Untidy Objects

Beginning in Spring 2021, Amber Ginsburg (Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago), Sara Black (Department of Sculpture at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and Samantha Frost (Department of Political Science and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) engage in a two-year collaborative art project called Untidy Objects. At the center of this project is a multi-sensory living sculpture, through which the collaborators aim to capture the relationship between a living subject and its world.

Untidy Objects

In this experimental course, students will join Gray Center Fellows Samantha Frost (UIUC Political Science), Sara Black (SAIC Sculpture) and Amber Ginsburg (UChicago DOVA) as we use the lens of “untidy objects” to unravel the relationship between self and other, self and world. The concepts we normally use to think tend to take for granted, on the one hand, tidy objects, and on the other hand, tidy subjects coming to know tidy objects. We will undertake to challenge distinctions between subject and object through a multi-faceted set of sculptural and horticultural practices that bring us into close contact with plants and trees.The aspirations of this project are to question the conceptual ground from which we think about environmental justice and politics with an emphasis on practices of proximity to living others. Through readings, guest speakers, discussions, and practicum, this course and project provide an opportunity to re-habituate ourselves and lean differently into the world, to perceive, conceptualize, and represent living processes in ways that are oblique to common-sense.

Fridays 10:30 to 1:20, 9/27 – 12/11, Logan Center 108
ARTV 22321/1