TIME SCAPES

CA 160 Introduction to Visual Art

CA 160 is an introductory visual art course at Simon Fraser University's School for the Contemporary Arts.
From the calendar: CA 160 is a studio-based course that provides students with a practical and theoretical foundation for contemporary visual art. The course is organized through a series of projects concentrating on the fundamental aspects of the visual art process and the nature of materials. The projects guide the student through experimentation in a range of mediums in both two and three dimensions. Each project is a logical development from the one preceding it. The course text and in-class discussions focus on developing the student’s ability to discuss art works with a critical awareness of issues pertaining to materiality and representation. The work of a variety of contemporary artists is introduced through in-class presentations.
As an integral part of their creative activity, students are expected to contribute to class discussions and critiques of each project through engaged, informed and constructive criticism. In addition, students are encouraged to familiarize themselves with contemporary art through assigned readings, individual research of contemporary art journals and visits to galleries, museums and other exhibition sites either in person or digitally.

Our teaching and studying studio art remotely, during the pandemic, is a new situation and we hope to focus on the positive potentials of this new, and temporary configuration. Moreso now than at other times, my colleagues Kathy Slade, Judy Radul and I have adapted our assignments to allow students to reflect on the conditions of our current situation.. The possibility to share the same studio environment is replaced by the separate the zoom presence of our various living or working spaces.

Assignments like "Working from Bed" specifically address and recognizes that while we are all in lock-down or self-isolation our conditions and contexts vary. t The main topic of the "Working from Bed" assignment is the question of what it mean to work from home? Students are asked to consider the differences between the bedroom and an artist’s studio or a gallery. How do these differences in scale, context, or framing of these sites change a work? In the common binary that is set up between public (masculine, rational, outside) and private (feminine, irrational, inside) the bedroom is placed squarely in the arena of the private, yet many artists have used this space for public or political ends. Artists working in diverse eras and contexts have worked from bed ranging a gamut from Marcel Proust to John Lennon and Yoko Ono and Tracy Emin. A focus on how we can be social during the pandemic is reflected in the assignment "Identical Lunch", which asks students to work in groups of three to plan a menu, eat together and take notes about their lunchtime conversations. Based on Alison Knowles famous work, students will make a score for the lunch and create a small magazine about their experience.

Time Scapes developed out of an ongoing conversation with my artist colleague Karina Nimmerfall from Germany, teaching remotely as we do. We discussed different artistic tools and methods of visual display which could be employed to investigate and research time as a new ‘pandemic landscape’. Students from Vancouver and Cologne worked on similar assignments and, as a final critique, discussed their work during 2-hour online dialogue. The works that the Vancouver and Cologne students devised, which all took the form of artistic graphs, are currently being exhibited at in Graz, Austria through Camera Austria, a leading institution in the discourse and role of photography as a medium and practice within contemporary art. Camera Austria has dedicated their programming this year to extensive public art projects and community organized practice with the title “The City & The Good Life.”
Photo credit: Markus Krottendorf