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Grad students explore theory and practice of image at symposium
The Inland Visual Studies Center provides a theoretical platform for art students to be more cognizant of the strategies of image-making that the fine arts and popular culture share. This cultural critique is part of a steady movement in the modernism to blur the boundaries between high and low culture or between the official narrative of Western art and voices of change. The center, located at Bradley, is a collaboration between Bradley University, Washington University Department of Art and Architecture, the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art in St. Louis, and Ohio State University.
Darren Jackson's voyeuristic performance piece in action.
On April 15, 16, and 17, the Center held its first annual symposium. The opening event included an art exhibition with presentations by art faculty and graduate students at the Prairie Center of the Arts. This was the first of several events presented at the symposium. Downstairs, the event featured more traditional methods of typography and painting by faculty members, works which one graduate student described as “inspirational.” Upstairs, above the gallery in the old rope factory, Art Department graduate students set up installation and performance pieces showcasing more progressive mediums of expression that gave clarity to the artist’s conscious role in creating it.
One artist, Darren Jackson, a new face in the graduate program, critiques the relationship between popular and fine art imagery. Jackson used voyeurism as a performance piece to observe and then form a meta-narrative with subjects walking in and out of the sight of his cameras. It is his goal to represent the complexity of image through observing people. This type of theorizing, observing from a distance, becomes for Jackson the way to construct multi-dimensional meaning. The two-dimensional images Jackson broadcasts on his screen are the scene of onlookers so that they become part of the performance. This highlights Jackson’s foregrounded image as an artist. It is the onlookers that the artist narrates within the spectacle which becomes an aesthetic image and show. Jackson remarks that his fellow graduate students believe it is his analyzing and watching that is the most honest part of his work. His ability to fit various personas into a meta-narrative is an attempt to create a more, in his words, “robust truth.”
It is not all performance art for Jackson, who ultimately hopes to market his skills in a number of ways, including to nonprofit organizations. “I've always wanted to be the director of a creative team for a high-profile nonprofit organization or start my own art, design, multimedia, and creative-thinking firm with close friends.” He feels the program furthered his capability to reach the goals for which he originally came to Bradley. “If it had not been for this year to explore my own interests, passions, and random tangents, I don’t think I would be traveling the path I am currently on towards an interdisciplinary of art and multimedia.”
While Jackson seeks to represent a more “robust” sense of events through his cameras, the show also featured reactions to image as practice. Graduate student and artist Lei Curtis portrays an unsettling irony of image in the piece she exhibited. Her work facetiously suggests that unhealthy habits promote a healthy image with tongue-in-cheek commentary on the means people will go to in order to stay trim. Obviously, image masks the infectiousness of eating disorders and marks a contradiction between what we put forth to society and who we really are on the inside. This representation of image coincides with the narrating of image in Darren Jackson’s voyeurism piece because each shows the transformation of what Guy Debord would call from being into having into image.
For all the success and quality of the show downstairs, the graduate students showed and represented another aspect of their faculty members’ abilities to inspire and teach. Altogether, a good turnout came to see the Bradley Art Department in full form, showcasing the artistic vision of the faculty members and the visions of those who they influence beyond their own. Those who came left with a remarkably spectacular image of the art community at Bradley University. For more information about the Inland Visual Studies Center and the event, please go to: http://art.bradley.edu/inlandcenter.