Topics in Acting for the Screen (377-0-21)
Topic
Thrift Aesthetics: The Queer Art of Salvage
Instructors
Joshua Wade Rains
Meeting Info
Wirtz 215 Instruct Black Box 3: Fri 12:00PM - 2:50PM
Overview of class
How do you assign value to the discarded? When does refuse become treasure or sculpture? What are the possibilities for a found object? These questions are not uncommon for many artists who choose to work with second-hand objects and materials. For queer artists, who often struggle for funding, access, and exposure, working with these materials is not a choice. In this production-focused course, students will transform the routine of "rummaging" into inspiration and material for their own creative work.
Adhering to a weekly practice of mining thrift stores, second-hand shops, garage sales, and garbage cans for materials, objects, spaces, and encounters, students will develop their own artistic relationship to object creation, character development, and "world-building". Moving through 4 units - Salvage, Thrift, Reuse, Transform - students will blend this mode of artistic production with conceptually driven performances to create experimental video work. In addition to this studio component, students will study a wide array of artists whose performative and video practices utilize "low-budget" materials, and basic modes of production, epitomizing the resourcefulness of queer art making.
Registration Requirements
Permission number only.
Teaching Method
Expectations
1. Throughout the quarter, students will produce a minimum of 4 performance and/or video pieces, each engaging with media and concepts screened and discussed in class.
2. While minor parameters will be given to students by the instructor for performances, students are expected to be exceptionally self- directed to create and finish work.
3. As part of the practice of this class, no mastery of any media is required from any student. However, on presentation days, students will be physically present to professionally present and defend completed creative works.
4. As a mode of evaluation, each performance piece should be noticeably more refined than your previous piece, without question. This class is structured to build in complexity of ideas as well as work as we progress.
Class Materials (Required)
None. All reading/viewing materials will be supplied via Canvas by the instructor.