East Duke Corridor Video Display: Arts of the Moving Image

Currently being presented on the East Duke Corridor Gallery video screen are thirteen videos, including animation, by current or past students in the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image. The video montage, totalling over 1-1/2 hours of run time, was assembled by Josh Gibson, Associate Director of AMI.

A Journey to the West, Lawrence Chen (6 min)
On the Trail of Gnicche, Zane Shannon, Sarah Goetz, Charlie  McSpadden, Julia Aronson, Dani Potter (10min 37 secs)
Elephant's Foot, Michael Faber (4 min 45 secs)
The Collector, Shang Gao (4 min 43 secs)
Good in My Hood, Eric Holljes (3 min 23 secs)
Side Effects, Lawrence Chen (8 min 53 secs)
La Vita Dell Pozo, (The Life of the Well) Jessica Dreyfus, Matt Tolson, Nick Weisner, Ian Howland, Alex Ripley (13min 5 secs)
Didn't Get It, Anthony Watkins (2 min 58 secs)
Attack of the Cephalopods, David Logan, Eric Bramley (22 min 8 secs)
As Good as it Gets, Varun Lela (3min 21 secs)
Conjuring Billie Holliday, Margo Joffe (12 min 4 secs)
Dance For Camera, Jessica Dreyfus (4 min 24 secs)
Pure Evil, Sam Cieply (3 min 13 secs)

Nasher Museum Lecture

Andy Warhol, Rick Ocasek, 1980. Polacolor 2, 4-1/4 x 3-3/8 inches. Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. © 2009 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Kristine Stiles, Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, presented "Ever So Far at Close Shooting Range: Warhol's Polaroid Photographs" at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke on December 3 as part of the public programming for the current exhibition Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids.

Religion and Visual Culture

David Morgan, Professor of Religion with a secondary appointment in Art, Art History and Visual Studies, contributed a group of essays to various books this year: "Seeing Nationhood: Images of American Identity," in Powers: Religion as a Social and Spiritual Force, edited by Meerten ter Borg & Jan Willem van Henten (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); "The Look of the Sacred," in Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, edited by Robert A. Orsi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); "Aura and the Inversion of Marian Pilgrimage: Fatima and Her Statues," in Moved by Mary: Pilgrimage in the Modern World, edited by A. Hermkens, W. Jansen and C. Notermans (Oxford: Ashgate, 2009); and "Painting as Visual Evidence: Production, Circulation, Reception," in Using Visual Evidence, edited by Richard Howells and Robert W. Matson (Maidenhead, England: Open University Press, 2009).

 
Visiting Artist Pinar Yoldas

The Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies is pleased to welcome Pinar Yoldas as a visiting artist during spring semester 2010. Thanks to the generous support of a Visiting Artist Grant from the Council for the Arts, Office of the Provost, Yoldas will use her residency to explore the field of neuroaesthetics via research, teaching, and a public exhibition.

In addition to her international exhibition record, Yoldas has long been cultivating her interests in the arts and sciences, specifically the relationship between the arts and the neurosciences. During her undergraduate bachelor of architecture professional degree from the distinguished Middle East Technical University (METU) in Istanbul, Ms. Yoldas developed a keen interest in visually interrogating the link between the lived environment and embodied notions of social space, receiving a METU Exceptional Undergraduate Scholarship and first prize in the MiMED Architectural Association Student Portfolio Competition.

Building upon her interest in the ways in which new technologies increasingly mediate sensory experiences, Yoldas next embarked on an ambitious graduate career that included a Masters of Arts in Visual Communication Design from Bilgi University in Istanbul in 2004, a Masters of Science in Information Technologies from Istanbul Technical University in 2006, and a Master of Fine Arts from the Department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA in 2008, where she was the recipient of the prestigious Eugene Wurzel Memorial Scholarship in 2006 and the Clifton Webb Scholarship in the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA in 2007.

It is through her most recent work at UCLA that Ms. Yoldas has become increasingly engaged in issues of perception, gender, and neuroscience - a passion she continues to pursue in both her teaching and individual practice. During her residency, Pinar will be teaching two courses in AAH&VS: ARTSVIS 269S.03, "Controlling Space and Meaning: Dialogues between Sculpture, Architecture & the Body," and VISUALST 260S.06, "ART <-> NEUROSCIENCE" (see below).

Conference on Romanesque and the Past

Beverley Minster, exterior.

Ph.D. candidate Matthew Woodworth received a fellowship to attend the British Archaeological Association conference, Romanesque and the Past, in London in April 2010.  Woodworth has spent the past year in England conducting research for his dissertation on Beverley Minster, a parish church in East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It is generally regarded as the most architecturally impressive church in England that is not a cathedral.

Matthew Woodworth inside Beverley Minster.

New Spring 2010 Courses

Controlling Space and Meaning: Dialogues between Sculpture, Architecture & the Body
ARTSVIS 269S.03, cross listed with VISUALST 260S.07
Instructor: Pinar Yoldas
Time: TH 1:15PM - 4:15PM

"The new building of the future will be everything in one form; architecture, sculpture and painting."
-Bauhaus Manifesto

In De Architectura (today known as the Ten Books of Architecture) prominent Roman architect Vitruvius asserts that an architectural structure must exhibit these three qualities: firmitas, utilitas, venustas - that is, it must be strong or durable, useful, and beautiful. Vitrivius orders these three qualities in terms of priority. Above all, an architectural structure has to be durable as to resist external forces that would harm its inhabitants. It has to be functional, as to serve its users' needs. And, finally, it has to be beautiful as to touch its inhabitants' souls. About two thousand years after Vitruvius, Louis Sullivan coined the phrase "form follows function," a principle of twentieth-century architecture echoing the order of firmitas>utilitas>venustas.

Yet the twentieth century has seen the dissolving of the boundaries that traditionally separate the fine arts from the decorative arts (as in the example of the Bauhaus) with a parallel dimming of the distinctions between sculpture and architecture. One can even claim that the shift from utilitas > venustas to venustas > utilitas has accelerated as we entered the twenty-first century. We can count so many architects/sculptors, such as Frank Gehry, Maya Lin, Santiago Calatrava, Richard Serra, and Greg Lynn, as living proofs of this merging together of two formerly distinct disciplines.

Through this studio class we will be exploring the blurry borders between contemporary architecture and sculpture, with an emphasis on the digital revolution and advances in technology as the major transformative forces of the century.

ART <-> NEUROSCIENCE
VISUALST 260S.06, cross listed with ARTS 269S.02
Instructor: Pinar Yoldas
Time: TU 1:15PM - 4:15PM

"A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind."
-Eugene Ionesco

Art can and does transform the human mind. When we experience art, a fascinating sequence of neurological, perceptual, and cognitive phenomena emerges. Sensory information flows through our neurons as we "feel" and "think"; this flow leads to new connections between our billions of neurons. These new connections are nothing but new ideas, novel ways of seeing and understanding ourselves and the world around us. If art and science are two different cultures, we will be looking at people who stand at the very intersection of these two territories, artists with a focus in science, scientists with a focus in art. By discussing subjects like memory, dreams, emotions, etc. that belong to both domains, an interdisciplinary understanding of art and science will be developed.

Visual Studies Initiative

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Please refer all relevant departmental information for inclusion in our bi-weekly email announcement to John Taormina, Director, Visual Resources Center, at taormina@duke.edu.