since receiving her MFA in 1997 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Dannielle’s work has been presented in over 100 gallery exhibitions, both nationally and internationally in Paris, Houston, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, and New York.  She has participated in numerous institution exhibitions including PS1/MOMA, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Several of her drawings have recently been purchased as part of the Contemporary Drawing Collection at the Museum of Modern Art, and her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and The Weatherspoon Museum of Art in Greensboro, NC.

Cassie Thornton is a social practice artist and is collaborating with Evergreen students as part of the exhibit, Sensations that Announce the Future in the Evergreen Gallery.  She is also known as the Feminist Economics Department (The FED). The FED works with imaginary financial limitations. On earth, we have amassed excessive public, private and personal debt, justifying an inability to provide shelter or food, education, or healthcare for many, and much less, go to space. Collective fear of debt is so strong that when we look at the sky we see the debt ceiling where the ozone used to be, rather than an expansive universe with infinite possibility. Thus, The FED’s materials are in themselves financial forms– debt and its accomplice, security.

On earth, The FED constructs situations where members of the public observe and confront financialization– in order to see it as an idea that can be manipulated rather than the absolute way of living and being. Through producing experimental moments in public spaces, participants test and extend what can be considered ‘real’. This work involves ordinary people doing extraordinary things— dancers touching the surfaces inside financial institutions, actors selling their nervous breakdowns to pay off debt, security guards protecting public vulnerability by reciting poetry written on the job, and people screaming their debt to space over the radio.

Evergreen Art Lecture Series presents a broad range of interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art issues by artists, writers, and scholars.  The emphasis is to introduce the way in which a variety of practices undertake various fields of inquiry. The series provides a lively forum for the exchange of ideas between the speakers, students, faculty and the public. The series will take place in the Recital Hall of the Communications Building at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. Most of the talks take place on every other Wednesday from 11:30-1:00 pm and are free and open to the public. PLEASE NOTE extra dates and times for art lectures.

This fall many of the lectures are by *artists in the Evergreen Gallery exhibition, Sensations that Announce the Future.

Fall Quarter 2015

*Week 2: 10/7  Cassie Thornton, social practice/interdisciplinary artist

Week 3: 10/15 THURSDAY, 1-2:30PM Dannielle Tegeder, visual artist, professional practices

*Week 4: 10/21 Matt Offenbacher, visual artist, social practices

Week 6: 11/4 Alison O’Daniel, video/ interdisciplinary artist

Week 7: MONDAY, 11/9, 5:30-7PM  Thierry de Duve,  art historian and theorist

Week 7: TUESDAY, 11/10, 10:30-12PM  Lisa Blas , visual artist

*Week 8: 11/18 Davida Ingram,  social practice/interdisciplinary artist

*Week 10: 12/9 Issues in Contemporary Native Art – Panel discussion organized by Gail Tremblay

Cassie Thornton is also known as the Feminist Economics Department (The FED). The FED works with imaginary financial limitations. On earth, we have amassed excessive public, private and personal debt, justifying an inability to provide shelter or food, education, or healthcare for many, and much less, go to space. Collective fear of debt is so strong that when we look at the sky we see the debt ceiling where the ozone used to be, rather than an expansive universe with infinite possibility. Thus, The FED’s materials are in themselves financial forms– debt and its accomplice, security.

On earth, The FED constructs situations where members of the public observe and confront financialization– in order to see it as an idea that can be manipulated rather than the absolute way of living and being. Through producing experimental moments in public spaces, participants test and extend what can be considered ‘real’. This work involves ordinary people doing extraordinary things— dancers touching the surfaces inside financial institutions, actors selling their nervous breakdowns to pay off debt, security guards protecting public vulnerability by reciting poetry written on the job, and people screaming their debt to space over the radio.

Amjad Faur currently teaches photography and visual arts at The Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington. He came to Evergreen from the University of Arkansas, where he primarily taught art history and critical theory. His current research involves the overlapping visual languages of colonial Europe in the Middle East and the tropes/signifiers scattered throughout Western art history that harmonize with these expansionist tendencies.

