Thursday, April 14, 2016

About the Event
RMCAD was honored to close out the year’s Humor series by hosting acclaimed artist, writer, and filmmaker Miranda July in an on-stage conversation with local artist and art writer Lanny Frances DeVuono. The discussion focused on July’s use of humor which employs a complexity of emotion that does more than elicit a chuckle – it simultaneously exposes something deep and raw about our humanity by balancing in a liminal space between fragility and the elation granted by laughing at the absurdity of our vulnerability.

About Miranda July
July’s work has been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Biennale, and in two Whitney Biennials. July wrote, directed, and starred in two feature-length, award-winning films: The Future and Me and You and Everyone We Know. Her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and many other publications, and collected in the book No One Belongs Here More Than You. Her New York Times Bestselling novel The First Bad Man was published last year. July has created a number of interactive works, including web and email-based projects, a geosocial networking app, and her recent participatory performance titled New Society.

About Lanny Frances DeVuono
DeVuono is a Denver-based artist, art writer, and Associate Professor of painting and drawing at the University of Colorado Denver. She received numerous awards for her work, including a Fulbright Fellowship and a Grants for Artist Projects (GAP) Grant. She writes on contemporary art with past publications including Art News and New Art Examiner. Drawings by DeVuono are currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver through June 5, 2016 in the exhibition titled Critical Focus: Lanny DeVuono.

The VASD Program was proud to partner with Impromptu Company for this event. Learn more about Impromptu Co. here.

Screening THE FUTURE at Alamo Drafthouse
The VASD Program was proud to collaborate with our friends at the Alamo Drafthouse for a special screening of July's film THE FUTURE prior to her appearance at RMCAD. 

Screening Me and You and Everyone We Know
This was a RAMCD community only event.
In collaboration with Fine Arts, Art Education, and Commercial Photography departments, the VASD Program hosted a screening of Miranda July’s first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know. 

Additional Events for the RMCAD Community
The artist also be participated in the following events for the RMCAD community: 

Next Day Q&A Luncheon
This was a RMCAD community only event.
RMCAD faculty, staff, and students joined the VASD Program and guest MIRANDA JULY for a casual Q+A session over lunch. This intimate gathering provides an opportunity to further discuss the ideas presented in the previous night's lecture and a place to further engage with our special guest.

Student Session with Miranda July
This was a RMCAD community only event.
A small group of students had the opportunity to meet with VASD Program guest Miranda July for an intimate student session and viewing of the Graduation Exhibition.

Reading List
Additional research materials suggested by July can be found here.

Image credit: Todd Cole

Thursday, March 24, 2016

Read this Westword piece  about Woodring's lecture. Westword also recommended this event as a great thing to do the week of March 21st. Read more on that, here. 

About the Lecture
Woodring is an instinctive artist who seldom analyzes his methods, but in this lecture he shined light on processes and principles that have heretofore operated in the shadows. Woodring’s vivid imagery contains a wealth of historic and contemporary references enabling him to discover rich visual languages in his wordless comics. In this lecture he shared many of his obscure influences and inspirational touchstones and explored what makes his works so inexplicably, and often darkly, humorous.

About the Lecturer
Jim Woodring is a cartoonist whose works - comics, drawings, and paintings - traffic heavily in intermingled humor and horror. Based just outside of Seattle, WA Woodring depicts worlds from his unique vision fueled by hallucinations and surrealistic absurdity. These strange and immersive images have been published in multiple books including The Book of Jim and Weathercraft. The New York Times describes Woodring's work as “half unshakable nightmare, half Chuck Jones cartoon filtered through the Bhagavad Gita.”

Woodring was awarded the Artist Trust GAP Award, a United States Artist Fellowship (with Bill Frisell), and an Inkpot Award at the 2008 Comic-Con International in San Diego. Seattle’s The Stranger presented Wooding with their Literature Genius award in 2010. 

Additional Events
The artist also participated in the following events with the RMCAD community during his visit:

Next Day Q+A Luncheon
RMCAD faculty, staff, and students joined the VASD Program and guest Jim Woodring for a casual Q+A session over lunch. This intimate gathering provided an opportunity to further discuss the ideas presented in the previous night's lecture and a place to further engage with our special guest.

Drawing Session with Jim Woodring
A small group of students had the opportunity to step into Jim Woodring's world as the artist shared his process and technique. From ideation to final ink, Woodring presented a live, interactive drawing demo and commentary illuminating his conceptual and technical skill.

Reading List
Additional research materials suggested by Woodring can be found here.

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Let us know what you thought about Keller and Dixon's lecture in this short, 6 question, anonymous survey. Thank you for your feedback.

