Announcements; Faculty and Staff

Scott Meador, Associate Professor of Art, Digital

ACM SIGGRAPH is the Association for Computing Machinery & Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Scott attended the SIGGRAPH 2019 conference in Los Angeles, CA in July where he saw the latest work and innovations in multiple forms of animation, digital fabrication, virtual reality, digital filmmaking, and animation education.

Scott attended the Animation for Public Engagement Symposium (APES) at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX in September. He presented the work he did on the Little Rock Central High School projection mapping event for the 60th anniversary of the Central High Desegregation Crisis. APES is an annual forum for professionals (scholars and practitioners) concerned with advancing and promoting animation as therapeutic practice, educational technique, and as a tool for social engagement. The symposium identifies new terrains in the interface of animation with society and offers an alternative views of animation beyond artistic expression, entertainment or marketing tool.

In October Scott participated in a Sculptural Blacksmithing workshop in East Durham, NY. The instructor was the blacksmith, Chris Cash, from Maryland, and the workshop was hosted by famed maker, Jimmy DiResta.

 

David Bailin, Part-Time Instructor

Man passes through forests of symbols which watch him with familiar gazes.
Baudelaire*

There are trees and they are on fire.
Schomburg**

Back in 2014, I gave a lecture entitled He Left Paper Trail: Core, Subject and Object Matter. It was a review of my themes, processes and media spanning about 40 years. When I was putting the lecture together I was shocked that with all the iterations my work went through from the visual arts, to performance, to theater, to writing and back to the visual arts, its core never changed. I was literally following in my own footsteps.

The starting point was place. From the Dakota plains, to the foothills of Colorado, to the urban density of NYC and Boston, to the delta of Arkansas, place affected my work. For some reason, I have never felt comfortable in any of those places and have always been skeptical that there was a firm foundation under my feet. I am aware that my concerns are both earnest and comedic. So my work is an exploration of what happens in this particular environment with this particular character. I approach my work, then, as I did when I directed plays: what kind of piece of business will occur. Sometimes it’s a serious metaphysical statement about power or lack of power or meaning and purpose; other times it’s pure vaudeville.

My characters inhabit, in Situ, an environment that is more stage set than real, uncanny spaces–unstable, filled with erasures and pentimento where correspondences, references, signs and symbols are buried within charcoal like so many pixels. Even before 2002, when I first exhibited at Koplin Del Rio, I identified with a solitary character that dug, collected, prodded, pondered in some kind of environment–exterior or interior–and persevered no matter how absurd that action may be.

Place, at the beginning of the 2020s, is ambiguous. On-line, we inhabit places of symbols and memes, and, off-line, a world on fire, dangerous and desperate. My drawings are my footsteps through those spaces, traced and re-traced, as the symbols, memes, and dangers change through time and culture, but my effort to understand our place in them continues.

*Baudelaire,  “Correspondances” from Fleurs du mal, 1857
**Zachary Schomburg, “The Fire Cycle” from Scary, No Scary. Copyright © 2009. Reprinted by permission of Black Ocean

 

David Bailin, Part-Time Instructor

Bailin Drawing Awarded Distinction at 11th Annual International Exhibition of Contemporary Drawing at UNC. As part of an ongoing commitment to promote drawing practices in the visual arts, the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNC Asheville), presented the 2020 11th Annual Juried International Exhibition Of Contemporary Drawing. Seeking to examine drawing as it is practiced and defined by contemporary artists, this exhibition demonstrates the continued significance of drawing through both conventional and innovative methods. Bailin received a second place award from the William Beckman, Juror.