Spring Symposium

Visual + Critical Studies 2012 Spring Symposium:  Saturday April 28th, 2012

There is no social system that is not first and foremost a visual system. Thus, processes of social transformation necessarily transpire within the visual arena. Visuality serves to introduce change–new creative models, new political paradigms, new relational possibilities, new poetic forms–into social contexts. This is what makes the ability to interpret visual information and promote critical revisioning so crucial during periods of transformation.

The Visual and Critical Studies program trains students to deeply engage visual culture by refining written and oral presentation abilities, sharpening critical faculties, fostering research skills, expanding methodological options, and furthering the development of both creative and traditional modes of critical expression.

This year’s cohort presents innovative and transformative research in the field of visual studies at the program’s capstone event, the 2012 VCS Spring Symposium.  In this daylong public symposium, 12 graduate candidates in the program will interrogate the politics and poetics of visual culture.

Click here to read an abstract of each presenter’s work.

Schedule of the day’s events:

10:00 – 10:15 am – Opening Remarks

10:15 – 11:15 am - Panel One: “Surrogate Bodies”
Moderated by:  Hossein Khosrowjah

Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik The Edible Body: Representational Strategies in Contemporary Art Practices

Simone Bailey Disappear Here: Performing Through Documentation

Susan Miller A Couple of Random Characters in Search of an Author

Amanda Cachia What Can a Body Do? Inscribing and Adjusting a Disabled Experience in Contemporary Art

11:15 – 11:45 am – Q&A

11:45 – 12:45 pm – Lunch (in the back of the Nave)

12:45 – 1:45 pm - Panel Two: “Politics of Display”
Moderated by:  Alla Efimova

Emily Doman 30 Americans: Challenging Institutional Framing for the Presentation of black American Artists

Janessa Post A Critical Re-Vision: American Consumerism Through the Lens of Creative Reuse

Becca Roy O’Gorman

Angela Braren Curating Himself: The Simson/Tose Dioramas of the California Academy of Sciences

1:45 – 2:15 pm – Q&A

2:15 – 2:30 pm – Break

2:30 – 3:30 pm - Panel Three: “Beyond Seeing:”
Moderated by:  Josef Chytry

Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa Implicated Spaces

Robert Gomez A New Digital Media Regime: Narco Warfare Through Social Media

Jordan Reznick Imperceptible Politics: The Photograph and the Aesthetic Experience

Casey Carroll Seeing Beyond Recycled Imagery: Visualizing New Roots 

3:30 – 4:00 pm – Q&A

4:00 – 4:15 pm – Closing Remarks

Reception immediately following in the Graduate Center (across the street at 184 Hooper)