About the Lecture
For Keller and Dixon humor is both a common coping mechanism for life’s ailments and a lens that allows them to revel in failings and celebrate futility in their creative work. As multidisciplinary artists and designers, each uses a specific working methodology - Keller operates with intentional, clever endurance while Dixon employs quick and novel intuition. When working together, they march forward by embracing merriment in absurdity. In this lecture, Keller and Dixon will trace their bodies of work through parallel, syncopated, and divergent paths of inquiry. In their lecture they discussed the importance of intentional and accidental misinterpretation as a means of understanding the contemporary human condition; the necessity of mirth in their working lives and partnership; and the laughable ridiculousness of life’s supreme ability to complicate communication.

About the Lecturers
Keller and Dixon are artists/designers working collaboratively and independently in Homer, Alaska. Both received Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art + Design and Masters of Fine Arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Dixon straddles a wide set of mediums in her playful and process-oriented work. With a foothold in graphic design and creative direction, she often reaches into broader terrain including experiential work, installation, and product design. Her projects are spurred on by the fallibility of communication, attempts at connection, and unintended output. Dixon received a U.S. Presidential Award, a place in the permanent design collection at the SFMOMA, and the honorable ranking of Art Director’s Club (ADC) Young Gun. Her clients have included the New York Times, Nike, Volkswagen, and Coach. She acted as Design Director for installations featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale and has shown at the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.

Keller is attracted to the uneasy tension generated by our ubiquitous use of technology. His work utilizes entertaining misuses of technology and failures of communication that result from brute-force manipulations of appropriated material and rules-based systems. He has received acclaimed attention for his ongoing series consisting of a self-portrait taken every single day for the past 17 years called The Adaptation to My Generation and digital manipulation via an algorithm of The Simpsons among other projects. Keller's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the 2012 transmediale in Berlin, the Australian Centre for Photography in Paddington, and the Seoul International Media Art Biennale in Korea. 

Additional Events
The artists also participated in the following events for the RMCAD community:

Next Day Q&A Session 
Thursday, February 11, 2016

Studio Visits and Portfolio Reviews
Thursday, February 11, 2016
and Friday, February 12, 2016

Reading List
Additional research materials suggested by Keller and Dixon can be found here.

Image credit:
Anonymous Hugging Wall, Keetra Dean Dixon. Courtesy of the artist.

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

About the Lecture
There has been much talk of irony as an aesthetic penchant, an affectation of hipsters, and a failure to be earnest or true to oneself. But this critique of irony is hardly new—we’ve been hearing it incessantly for two decades – and it is not even really clear what irony is, anyway. A concept that is millennia old has slipped through many different meanings over time.

Combining his expertise in video games, philosophy, technology, and cultural critique, Ian Bogost presented a revised theory of irony that addresses the failure to earnestly encounter the outside world. From a perspective that orients objects at the center, Bogost asked and, at least in part, answered a series of questions:

How can we learn to live with things? How do we approach a world so replete, so overburdened with stuff that it is literally falling apart from the wear? How can we conceptualize ourselves as just another thing among so many others, rather than the masters of these servile objects? How can we value things for what they are, regardless of their role in our quotidian concerns, and how do we do so habitually, not just late one weird night? Finally, how do we do so without descending into the anguish of nihilism, without inevitably concluding that the universe is fundamentally indifferent?

About the Lecturer
Dr. Ian Bogost is an author and award-winning game designer. He is the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Bogost is also founding partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic, where he writes regularly about technology and popular culture. He has published many books including Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames and Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing, among others. In addition to his work as a writer, Bogost is also co-editor of Object Lessons, a book and essay series about the secret lives of ordinary things (Bloomsbury/The Atlantic), and of Platform Studies, a book series about the relationship between hardware/software design and creativity (MIT Press).

Bogost’s video games about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, suburban errands, pandemic flu, and tort reform. His independent games include Cow Clicker, a Facebook game send-up of Facebook games that was the subject of a Wired magazine feature, and A Slow Year, a collection of video game poems for Atari VCS, Windows, and Mac, which won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the 2010 IndieCade Festival.

Bogost is currently working on a forthcoming book about living playfully in an age of irony.

Additional Events with Ian Bogost
The RMCAD community joined the VASD Program and Ian Bogost on November 12, 2015 for a Next Day Q+A Session over lunch. 

A group of current RMCAD students also had the opportunity to participate in a workshop with Ian called Make Atari Games.

Reading Lists
Additional research materials suggested by Ian Bogost can be found here.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

About the Performance
Read this Westword preview of the performance and short interview with the artist. 

Informed by mythological stories, melodrama, soap operas, R&B, and music videos, artist Kalup Linzy presents a special live musical performance titled A Lullaby, A Job, and an Ass to Hope For. As Kaye, the protagonist from his full length video Romantic Loner, Linzy will perform original songs interspersed with video interludes and will be accompanied by Ben Darwish on keyboard. With equal parts admiration and satire, Linzy’s performances address both the sincerity and absurdity found in the complexities of family, race, gender, romantic entanglement, and celebrity. 

