Course Descriptions

Normal is as Normal Does

Course Type / Media: Studio / Painting, Drawing, Digital Collage

Instructor: Jeffrey Gibson, MA

This studio course will use both traditional and non-traditional painting, collage and drawing techniques to explore each artist’s subjective visual language placed within the new context of a foreign culture and place. We will begin from a place of describing how normalcy is defined within our own respective cultures, research how normalcy is presented within French culture (as seen in pop media, art histories, local culture), and develop significant mixed media artworks that counter and compare both. Students will be encouraged to make ambitious works that are conceptually driven and express a critical perspective on the issues that surround what is considered normal, non-normative or alternative. The class will look at strategies used by both modern and contemporary artists to place their alternative (including queer, feminist, transgender, non-Western) voices within more mainstream discussions in the art world and culture at large. Specific material concerns and techniques will be addressed with in-class demonstrations. Slide lectures and discussions will supplement studio work and critiques.

The Liminal Figure

Course Type / Media: Studio / Sculpture, Installation

Instructor: Rune Olsen, MA

This studio course will focus on the use of the figure to explore concepts found within modern and contemporary narrative. Students will be asked to consider popular narrative structures and find ways to rewrite them through subversive sculptural materials and techniques. Issues of visual representation, locality, cultural and sub-cultural values, roles of antagonist vs. protagonist, the figure as political, personification and anthropomorphism will be discussed in relationship to student projects and to diverse contemporary artists who deal with figurative representation in their work. This include examining strategies used by queer artists, non-Western artists, minority artists, activists, and artists who subvert readings of normative cultural signifiers via creative and strategic means. Students will be encouraged to make site-specific and temporary installations that utilize locally purchased and found objects to explore both linear and non-linear narrative structures. Some possible formats may include earthworks, subverting the reading of already existing sites or sculptures, or presenting documentation of temporary artistic interventions. Specific material concerns and techniques will be addressed with in-class demonstrations. Slide lectures and discussions will supplement studio work and critiques. The title refers to Homi Bhabha’s «Liminal Space», about occupying multiple positions simultaneously. These ideas will be further supported by showing images, and discussing the art and art-practices of such artist as: Thomas Hirschhorn, Rachel Harrison, Lara Schnitger, Folkert de Jong, Thomas Houseago, Sarah Lucas, David Hammons, Nathan Mabry, Katharina Fritsch, Ron Mueck, Juan Munoz, Kiki Smith, Matthew Monahan, Francis Alÿs, Rirkrit Tirivanija, Janine Antoni, Adrian Piper, Robert Gober, Charles Ray, Maurizio Cattelan, Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Fluxus, Arte Povera and Feminism.

Without Limitations: Fluid Identities in a Hybrid Society

Course Type / Media: Interdisciplinary Studio

Instructors: Jeffrey Gibson, MA, Rune Olsen, MA

This course will be co-taught by sculptor Rune Olsen and painter and installation artist Jeffrey Gibson. Each comes from two distinct cultural backgrounds, Rune Olsen from Norway and Jeffrey Gibson is of Choctaw and Cherokee heritage. Both work internationally, but draw inspiration for their own practices from these backgrounds as well as pop cultural references from around the world, including contemporary design and advertising, fashion, music, film and media. For this class students will be introduced to artists and designers who, in a hybrid society, create fluid identities by crossing between multiple visual medias. We will look at the visual signifiers of various subcultures as inspiration for the students to create alter egos or amplify selective aspects of their own identity and translate this self into a visual language. With a Do It Yourself attitude, students will be encouraged to recycle, reuse and repurpose materials found in their local surroundings to create their own fictional or non-fictional narratives through costumes, disguises, photographs, performances, and multimedia installations.

