Time, Chance & Outside Forces

with Heather Mekkelson
SCULPTURE 692 001 | 3 credits | $250 Lab Fee
June 29–July 12, 2025

This multimedia course emphasizes sculpture and site-specificity, providing students with the opportunity to contextualize their practice in the surrounding landscape of Ox-Bow. Coursework will center on the creation of artistic systems that use forces like time, gravity, weather, and decay as process agents. Woodworking and metalworking capacities will be introduced and accessible to students in support of their work. Demonstrations will cover the use of unconventional materials and approaches. A focus on creative forms of documentation will enable students to finish the course with compelling evidence of works that may no longer be in existence. Morning meetings will be devoted to exploring issues of auto-destruction, ephemerality, agency, and uncertainty through readings and discussions. Afternoons provide the opportunity for material and process demonstrations, as well as studio work in the shop or the field with instructor support. Artists we will look to include Leonardo Drew, Mark Dion, Ana Mendieta, and Paul Rosero Contreras, among many others. In addition to discussing excerpts selected from Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object and writings by Gustav Metzger, we will view screenings of work by Joseph Beuys, Francis Alÿs, and others. Students will complete a midpoint exercise designed to disappear. The course culminates in an ephemeral project that is individually driven, relevant to material covered, and creatively documented.

Heather Mekkelson, Temporal Origin, 2019-2020, soap, steel, metal alloy, and foam, 58 x 58 x 62 in.

Heather Mekkelson (she/her) uses all forms of art but finds sculpture to be the best for speculating on questions with no clear answers. She suspects it comes from thinking through her hands. The work Mekkelson makes has been exhibited throughout Chicago and places beyond, in a variety of spaces, like museums and galleries, but also on street poles and that one time in a medicine cabinet. Over the years people have written about what she does, and sometimes who she is. Some insightful ones can be found in print, in Art Journal and Aperture, and online at Artforum, Art21 Magazine, and Visual Art Source. To hear her speak about her work, podcast interviews with Bad at Sports and Studio Break are available for listening. Mekkelson has received support for her work with fellowships, grants and awards from Artadia, the Illinois Arts Council, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and the institutions she has served.