About the Exhibition 
Art.Jobs.Lullabies. (Lakewood-Denver, Colorado Edition)
On view through November 24, 2015

RMCAD’s Philip J. Steele Gallery will feature an exhibition of videos and works on paper by Linzy (some works attributed to the characters featured in his videos) in conjunction with his VASD Program performance. 

About the Artist
Kalup Linzy is a video and performance artist based in Brooklyn, New York, Linzy received his MFA from the University of South Florida and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Linzy's best-known work is a series of videos that satirize the conventions of the television soap opera and imbue them with art world drama.

Linzy’s work has received many awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Foundation grant, an Art Matters Grant, and The Headlands Center for the Arts Alumni Awards Residency. His work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Prospect.1 New Orleans, and MoMA PS1. Institutional collection of his work includes Whitney Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In summer 2010, Linzy appeared alongside James Franco on the long-running ABC soap opera General Hospital in a storyline that incorporated performance art. 

Additional Events with Kalup Linzy
The RMCAD community joined Kalup Linzy for a Next Day Q+A Luncheon. For more information about this event please click here.

Workshopping Art Jobs and Lullabies with Kalup Linzy
A small group of current RMCAD students had the incredible opportunity to workshop and act in one of Kalup Linzy's iconic video works. 

Reading Lists
Additional research materials suggested by Kalup Linzy can be found here. 

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

About the Lecture
Great comedy is an art form, but what makes an artist a great comedian? Our two humor experts hashed out the interplay of art, design, and comedy. We explored why something is funny, the benefits (and costs) of pursuing humor within art and design, and how humor enhances the creative process. 

About the Lecturers
Peter McGraw, a marketing and psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, directs the Humor Research Lab (HuRL) and is the co-author of The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny. 

Chelsey Delaney is based in Brooklyn New York and leads User Experience at Planned Parenthood Federation of America at its new Digital Products Lab. She completed her Master of Design thesis on the intersection of humor and interaction design in 2011 at Carnegie Mellon University. She regularly writes and speaks about humor and design.

Additional Events with Peter McGraw and Chelsey Delaney
The RMCAD community is invited to join our guests on September 30, 2015 at 11:30 a.m., for a Next Day Q+A Session over lunch. For more information about this event please click here.

Chelsey is also leading a special workshop for RMCAD students titled Humor-Centered Design. For details about this RMCAD student event, please click here.

Reading Lists
Additional materials suggested by Dr. Peter McGraw can be found here. For materials suggested by Chelsey Delaney, please go here. 

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Collaborative duo Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker kicked off the VASD Program's Humor lecture series. 

About the Lecture
Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker discussed their collaborative video work in which they playfully use the inherent properties of everyday objects to generate incisive and poetic social criticism. The lecture presented Conlon and Harker’s exploratory process, the influence of their geographic context, and the importance of elements such as sound, rhythm, narrative, and humor to create both a visual impact and sociopolitical commentary. Conlon and Harker's VASD Program lecture was presented in conjunction with the Biennial of the Americas and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. 

About the Lecturers
Donna Conlon (Atlanta, 1966) and Jonathan Harker (Quito, 1975) live and work in Panama City, Panama. Conlon and Harker have exhibited their collaborations widely, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; El Museo del Barrio, New York; and Palais du Tokyo, Paris. They have also participated in the 43rd Salón (Inter)Nacional de Artistas, Medellín, Colombia; Mercosur Biennale, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Pontevedra Biennale, Spain; and the Havana Biennale. Their collaborations are also included in public collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Tate Modern, London. Conlon and Harker are represented by Diablo Rosso Gallery, Panama.

Additional Events
The artists will also be participating in the following events:
Next Day Q&A Session 
(RMCAD community only)
Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Studio Visits with Current RMCAD Students
(RMCAD community only)
Wednesday, July 22 and Thursday, July 23, 2015

Biennial of the Americas exhibition Now? NOW! 
Conlon and Harker are featured in the Biennial of the Americas' central exhibition.
July 14, 2015 - August 30, 2015
More information can be found here.

MCA Denver’s Mixed Taste 
Sonic Art & the Domino Effect
Bruce Odland & Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker
Thursday, July 23, 2015

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

The VASD Program launched its yearlong Humor lecture series with an evening of local stand-up. Hosted by comedian Byron Graham, this event featured local stand-up sets by Hippieman, Christie Buchele, Zac Maas, Janae Burris, Jordan Wieleba, and Kevin Klatman. Drinks, refreshments, and door prizes were offered throughout the evening.

Read more about this event in the Westword and see what our host, Byron Graham had to say about the line-up.

About the Comedians
Byron Graham is a comedian and freelance writer from Denver, Colorado. Graham has performed across the country, opening for comics like Carmen Lynch, Ron Funches and Hannibal Buress. A regular contributor to Denver's alternative weekly newspaper, the Westword, Graham has interviewed personal heroes such as Marc Maron and George Saunders.

