Evergreen Art Lecture Series

Week 2 – October 5, 2011–Fionn Meade (via telecommuting)

Fionn Meade is Curator at SculptureCenter, NY, where recent group
exhibitions include Knight’s Move, a survey of new sculpture in New
York, and Leopards in the Temple, with Lothar Baumgarten, Das
Institut, Patrick Hill, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Lucy Skaer,
and Kathrin Sonntag, among others. Recent curatorial projects also
include Nachleben, co-organized with Lucy Raven at Goethe Institut,
NY, which engaged Aby Warburg’s thinking and included works by Matthew
Buckingham, Patricia Esquivias, William E. Jones, Harun Farocki,
Rachel Harrison, John Miller, Stan VanDerBeek, James Welling,
Christopher Wool, and Akram Zaatari, among others, and Entr’acte at
Catherine Bastide with Tom Burr, James Coleman, David Noonan, William
Pope.L, Catherine Sullivan, and Rosemarie Trockel. His writing appears
in Artforum, Bomb, Bidoun, The Fillip Review, Mousse, and Parkett,
among other publications, and he received a 2009 Arts Writer Grant
from Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Recently
released catalog writing includes essays on Elad Lassry for the
Kunsthalle Zurich (JRP/Ringier), and Mark Morrisroe for the Fotomuseum
Winterthur (JRP/Ringier). He holds an MA from the Center for
Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and MFA in Creative Writing from
Columbia University

Jennifer Combe is an Evergreen alum, artist and teacher. She graduated from Evergreen with both a Master in Teaching with a focus on art education in 1997, and in 1995, a Bachelor of Arts focused on anti-bias education, cultural studies, and art. In 2009 she earned a Master in Fine Art from The Vermont College of Fine Arts.

“Over the past fourteen years, I’ve engaged in an art practice investigating the cultural contexts of how meaning is derived from mark making both on the canvas and in the classroom. When I began with that first class of bright-eyed five and six year olds I compartmentalized these two acts. This was partially a knee-jerk defense to protect my studio practice from the monumental heap of work that teaching in a public school has become in this time and place. But now that the first decade of mark making and the teaching of mark making have passed, I take comfort, satisfaction, and find a deep joy in these inseparable acts.”

Her visual work has been exhibited in a range of venues, including galleries, homes, state buildings, restaurants, book stores, LGBTQ festivals, and colleges in Portland, Seattle, Olympia, Montpelier, VT, Salt Lake City, and Missoula, MT.

Female heroism is undersung, but Ellen Lesperance is determined to sing it—not only so it’s not forgotten, but with the hope that it might be catching. Go to her web site, and you immeditely hear the chants of the Women’s Peace Camp at the nuclear testing site Greenham Common.

Look at her paintings, outside the elevators at Seattle Art Museum, and you see they’re dot patterns in a grid on brownish paper: patterns for sweaters that, when worn—and however soft—might transform the individual wearer. Lesperance, originally from a hippieish family in Seattle’s U District and now living in the latter-day utopic city of Portland, is both wedded to and critical of collective idealism. She knows how it can hollow out over time, and how dogma or compromise can take over. But she plainly still believes in the sheer power of individual action. How to make it happen? That’s the spur of her work.

The tone of inspiration has become pretty rare in art. It’s fairly rare in the culture at large. Radical acts may remain, but the rousing spirit of radicalism is hard to find. Lesperance’s art actually includes everything from the archival photos she starts with to the titles she writes to the pattern paintings that hang on the wall to the sweaters she wants to be worn. One of her own inspirations was visiting the Asylum for Radical Feminism in Santa Fe, which she found harrowing: The feminists were very few in number, and essentially impoverished. But they had stories to tell; that’s where she learned of Greenham Common.-Jen Graves, The Stranger

“I like the idea that, for example, through the recreation of a Greenham sweater, a new ‘wearer’ might be beckoned. I also have a particular interest in assigning valor to young women from the Pacific Northwest like Rachel Corrie and Beth Horehound O’Brien, women who have sacrificed their lives fighting the good fight.”

Seattle artist Brian Murphy uses watercolor to create introspective self-portraits. Using fleshy, bold colors, Murphy creates invisible and reductive areas, which allude to the mass and solidity of the human form. Murphy’s work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions and in 2001, Murphy received the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Memorial award.

Thom Andersen has lived in Los Angeles for most of his life. In the 1960s, he made short films, including Melting (1965), Olivia’s Place (1966), and — ——- (1967, with Malcolm Brodwick). In 1974 he completed Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, an hour-long documentation of Muybridge’s photographic work. In 1995, with Noël Burch, he completed Red Hollywood, a videotape about the filmwork created by the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist. Their work on the history of the Blacklist also produced a book, Les Communistes de Hollywood: Autre chose que des martyrs, published in 1994. In 2003 he completed Los Angeles Plays Itself, a videotape about the representation of Los Angeles in movies. It won the National Film Board of Canada Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2003 Vancouver International Film Festival, and it was voted best documentary of 2004 in the Village Voice Film Critics’ Poll. He has taught film composition at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987.Andersen is also one of the preeminent film educators in the United States, teaching at Cal Arts in Los Angeles where he has lived for most of his life. However his own films are largely unknown except for his 2003 award-winning portrait of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Plays Itself, voted best documentary of 2004 in the Village Voice Film Critics’ Poll.

There will be a screening of his latest film Get Out of the Car (2010) which responds to his award-winning documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself by recording the city’s most evanescent signs, memorializing some of its vanished monuments and musical history.

Hosted by Nonfiction Media, the Artist Lecture Series and Evergreen Expressions.