INsideOUT or OUTsideIN

Course Type / Media: Studio / Digital Media, Video, Animation

Instructor: Michael Hall, MFA

This studio course will incorporate a variety of digital media including video, animation, photography, sound and the web to investigate questions of the outsider. The term “Outsider Artist” was coined in the 1970s to describe any number of untrained, self-taught artists; however, in addition to investigating working methods and styles of Art Brut, Folk Art and Street Art, etc., students will investigate the concept of the outsider in a much broader sense. New digital tools and distribution of media has empowered once disenfranchised individuals to find a broader community and create dialogue with those outside their customary groups. Throughout the semester students will examine their own sense of normalcy and abnormalcy, what is considered inside and outside the norm and what abnormal means when it morphs into the mainstream. As foreigners to their new environs, students will be asked to consider how that affects their sense of normalcy and how one begins a dialogue in new and possibly unfamiliar surroundings. Instruction and introduction to digital media techniques will be covered with in-class demonstrations. In addition to studio work and critiques, we will look at artwork, communities and popular trends that at one time were considered outside the “norm” and what it means for the outsider to be welcomed into the mainstream.

Working with Limitations

Course Type / Media: Studio / Digital Photography, Video, Drawing

Instructor: Michael Hall, MFA

Having worked with artists with physical and developmental disabilities for 8 years, I am amazed and impressed by the resourcefulness and imagination of these artists. Artworks are made despite overwhelming challenges, with the simplest intuitive solutions, such as using resources that are immediately available, or using subject matter that is close to their daily experience. As trained artists, our responses are consciously and unconsciously guided by our education, filtered by theory and executed in well-established materials and processes. While critical-thinking, well-crafted artworks and a degree are expected for a successful career, an artist’s intuition is the key ingredient to inspire, leap outside of the norm, and make new headway in their work. Artists are forced to contend with limitations throughout their career whether from illness, space constraints or availability of materials. The dedicated artist will overcome challenges to make work and express themselves through any means. This course will focus on how to make work within limitations and find ways to reach an intuitive response. Using strategies formed from years working with artists with disabilities, students will be guided through a series of exercises to make work that responds to restrictions, personal interests and the environment around them. This is a multidisplinary class that will work with drawing, photography, video and sculpture. Students will be encouraged to experiment greatly and use materials and processes unfamiliar to them. Studio work and critiques will be supplemented with slide lectures and brief demos.

Censorship and right of artistic expression

Course Type: Art History/Critical Studies

Instructor: Fabienne Le Gall, MA

Since the end of the twentieth century, the question of crossing boundaries has been a part of contemporary art, responding to both the social and political situation of a changing world, to the economic market, to the quest for an “always more”
Today, contemporary art explores themes – from news, such as wars, the condition of women, relationships between the sexes, social censorship, diversity and marginalization, violence and madness, religion and intolerance. But does society accept to see these realities? While great exhibitions are competing for the most controversial works, criticisms and censorships are redoubling their efforts to hide them.
This course will question the freedom of the contemporary artist to act and think and the means at its disposal to express him or her self in an art world increasingly large and in a situation of social crisis.
We will reflect on and discuss issues such as how much freedom does the artist have? Does he or she the right (or duty) to overcome social, political, and religious taboos? Should freedom of speech be controlled?
We will also study the Venice Biennale to analyze the exposure mode of works and the monumentality of art today as part of the great fairs and art biennials together with the freedom of action that offer these exhibitions to the artist.
We will support our reflection on the work of such artists as Paweł Althamer, Yael Bartana, Artur Żmijewski, Cindy Sherman, Andres Serrano, Maurizio Cattelan, Oleg Kulig, Katarzyna Kozyra, Shirin Neshat, ORLAN, Giuseppe Veneziano, Tomas Saraceno, Ai Weiwei...

French Language, Literature and Culture

Course Type:  Language Studies

Instructor:  Carine Charof, MA

PASCA students live with French families and have frequent contact with the people of Pont-Aven through social and artistic exchanges. Classroom work at all levels of instruction builds the language skills needed for these encounters and focuses on French as it is used in everyday situations.

Level 1
A serious class for complete beginners. Basic grammar and vocabulary will be covered through exercises, homework and discussion. Conversational skills will be emphasized, as students move out of the classroom on a regular basis to open-air markets, cafes, and field trips to engage in real conversation. Students study with textbooks custom designed by the teacher and focus on vocabulary for daily life in France, and especially for artists.