                               Steven Hendricks was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He moved out west to attend Evergreen. He completed his MFA in Writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then returned to Washington to teach at Evergreen. Hendricks’s work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Web Conjunctions, Fold: The Reader, The Encyclopedia Project (Vol. 2), Sidebrow, and at XCP (archived at PennSound, 2005). Hendricks is also a practicing bookbinder and letterpress printer. His artists’ book work, Breathing Machine, appears in Lark Books’ anthology 500 Handmade Books: Inspiring Interpretations of a Timeless Form. He has shown artist book works in galleries in Olympia, Portland, and Seattle. His first novel, Little is Left to Tell, was published by Starcherone Books in the Fall of 2014.

Kim Miller received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York City and her MFA from Vermont College. Miller has shown videos, performed live and combinations thereof on national tours and international shows, from China to Milwaukee. Kim was awarded the Mary L. Nohl Individual Artist Fellowship 2009-10, Artist-in-Residence at Compeung, Doi Saket, Thailand in 2011 & 2012, Artist-in-Residence at Lynden Sculpture Garden in 2013-14 and a Puffin Foundation, Ltd. Grant in 2014.

She has taught in the humanities and design department at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand; the film and graphic design departments in the United States at UW-Milwaukee; and in the foundations, fine art, liberal studies and design departments of Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

Alejandro de Acosta describes his Art Lecture  as”a discussion of the work of Argentine poet Antonio Porchia (1885-1968), and his translation of Porchia. Porchia developed and wrote solely in a singular form he called voces (voices). His single book, named, precisely, VOCES, was little known when it appeared, due in part to his distance from literary circles and to its unclassifiable short, aphoristic poetry. Alejandro will discuss Porchia’s poetry and poetics, his finished and unfinished voices, and his approach to sharing them; their influence on subsequent Argentine poets; and the process of his current collaborative translation of them, opening out onto a larger set of ideas about language and translation, poetic forms and how they are circulated and made public.”

Alejandro was born in Buenos Aires in 1972, and grew up in Caracas, Madison (Wisconsin) and Cleveland (Ohio).  Tertiary education in Amherst, MA (Hampshire College, bachelor’s degree) and Binghamton, NY (doctorate at Binghamton University).  A onetime participant in the zine and mail art milieu, in Austin, Alejandro founded mufa::poema, a micropress that freely distributed a dozen poetry and prose chapbooks. Long standing interest in sound art and poetry reading led to a two-year radio and podcast project, “Sector Phy,” on KPWR-FM, as well as numerous audio performances under the moniker JANO (THING) SELECTOR.

Back in Binghamton, study of the history of Western philosophy and contemporary continental thought brought Alejandro to write a dissertation on Spinozan themes, not without a discussion of exhortatory graffiti.  These studies subsequently displaced themselves in the direction of, first, Latin American philosophy, and second, an articulation of (for lack of a better word) anarchist ideas in various genres of prose.  An outcome of this second trajectory, informed by continued engagement with poetry and poetics, are his two recent collections of critical and experimental essays: The Impossible, Patience (Ardent Press, 2014) and How to Live Now or Never (Repartee/LBC Books, 2014).

For many years, Alejandro taught philosophy and poetry at Southwestern University (Georgetown, TX), as well as in popular education settings.  Readings, lectures, and presentations in Albany, Austin, Berkeley, Denver, Morelia, Portland, Seattle and elsewhere.  With Joshua Beckman, Alejandro has translated the poetry of Jorge Carrera Andrade (Micrograms, Wave Books, 2011) and Carlos Oquendo de Amat (Five Meters of Poems, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010).  Most recently, Alejandro translated Fabian Luduena’s H.P. Lovecraft: The Disjunction in Being (Schism Press, 2015).  Two current projects are an anthology of writing by and about Antonio Porchia and The Ponge Stone, a manuscript of translations, essays, and letters emerging from the study of Francis Ponge’s Pour un Malherbe.  Alejandro’s ongoing research is in U.S. and Latin American poetry, and, still, philosophy.  Alejandro de Acosta currently lives in Olympia, WA.