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July 16, 2016
The Senses Lecture Series began with Evasion Yoga by Finishing School. This participatory performance emphasized ways of seeing as we asked ourselves: How does it feel to be under constant surveillance? What postures do we take when we don’t have privacy? How do our relationships and our experiences change if we perceive that our safe spaces are under attack? Evasion Yoga addressed some of these important questions and experiences.
About Evasion Yoga
Evasion Yoga continues a multi-year series of projects by Los Angeles-based Finishing School. This interactive performance explores technology, surveillance, privacy, and power, playfully interwoven into a 30 minute yoga session. Participants were introduced to restful states for the body, mind, and soul - expressed in intimate gestures derived from military evasion tactics and blended with everyday acts of privacy and safety.
Read this Westword interview with Finishing School to learn more.
About Finishing School
Established in 2001, Finishing School is a socially-engaged artist collective that playfully explores an expansive range of subject and media territories at the many intersections of art and the everyday. The collective’s five members represent a broad range of skills and research interests. Finishing School produces interdisciplinary actions, installations, workshops, design, publications, film, studio art, performance, and new media.
Finishing School has presented work throughout the United States and internationally, including Switzerland, Israel, England, and Brazil. US institutions include Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, New York University, Creative Time, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Their work has also been noted in many publications, such as the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Artforum, Art Papers, Art News, and Art in America.
BLISS at BMoCA
The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art presents a newly commissioned social engagement project by Finishing School titled BLISS. This exhibition is on view at the museum from June 23 – September 11, 2016. Learn more at bmoca.org
Additional Events with the Artists for the RMCAD Community
RMCAD students participated in an Evasion Yoga Workshop with members of Finishing School. Go here for details.
Reading List
Additional research materials suggested by Finishing School can be found here.
This event was presented in conjunction with RMCAD’s FARMCAD and The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and is supported in part by 40 West Arts.
Image credits: Finishing School
August 30, 2016
About the Event
The Office of Student Life and the VASD Program hosted short lectures presented by RMCAD faculty over lunch for Welcome Week. Six RMCAD faculty members offered quick, 5 minute maximum talks inspired by the VASD Program’s Senses series. Faculty, staff, and students attended and celebrated the start of the fall semester and the start of the new series.
Presenters
Sean Brown (Chair of Game Art)
Matthew Harris (Head of Fine Arts)
Samuel Helms (Head of ELET)
Ruth Holden (Chair of Business for the Creative Industries)
Neely Patton (Dean of Program and Curricular Development)
Frank Varney (Commercial Photography Faculty)
The fall 2016 / spring 2017 VASD Program lecture series will present a variety of perspectives highlighting the extraordinary aspects of the most common element of our humanity: the senses.
Sensual experiences are simultaneously ordinary and mysterious. They constitute and construct our everyday life – allowing us to navigate, understand, and interact with the world – and are delicately complex, malleable membranes bridging our inner selves to the exterior environment. But the senses can also be deceived, altered, heightened, distorted, damaged, and augmented, affecting our interpretation and perception of reality, self, and environment. Advances in science and technology, as well as the enigmatic occurrences of clairvoyance and intuition, expand empirical knowledge beyond the corporal limitations of the traditional five senses.
Contemporary artists, scholars, and designers are creating and studying ways to stimulate and satiate the multifaceted senses, influencing our interactions and knowledge of the world and of our selves.