The Center for Visual Culture: session 02: mute presence

Dates TBA

Mute Presence

Artist-in-Residence:
Sharon Hayes

Scholar-in-Residence:
Marie Shurkus

The latin root communis, common, has born multiple English words: community, communication, communism, communal. Indeed communication is often thought within the utopic frame of creating shared understanding as the passing of given information, learned knowledge, personal experience. In communicating something becomes common. Frank Stella said: “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there.” But what is the relation between what we see, what we say and what is there? Is it possible that something beyond vision is also present in the image or in the experience of the image, perhaps something haptic? Is this presence something that can be represented through the image if we look outside of our traditional understanding of the image as mimetic representation? This residency will consider communication as a material site that, rather than creating or facilitating “understanding”, enacts translations and transformations. As a point of departure, we will explore how the conditions that shape the appearance of images and speech acts produce these things as something more than linguistic or material constructs.

MARIE SHURKUS is an art historian who has been involved in the contemporary art world as a curator, writer, art programmer, and educator for over 10 years. She is pursuing a Ph.D. at Concordia University in Montreal. Her dissertation will employ Deleuzian philosophy to examine how the contemporary practice of appropriation engages a translation, resulting in art works that are new and yet undeniably derivative. Marie is faculty at Vermont College, and she also teaches art history at Johnson State College, where she has offered graduate seminars on a variety of topics, including: Marxism and Art; Physical Evidence: Body As Medium and Subject; the Historical development of Monuments & Public Art Practices; Deleuzian Philosophy and the Visual Arts; and Discursive Structures of Museums and Exhibitions.
In 1994 Marie completed a master's degree in Modern Art History Theory and Criticism at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).Her thesis examined how Cindy Sherman’s photographs from 1977-87 redefined the meaning of female excess and lack through the historical signifiers of the witch and the hysteric.

SHARON HAYES has been engaged over the past ten years in an art practice that moves between multiple mediums –video, performance, installation– in an ongoing artistic investigation into the relations of history, politics and space to the processes of individual and collective subject formation. To this aim, she employs conceptual and methodological approaches borrowed from artistic and academic practices such as theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism. In her most recent work, she has been investigating the present political moment, through a critical examination of various historic texts, including a speech from the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the transcripts of the audio tapes that Patricia Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) sent to her parents during her kidnapping in 1974. The work utilizes performative strategies to filter a historic text through a process of interpretation that is necessarily informed by the historical gap that exists between two moments of enunciation: the original and the re-spoken or re-presented. Hayes’ iinstallation, video and performance work has been shown at P.S. 1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Parlour Projects, and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Indepedent Study Program. She is a faculty member at Vermont College. Her work can be found at www.shaze.info

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