Things Become Things: Sculpture & Site Specific Installation
with Devin T. Mays
SCULPTURE 689 001 | 3 credits | $100 Lab Fee
May 26 - June 8, 2024
Students will create objects and temporary environments specifically for the Ox-Bow campus. Ox-Bow's community of art making as well as its unique natural offerings such as the forests, lagoon, and lake will be the source and location for site-specific creations. It is an opportunity to blur the lines between studio production and daily life in this setting and be in conversation with other artists expanding the boundaries of the studio. Students will experiment with various traditional and non-traditional approaches to object making such as casting, construction, knotting, the augmentation of found objects, and dimensional drawing. The resulting sculptural experiments will be placed in spaces in and around Ox-Bow. Presentations on historical and contemporary examples including Beverly Buchanan, Emmer Sewell, and Kenzi Shiokava will help to contextualize these modes of working and readings will include Forms of Poetic Attention by Lucy Alford, Blackness and Nothingness by Fred Moten, A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, and The Endgame by Beckett. We will discuss the meanings of exhibiting work in a variety of spaces: rural/urban, indoor/outdoor/, natural/manicured, gallery space/living space, sacred/profane, actual/virtual and in addition to creating objects and environments for specific locations, we will also reverse this process by letting spaces dictate what the sculptural environment should be. Assignments will invite students to wander, catalog the material world of their surroundings, and produce temporary slight and monumental gestures in the landscape. Regular discussion and critique will culminate in a presentation of works for the Ox-Bow community.
Devin T. Mays (b. Detroit, Michigan) uses sculpture, installation, performance and pictures to offer observation of what's seen and unseen. The materials being used in his practice do not always present themselves as anything more than what they appear to be. There is not always a physical transformation at the hands of his facilitation. He often refers to his interdisciplinary practice as an exercise in wandering, a practice-in-practice, a place for things to become Things. Mays has exhibited at Sculpture Center, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Driehaus Museum, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Belmacz, London; The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago; DePaul Art Museum, and The Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry among others. Mays holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Howard University and a Master of Fine Arts from The University of Chicago. He is currently a fellow with the Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning (CERCL) and the Art Department at Rice University.
Devin T. Mays, Untitled (Unnamed), 2023, pallets, shims and door stop