Janae Burris is a Los Angeles native and recent Denver transplant and has performed stand-up and improv comedy for ten years. Janae earned a bachelor of fine arts from California Institute of the Arts and worked as an actress in Los Angeles theater. Memorable performances in Denver include The Narrators at Buntport Theater, Too Much Fun, the 2015 Highplains Comedy Festival, and hosting at The Denver Improv Comedy Club.

John Novosad, a.k.a. “Hippieman” is a stand-up comedian who grew up in Boulder, Colorado and made his comedic debut in 1980 and continues to tour extensively. He is a featured performer at Comedy Works in Denver and made his network television debut on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

Christie Buchele is a comic from Denver, Colorado. Christie placed third in Comedy Works' New Faces Competition in 2013, and has performed at both the Crom Comedy Festival in Omaha, Nebraska and Denver's own High Plains Comedy Festival. Christie co-hosts a humorous relationship advice podcast called Empty Girlfriend.

Zac Maas hails from Denver, Colorado by way of South Dakota. Zac made it into the Final 10 in the Comedy Works New Faces Competition and also the Comedy Works Clean Finals. His podcast Whiskey and Cigarettes has won Westword’s people’s choice award for best podcast two years in a row (past guests include The Sklar Brothers, Greg Proops, and Kyle Kinane). His hit show Uncalled Four made it into the prestigious Bridgetown Comedy Festival in 2015.

Since 2006, comedian Jordan Wieleba has been bringing her edgy and fierce style of comedy to audiences across Colorado. In 2011, Jordan came out publicly as transgender and has since been educating and entertaining crowds about the lifestyle by incorporating it in her material. She has appeared on the cover of Out Front Colorado and is a Westword "Best of Denver" winner.

Kevin Klatman is a fair weathered accounting student and a stand-up comedian who has spent all of his 21 years thus far in Boulder, Colorado. He made his comedy debut when he was 19 years old at Voodoo Comedy Playhouse and has been showcasing his one liners throughout the Denver at comedy clubs like Comedy Works and bars like Johnny’s Cigar Bar.

This event was co-presented by RMCAD’s office of Student Life and was part of RMCAD's Welcome Week events, greeting students for the Fall 2015 semester. 

Monday, September 14

About the Event
The Faculty Affairs Committee and the Visiting Artist, Scholar, and Designer Program are hosted a fun, lightning lecture event over lunch. Four RMCAD faculty members and two students presented short, 5 min presentations inspired by the VASD Program Humor lecture series. Faculty, staff, and students are invited to attend.

Presenters
Larry Kresek (Illustration)
Jessica Gladstone (Graphic Design)
Darlene Ritz (Fashion Design)
Frank Varney (Commercial Photography)
Student Ambassadors
 

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

This special event was open to the RMCAD community only, however, the public is invited to see the exhibition at RedLine through December 27, 2015. More information about the exhibition can be found on the RedLine website here.

About the Tour
Artist Jim Green led a special private tour of his exhibition Greenscapes at RedLine. Students had the opportunity to meet the artist, get a private exhibition tour, and learn about the artist and his notable career of making people laugh in public spaces.

About the RedLine Exhibition
Greenscapes: A Survey of Sound Art by Jim Green
November 6 - December 27

Greenscapes: A Survey of Sound Art by Jim Green is the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to Denver sound-artist, Jim Green, whose humorous, participatory sound installations have been featured around the country and in prominent Denver locations like the Denver International Airport (Train Call, 1995), the Colorado Convention Center (Laughing Escalator, 2004), and the Denver Art Museum (Amplified Floor, 1991 and Singing Sinks, 2008), among other venues.

This survey will span four decades of Green’s work, which often occurs in outdoors or in public spaces rather than in a traditional exhibition setting.

"It is such a privilege to organize the first survey of the most prominent sound artist in the region. Jim Green has been playfully engaging audiences with his work since the ‘70s and humanizing our everyday experience of urban spaces. With this exhibition, we handed the entire building over to Jim – the bathrooms, the hallways, the exterior fence – and will look forward to how each work will reach out and engage our visitors when they least expect it."  -Louise Martorano, Executive Director of RedLine

About the Artist
Jim Green has used sound as his primary medium for thirty years and since 1984, focused on site-integrated work in public. The intent is to playfully integrate unexpected sound into existing environments. He is drawn to common environments and finds them successful sites for his playful style of public art. Green's people-oriented approach uses sound to engage the public with humor and surprise to produce a social, interactive experience. He believes public art functions best when it humanizes public space. Green also has extensive design team experience which includes teamwork with other artists, architects, engineers, contractors, administrators and the community.

Image credit: 
Jim Green
Courtesy Phone