Level 2
Intermediate students will improve their French conversational skills and grammar through exercises like reading required books, oral presentations, listening to French music, and watching French movies. Conversational skills are emphasized, as students move out of the classroom on a regular basis to open-air markets, cafes, and field trips to engage in real conversation. Students study with textbooks custom designed by the teacher and focus on specific topics and vocabulary especially for artists.

All courses are junior/senior (third or fourth year) art school level courses. They meet the NASAD required contact hours of 90 for a studio course and 45 for Liberal Arts. Study Trips are considered part of the curriculum and are led by the professors.

Alias

Course Type / Media:  Art History/Critical Studies

Instructor:  Barbara McBane, PhD.

The Critical Studies component of PASCA’S Spring 2011 semester in France will draw from theater studies; anthropology and ethnography; and feminist, queer and post-structuralist theory to introduce students to selected key texts in the field of performance studies. A range of models and approaches to performance studies will be considered in the context of twentieth century art practices, from surrealism, Situationism, and Fluxus, to feminist performance art, computer theater studies, and cyber-performativity. We will think about ‘liveness,’ as well, in relation to object-making and will examine the mobilization of personae in a variety of contemporary art and studio practices. The course will pay special attention to the treatment of performance and performativity in art-related French and Francophone texts, documents, images, videos, and film.

Painting and Drawing as Material Practice

Course Type / Media:  Drawing, Painting, Collage, Mixed Media Techniques

Instructor:  Elizabeth Whalley, MFA

In this class, by focusing on our interaction with materials, we will examine the “default” image-making practices we bring to our studios at the outset of the session and dissect the identities they define for us. This exploration includes the ways in which we “perform” our studio practice as part of our creative persona. We will experiment with subverting our typical materials and methods through non-verbal games, competitions, algorithms, chance, and collaboration in order to deconstruct and reinvent our artistic identities. Through modifications of, possibly, tools, supports, pigments, binders, mediums, collage materials, digital interventions, scale, process and location we will find potentially viable aliases with whom to trade in our art-making. Traditional materials will be exploited for fresh meanings and non-traditional materials will be marshaled for their visuality. An array of topics querying aspects of materiality could include mark-making, paint manipulation, color, texture and surface, tactility, pattern, mechanical processes, virtuosity, permanence, and light. The significance of materiality in art-making will be considered in both historical and contemporary contexts. Texts by Alpers, Barthes, Bryson, Elkins, Gotlieb and Crary will supplement the class journals developed by each student.
Specific material concerns and techniques will be addressed with in-class demonstrations of various techniques. Slide lectures and discussions will supplement studio work and critiques. 

Figure Study: the Body as Ideal/Alias/Alien

Course Type / Media:  Painting, Drawing

Instructor:  Elizabeth Whalley, MFA

An examination of the traditional rituals of figure study, through drawing and painting, sets the stage for an exploration of the body as site of commodification, role-play, and alienation in contemporary art practice.  Traditional historical modes we will investigate will include representing the human ideal through mathematical and anatomical scaffoldings, developing of character and types through enactments of dramatic tableaux and charting the figure through formal experiments with line and color.  Extending this historical figure-based narrative, students in the class will construct a performative artistic alias within an individualized studio production.   Centers around which this alias could potentially play include the body defined by social and consumerist values, the body inscribed with sexual, gendered, and/or racial meaning, and the student’s own body displaced from his/her subjectivity through prosthesis and/or technological intervention. Historical artists we will reference include Durer, the Carraci, Rembrandt, Greuze, the Cubists and Matisse.  Contemporary artists will include Lisa Yuskavage, Lucien Freud, Jenny Saville,  Mika Rottenberg, Stelarc, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge / Lady Jaye.  
Specific material concerns and techniques will be addressed with in-class demonstrations of various techniques. Slide lectures and discussions will supplement studio work and critiques. 

