Studio Projects: Land and Sky

Studio Projects is a regularly offered, theme-based, visual arts program for students with some art background who want to do focused studio work and supporting research, and writing, to develop their portfolios, and to prepare for more advanced offerings. The theme of Studio Projects: Land and Sky this year is the relationship between artist and landscape - the ground below and the sky above. Every day you inhabit this boundary plane between earth and air. How does your place in the landscape shape you and what you make? How do you mark it in return? What's your role in the landscape: observer, participant, or both? How do studio work and work outdoors inform each other? How do tools mediate your experience of the environment?

Winter quarter seminars and research will address historical and contemporary landscape-based art and artists, and consider the changing responses of artists to environments and the communities that inhabit them. We'll continue to work to get to know and express local Olympia landscapes, and field trips and guest lectures will expand our awareness of regional landscapes and landscape-based art. During Winter quarter we'll travel to one or more of the distinctive landscapes of Washington State - the Pacific Coast, the Columbia Gorge, or the San Juan Islands - to study their geographies and histories, and to draw and photograph.

Winter studio projects will continue to focus on expanding 2D skills (drawing or painting, photography) and 3D skills (sculpture, environmental art, metalworking and assemblage). We will spend time working "in the field," as well as in the studio, making work in both. We will engage the landscape as both "fine" and "applied" art, as self-expression and as a form of exchange with the larger community, challenging such distinctions and looking for commonalities of approach and meaning. In the last half of the quarter each student will be asked to develop a more personal and focused body of work that deals with landscape, to deepen command of a particular theme or medium. As a culmination of the program, we'll mount a show of these studio works at the end of the quarter.

The program will function as a learning community - you should plan to commit yourself to at least forty hours of work a week in class and in the studio with your peers. You will be asked to regularly engage in critical assessment, in dialog and in writing, and to prepare a portfolio of your work at the end of the quarter. Dedicated students will advance their technical skills, build a portfolio of personal work, and gain a fuller understanding of landscape in contemporary art and culture and its potential in their own work.