I am very pleased with the MFA degree in Intermedia I earned at ASU over the past three years. I am posting a brief write up of the highs and lows of the program for future potential students.
I’ll start with the plusses.
FACULTY: The faculty in the Intermedia Department are amazing, supportive, and leaders in their fields. Dan Collins is an expert in data visualization, rapid prototyping, and 3D fabrication. With his wife, they have numerous public installations throughout Arizona and show internationally regularly. He is easy to talk to, helpful, knowledgable, and “gets” art making. Angela Ellsworth is incredibly supportive, and went out of her way to lend me books about art and meditation when I was researching that topic. She is a master of performance art and art interventions. As some one who dabbled in this area before grad school I enjoyed learning more about the history of the practice. Performance art can be exhilarating and intimidating, and is not for everyone, but Angela would be a good person to connect with if you do any kind of interactivity. Muriel runs the video, flash, and web art arena. She is the one faculty member who understand the need for easy access to equipment and has defended her stock for video cameras, green screens, editing labs, etc very well. Gregory Sale is our new tenure track professor who works with community arts and public practice. He is also very supportive and open to including students in his own massive far reaching projects. His classroom tactics are somewhat less traditional and he favors group work, but the projects that come out of his classes are often of a scale that is beyond the capabilities of any one student.
It should be noted that most studio classes at ASU are mixed undergrad and grad (usually about 10 undergrad and up to 5 grad). This has plusses and minuses, but I tend to think the undergrads do more to slow the grads down than the grads do to raise the level of the undergrads.
GPSA: The Graduate and Professional Student Association at ASU is an excellent way to get funding. They offer research and jumpstart grants every year. The application is quite long, but I’ve found that is a good exercise and can even help solidify your ideas when writing it out. I think I applied for six grants from them total over the three years and was awarded four.
ARTCORE: In my mind, teaching foundation courses through the ArtCore, run by Dan Collins, was the best part of the ASU program. I came to grad school because I wanted to teach 3D foundations when I was done, but through ASU I was able to teach seven semesters of 3D Design and two semesters of Introduction to Digital Media. This experience is invaluable, and helps significantly with the cost of tuition. The way it is set up, you are technically a TA, but have run of your own classroom, do your own projects, and grading. The wiki we have built for the ArtCore is an immense resource for new art teachers. I can’t say enough good things about the ArtCore.
And now the areas that need improvement.
FACILITIES: Outside of video art, the Intermedia program has next to no resources. The way the departments are set up, it is very hard to get access to another departments facilities, like the wood shop or sculpture shop. Basically, if you are not taking a class in another department, you can not use their tools. This created some problems for me as an interactive sculptor, to the point where I bought by own table saw (with the help of the GPSA grant funding). Studio space for Intermedia is an equal problem. While we do have studio space for all of our grads, I had several problems with facilities management about actually making art in said studios. These room are more set up to be digital / clean rooms, and cutting wood, girding metal, etc is frowned upon. There is no Intermedia shop or shared graduate shop. The sculpture department used to offer a one credit course in sculpture safety that gave easy access to their facilities, but the course has since been cut from the list. If you are a maker of physical objects, you may want to look elsewhere.
TECHNOLOGY: While our faculty are amazing, it should be noted from above that we have no faculty in physical computing or computer programming. It is possible to take undergrad courses in programming but they will not count towards your degree. There is one class offered in Arduino use, through the sculpture department, and one course sporadically offered in MAX/MSP through the School of Dance, but that’s about it. We also do not have any faculty in electronic music. This was such a problem that we actually lost two amazing grads who were electronic / installation musicians in my first year. Again, if you use physical computing or music in your work you may wish to look elsewhere or be prepared to teach yourself any new techniques you require. Our faculty do support this kind of work, they just can’t help with any technical problems you may run into. If hiring were up to me, I’d look for a visiting professor in physical computing / programing as soon as I could fund it.
That about sums it up. Again, I think it is an excellent program, and am pleased with what I was able to achieve.
Two recent MFA shows from the Harry Wood Gallery. Paintings by Matthew Clark up this week and sculptures by Emily Stergar. The paintings reference a Lego maze game and meditation mandalas. The sculptures are metaphors for various AZ waterways and had a really unique sound and lighting installation element. I really liked both, nice objects.