Alias/Avatar/Alter-Ego: Exploring Artistic Identities in the 21st Century

Course Type / Media:  Alternative Photographic Processes, Printmaking, Digital Art, Book Arts

Instructor:  Horatio Law, MFA

How do contemporary technologies and media inform our constructions of self and the meanings of ‘community’? How do digital tools impact traditional media? The anonymous nature of the Internet affords possibilities for creating alternative and multiple identities for anyone. Re-shaping myths of identity allows us to question and subvert stereotypes of the artist: heroic, starving, famous-before-30, etc. Experimenting with artistic identities also allows us to blur boundaries between commercial, design, and traditional or 'serious' art; artists are no longer restricted to traditional exhibition spaces such as galleries and museums.

In this course, we will apply alternative photographic processes to contemporary art-making practices, combining traditional and digital media. We will utilize anything at hand for image-capturing: cell phone, scanner, photocopier, digital camera, pin-hole and toy cameras. We will combine and transform photography, painting, drawing, print-making and book art. We will use both hi-tech and lo-tech media, and both digital and antique processes. As we construct and consider various personas, we will explore art production in the digital age and examine non-traditional and innovative ways to market or otherwise disseminate artwork.

Senses, Space and Displacement—Engaging the Body in Installation Environments

Course Type / Media:  Installation, Video/Projection, Sculpture, Social Practice and Performance

Instructor:  Horatio Law, MFA

An installation creates an altered environment that engages its audience in ways that are different from 2D and/or 3D artwork alone. Every viewing-subject experiences an installation differently. Walking through an installation can transform spatial and sensory perceptions and transport us to a different plane; it can allow us to be someone and somewhere else. Conversely, the presence of an audience for an installation-piece completes and alters the art/space.

How do artists convey ideas through installation space? How does the artist engage with the senses of the spectator/audience? What kind of materials can we use for an installation, and what are their effects? How does including the presence of an audience or viewing-subject change our ideas about installations? How do we move the subject through the installation space? How do we make work that encourages participation? This course will consider these questions and more, and will experiment with a wide range of materials we can use to create installation environments: video and still images, found and hand-made objects, permanent and perishable materials—materials that engage a range of senses: visual, audio, smell, taste and touch. We will also consider ways that specific performance tactics and social practices impact installation environments. Students will be encouraged to work with both indoor and outdoor installation.

French Language, Literature and Culture

Course Type:  Language Studies

Instructor:  Carine Charof, MA

PASCA students live with French families and have frequent contact with the people of Pont-Aven through social and artistic exchanges. Classroom work at all levels of instruction builds the language skills needed for these encounters and focuses on French as it is used in everyday situations.

Level 1
A serious class for complete beginners. Basic grammar and vocabulary will be covered through exercises, homework and discussion. Conversational skills will be emphasized, as students move out of the classroom on a regular basis to open-air markets, cafes, and field trips to engage in real conversation. Students study with textbooks custom designed by the teacher and focus on vocabulary for daily life in France, and especially for artists.

Level 2
Intermediate students will improve their French conversational skills and grammar through exercises like reading required books, oral presentations, listening to French music, and watching French movies. Conversational skills are emphasized, as students move out of the classroom on a regular basis to open-air markets, cafes, and field trips to engage in real conversation. Students study with textbooks custom designed by the teacher and focus on specific topics and vocabulary especially for artists.

All courses are junior/senior (third or fourth year) art school level courses. They meet the NASAD required contact hours of 90 for a studio course and 45 for Liberal Arts. Study Trips are considered part of the curriculum and are led by the professors.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Course Type:  Art History/Critical Studies

Instructor:  Barbara McBane, PhD

The PASCA Critical Studies course for Fall 2010 will address theories and practices of ‘translation,’ ‘transformation,’ and ‘transfiguration’ from several angles, all with the aim of stimulating new approaches to studio projects and practices. Film screenings will be an integral part of the course. The semester will be divided into three broad areas of readings and examples. A Theory component (about 4 weeks) will introduce students to essays on translation by Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Jean Baudrillard, Jean Laplanche, and Roland Barthes, as well as feminist, queer, and post-colonial perspectives. A second unit of study (about four weeks) will take up questions of Bodily Transformation: monstrous metamorphoses; alien abductions; transgender transfigurations; human-animal interchanges; translations from visibility to invisibility. A third unit of the course (about four weeks) will apply these themes and theories to Transmedia Translations: studio intermedia practices; translations from text to sound or music; transiting registers of dimensionality (from 2D to 3D to 4D); issues of technological translation: print-based, analogue, and digital.

