Lehrende der Akademie in Minnesota halten Werkvorträge

Die Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe ist im Gespräch mit der University of Minnesota, Minneapolis/USA: An dem vom DAAD geförderten Pilotprojekt nehmen Studierende bzw. Absolventen beider Hochschulen teil. Lisa Schlenker und Melanie Dorfer für die Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe und Joe Krasean und Nick Wells für das Department of Art – University of Minnesota, Minneapolis/USA.

Im Anschluss an den Studienaufenthalt von Joe Krasean und Nick Wells im Sommersemester in Karlsruhe befinden sich nun gerade Lisa Schlenker und Melanie Dorfer in Minneapolis.

Zwei Lehrende der University of Minnesota, Christine Baeumler und Chris Larson, sowie die Rektorin Lynn Lukas sind derzeit in Deutschland zu Gast. Christine Baeumler und Chris Larson stellen ihre künstlerische Praxis in Kurzvorträgen am Montag, 14. Dezember, um 19 Uhr im Vortragssaal der Akademie vor. Die Werkvorträge sind in englischer Sprache. Lynn Lukas berichtet am Dienstag, 15. Dezember, 19 Uhr an gleicher Stelle in einem Bildvortrag über die Akademie in Minnesota.

Werkvortrag Christine Baeumler, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies

"Art as Reclamation: Bogs, Bugs and Brownfields“

Christine Baeumler is known for her ecological art projects and interdisciplinary work. She seeks to raise awareness about ecological issues through studio practice as well as engaging communities in environmental projects focused on ecological restoration.

Werkvortrag Chris Larson , Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies

Chris Larson has a multi media based practice that is rooted in sculpture. His work incorporates film, video, photography, performance and drawing/painting, often in installed environments. He explores a purely sculptural moment and the suggestion of movement in static form. Larson's sculptures directly confront the medium. Working quickly and intuitively, he produces "machines" that seem to be echoes from the Middle Ages, when alchemists attempted inventions that would transform one material into another. Larson's machines - with unclear functions and nonfunctional parts - will never be operational. Despite the formalism present in his work, there exists an ambiguity of narrative, an absurdity resulting from myriad unanswered questions. 

"I want to bring forsaken ruins to life. I build colossal wooden machines that seem to have existed and functioned at one time. As I begin to build these machines, I start with the problem of what this particular machine is trying to produce. As I build the wheels, gears, and grinders to explore or fix this problem, more questions are laid out - questions that are suspended between the past and the future, creating a slippage in time. I want the viewer to ask certain questions of the sculpture: What is or what was it? What does or did it do? Why was it put here? The viewer may attempt, through intuition or logic, to answer these questions, but they are only left with degrees of speculation. The meaning is not derived from the answers to these questions - meaning is derived from asking these questions."

His work has been widely shown amongst others in the /New York, Walker Art Center/Minneapolis, Kunstmuseum/Bonn.