Sebx’s thesis show is now up at the Harry Wood Gallery through Friday. This is exciting because it’s the first Intermedia show we’ve had since Natalia’s a year and a half ago. Sebx utilizes biting sarcasm and wit to great a store that pokes fun at the news media, American paranoia, and current political problems we have. The craftsmanship is excellent. It is not all humor though, the silent 3D animation in the back of the gallery is a sobering contrast to the happy go lucky products despite is comic book charter nature.
Just hopped by the Intermedia Senior Show and saw this piece by Nina. The aesthetics really stood out to me. It’s right on the right when you enter Gallery 100 and you just see the tangle of red strings. Moving around the piece you see how they go through a series of eye-hooks to a big central eye-hook and then disperse again into mini balls on the floor. Really well done. I was a little sad when I learned that the vertical placement of the eye-hooks on the partition was random, it looked like it could have been from a land contour or something similar to me.
So naturally I like Bryon Darby’s recent MFA thesis exhibition. His Plane Wall reminded me of the photos I used to take at Castle Island in Boston.
There was a nice contrast between this pixelated photos of planes with some of the black and white ones. I particularly like the one of the plane’s shadow on the ground, as it adds a bit of diversity to the set.
Bryon also had some really cool floor maps that were printed in color on durable vinyl so that you could walk on them. These would make great rugs or mats for someone’s apartment.
But, my favorite piece is one showing a time lapse of different planes landing at PHX. You can clearly see the flight paths in the air. I saw this piece first as part of the new grad tour in 2009, so it was nice to see it again.
What also stood out to me about this show was how well everything was hung and displayed. Excellent work.
I went to several shows first friday, but two stuck out in my mind.
First, the Mixed Emotions show at the Stark Gallery in the Xavier Prep school. (About the school: Think rich kids. I mean they had giant ornate christmas trees in the school lobby. At my high school those trees would have lasted about thirty seconds before an ornament-snow-ball war broke out.) The show was currated by Ann Morton and included working by herself, Brooke Heuts, and Kelsey Wiskirchen. The show looked absolutely gorgeous in the space. All of the work went really well together and mixed flat with three dimensional work. The lighting was perfect for the muted colors used by all of the artists. Kelsey showed her woven newspapers and books, Brooke has her restructured quilts, and Ann displayed a mixture from her found object index. The only thing that didn’t make sense was the title, Mixed Emotions, as none of the worked seemed overly emotional. The ASU galleries could learn a lot from how well Stark is set up and maintained (wood floors, hint hint). The show is up through 11 February 2010.
The next show was A Bunch of Crock at Bragg’s Pie Factory by artist Safwat Saleem. After Nathaniel Lewis’s thesis exhibition, this is the next best show I’ve seen thus far in Phoenix. In a city that is plagued with harsh politics that are questioned in state and incomprehensible to those out of state, this show goes a long way in rethinking the composition of political art. In his own words:
A Bunch of Crock is an art exhibit about the absurdities of political campaigns and the unfortunate role of minorities. Filtering through various political messages in this election year, the common thread seems to be this: 1) politicians and pundits think the general population is too stupid to tell fact from fiction and 2) promoting fear of minorities is good politics.
Using satire and good old-fashioned profanity, this exhibit attempts to bypass the spin and tell the audience what the politicians and pundits actually mean, and how they portray minorities to promote fear and manufacture outrage.
And he is largely successful. The posters show excellent craftsmanship, wit, and humor. But, Saleem took his satyrical perspective and applied it to all elements of the show including the food, my personal favorite. Unfortunately I think this show was only up for first friday. However, there is a great deal of information about the project on his website.
During the five day move-toArizona drive I took last year I started listening to a special podcast called Astronomy Cast. I started at the beginning and would listen to several episodes a day, but for a series that started in 2006 releasing one or two episodes a week and is still going strong I had a lot of catching up to do! Well, last weekend en route to Flagstaff I finally got myself caught up to the current episode, number 200.
Astronomy Cast is truly amazing if you are at all interested in Astronomy. The hosts Pamela and Frasier make all the complex topics of physics and cosmology understandable to people without a math background. Frasier is particularly good at breaking down astronomy theories into everyday analogies. Topics range from Astronomy history, the solar system, stars, cosmology, astronomer biographies, and telescopes. I have found Astronomy Cast particularly helpful in understanding black holes, dark matter, and dark energy.
So go check them out! I’ve been so intrigued by the topics covered that I got my own telescope this past summer, and it is so nice to see the planets close up, even in light polluted Phoenix. If you’ve never seen Jupiter or Saturn through a telescope and you’re in the area, go to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff for a look through their 24″ refractor. Most universities have an open Astronomy night, too.