Contemporary Landscape Painting: Juxtaposition and sense of place

Course Type / Media:  painting and drawing; opaque paint (oil or acrylic)

Instructor:  Olive Ayhens, MFA

Our source and influence will be the landscape, our planet earth. Our interpretation will be constantly on the move--traveling and lost in translation. We will be settled in Pont-Aven with its many layers of time and civilizations. We will come to know our local environment through gathering source material with quick painting and drawing studies while we are out and about; we may also feel free to photograph for further source. Then back in the studio we will develop paintings (choice of oil or acrylic) from the collected source and by adding juxtaposition--maybe overlapping time exposures leading to abstraction, suggesting another reality of memory, dream, a possible ghost figure influenced by favorite mentors (perhaps the Nabis), maybe playing with space and scale, maybe contrast or color as a felt interpretation of the actual place, and maybe a venture into narrative painting.

As our class journeys to London, Paris, and Berlin we will focus on what is unique about these places from our personal feelings of "lost in translation." The class will do color mixed media sketches while traveling. We will be able to use these drawings when we return to Port Aven as well as photographs and our memories & fantasies for influence in our new paintings. The quest will be to capture the essence of our interpretations; to translate these places. These paintings may be taken from a broad range of the representational, the imaginative and inventive, and the abstract, with an emphasis on the interpretation of place.

Watercolor: place, luminosity and imagination

Course Type / Media:  painting and drawing

Instructor:  Olive Ayhens, MFA

Watercolor is a beautiful medium. It can be rich in the delicate subtlety of transparency or bolder in color buildup, with contrast of thin versus texture layering. It is non-toxic and can be portable, easy to move with and use in translation--from one location to another; from our home base in Pont-Aven and as we travel to London, Paris, and Berlin. The demands of watercolor painting call for working at times directly without preparation--quick studies, and at other times preparing a painting through drawings, collage, abstract black and white, color studies etc. We will work with wash techniques, underpainting, various patterns and textures, dry brush, scraping, lifting, spattering, salting, ripped paper, pointillism, etc. All this will help to establish a visual language.

We will get lost in translation as we venture in our daily lives around the surrounding environments, hopefully come to know and to translate the landscape in a deep sense--its many layers of time & cultures, perhaps as far back as its geological time, up to the current & the local inhabitants. Sometimes willfully and blindly.

It is mandatory to keep sketch books. From the first, students are encouraged to include personal motifs in landscape or architecture; these may include words, abstract or invented forms, integrated with a sense of place from the point of view of a receptive, appreciative and respectful outsider.

Re-imagining Experience: Using lens-based media to explore memory and individual notions of truth

Course Type / Media:  Digital Photography, Animation, Video

Instructor:  Amy Lovera, MFA

In any form of communication, something always gets lost or transformed in the re-telling, we are beholden to our sensual limitations of experience, our understanding is our own. This class will use the camera’s frame as a space for performance and reflection. How do our internal lives, our wishes, preoccupations and past experiences play into our understanding of the now? Your daily life in Pont-Aven will provide you with inspiration, through journaling, collecting sound and objects and recreating your experience in the studio. We will examine strategies for narrative and performance work, from video confessionals to symbolic still lives to digital compositing. This class is about the desire to communicate our understanding of experience in the hope that we can reach beyond ourselves.

