VVinter Sun: Mythological Cycles in the Studio

with Elijah Burgher and Rebecca Walz
PAINTING 681 001 | 3 credits | $100 Lab Fee
In-Person: January 5–18, 2025
Every day during the session (including weekends) 9:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m EST

Since prehistory, art has served as a way to make meaning of the difficult and mysterious aspects of human existence, particularly the cycles of birth, death and regeneration that structure life on this planet. For this interdisciplinary class, Michigan’s wintry landscape will serve as a point of departure for thinking about these cycles and their mythic symbols, such as Ishtar’s descent to the underworld and the death and resurrection of Attis. This course focuses on drawing as an archaeological and regenerative practice within the interdisciplinary field of contemporary art. Through studio projects, readings, screenings, lectures and group discussions, students will speculatively apply concepts of birth, death and regeneration to the process of making art, exploring themes of continuity, recurrence, rupture, metamorphosis, critique and appropriation. Topics will include cave painting, Mother Goddess cults, solar and lunar mythologies, alchemy, ritual, surrealism and the occult roots of modernism. Class projects will emphasize drawing as a research methodology. We will take inspiration from artists including Leonora Carrington, Forrest Bess, Ana Mendieta, Geta Brătescu and Paleolithic cave painting, historic tarot decks and alchemical manuscripts. Selected readings will include Metamorphoses by Ovid and Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art by Georges Bataille. Students will engage in performative and ritualistic exercises including “Womb of Chaos,” which invites them to rapidly generate drawings and raw materials for self-directed projects. Mercurial values of intuition, risk, ingenuity, trickery, theft, speed and quantity will be emphasized. Students will also create a self-guided independent project that includes a written proposal, research, sketches, material studies, and final work of art or a series of works. Artists will be encouraged to consider how site or installation, material choices, and historical references shape meaning and context within their work. Suggested themes: origin myth, cave art, time machine, underworld journey, union of opposites, mother goddess, solar/lunar cycle, rebirth.

Elijah Burgher, Elagabalus in the Afterlife, 2023, colored pencil and watercolor on paper, 16 x 12 in.

Using painting, drawing, and printmaking, Elijah Burgher works at the crossroads of representation and language, figuration and abstraction, and the real and imagined. Drawing from mythology, ancient history, the occult, and ritual magick, Burgher cultivates a highly intimate code of symbols to investigate the personal and cultural dynamics of desire, love, subcultural formation, and the history of abstraction. Burgher lives and works in Berlin. His work was featured in Block Party at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania; Scrivere Disegnando: When Language Seeks Its Other at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, 2020; For Opacity at the Drawing Center in New York City, 2018; and the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Elijah Burgher is represented by P.P.O.W in New York City, Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Ivan Gallery in Bucharest.

Rebecca Walz + Ryan M Pfeiffer, Sorcerer Saint-Cirq La-Popie, sanguine lead, graphite, charcoal and colored pencil on paper, 22 x 30 in.

Rebecca Walz is a visual artist, educator and curator based in Chicago. Currently working mostly in the areas of drawing, mixed media and collage, she has maintained a collaborative practice with her partner, Ryan M. Pfeiffer, for the past decade. Drawing from her research into prehistoric & ancient art, archeo-anthropology, religion and historical erotica, her works synthesize concerns about desire, myth, transformation and formlessness.

     She holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her artworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including The Carnegie Museum of Art, International Museum of Surgical Science, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Institute of Contemporary Art (Singapore), Breese Little (London), Abbaye Saint–Magloire Galerie (France), LAXART (Los Angeles), among others. Her works are included in the following public collections at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, The Kinsey Institute of Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, and the Microsoft Collection of Art. She was appointed as curatorial board member at Iceberg Projects (2015-2022) and has been professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for many years.