Material Transformation: a mixed-media metamorphosis

Course Type / Media:  Sculpture, Assemblage, Installation, Site-specific Work

Instructor:  Amy Lovera, MFA

This class is about the free-flowing process of working across media. It is about generating ideas and seeing what happens to them as they are embodied in different forms. Through a combination of studio work, collaborative and group projects, we will explore what happens when an idea begins in one medium, is produced in another and then takes on another life as when recreated by a peer. Collaboration can help us to come to solutions we wouldn’t have on our own. The goal of this class is to work playfully and intuitively, encouraging new methods of working that you can bring into your own work.

Professional Development Practicum for undergraduate art majors

Course Type / Media:  Critical Studies / Workshops

Instructor:  Barbara McBane, PhD, Phil Peters

For the past two semesters, PASCA has offered Post-Baccalaureate residents a professional development seminar series that covers a range of topics: documenting work; setting up blogs and websites; portfolio development; writing artist’s statements; applying to graduate programs and residencies; organizing shows; approaching galleries; creating networks and support communities; and more. This Fall, PASCA will open up this series to undergraduates and offer a hybrid Professional Development Practicum that may be taken for either studio art or liberal arts credit. For this accredited course, the Post-Bac seminar series will be combined with eight workshops that cover selected topics in greater depth; writing components and graded assignments will also be included. The eight workshops will include units on: photographing your artwork and printing and publishing images; sound recording and concepts of sound-design; basic and advanced video and audio editing; an HTML/CSS workshop; researching and articulating personal influences and interests in preparation for an extended artist’s statement; writing personal manifestoes. The seminar series is taught by the full faculty; the workshops will be taught by Phil Peters and Barbara McBane.

French Language, Literature and Culture

Course Type:  Language Studies

Instructor:  Carine Charof, MA

PASCA students live with French families and have frequent contact with the people of Pont-Aven through social and artistic exchanges. Classroom work at all levels of instruction builds the language skills needed for these encounters and focuses on French as it is used in everyday situations.

Level 1
A serious class for complete beginners. Basic grammar and vocabulary will be covered through exercises, homework and discussion. Conversational skills will be emphasized, as students move out of the classroom on a regular basis to open-air markets, cafes, and field trips to engage in real conversation. Students study with textbooks custom designed by the teacher and focus on vocabulary for daily life in France, and especially for artists.

Level 2
Intermediate students will improve their French conversational skills and grammar through exercises like reading required books, oral presentations, listening to French music, and watching French movies. Conversational skills are emphasized, as students move out of the classroom on a regular basis to open-air markets, cafes, and field trips to engage in real conversation. Students study with textbooks custom designed by the teacher and focus on specific topics and vocabulary especially for artists.

All courses are junior/senior (third or fourth year) art school level courses. They meet the NASAD required contact hours of 90 for a studio course and 45 for Liberal Arts. Study Trips are considered part of the curriculum and are led by the professors.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius: Art and Imaginations of Space.

Course Type:  Art History/Critical Studies

Instructor:  Barbara McBane, PhD

In this course, we will explore a variety of chartings of psychophysical landscapes with the object of suggesting new approaches to studio practices. Course readings will traverse a range of conceptual, cultural, and geopolitical viewpoints, and a variety of media in which map-making and space-imagining have been undertaken. Audiovisual media (film, sound-art, the internet) will be an important focus, but not an exclusive one. We will draw from Western cultural critics and philosophers who have taken up questions of space and how we inhabit it (Walter Benjamin, Edward Soja, Henri Lefebre, Guy Debord), but we will also give at least equal attention to other approaches: post-colonial, queer, and feminist, for example. Our archive will be wide-ranging; possibilities include: Persian rugs; Asian and Australian-Aboriginal sand-drawings; music notation; internet sites; star-maps. Special attention will be given to how space has been mapped through sound, from French village bells to Janet Cardiff’s sound-walks and prison installations. As an adjunct to the course, we will screen films featuring space and mapping, whether in relation to colonial projects or to undoing these; whether in order to anchor and orient us as cultural subjects or to disorient us, to disrupt our psycho-spatial coordinates, and to urge us to question our conditioned senses of ‘direction.’ Film possibilities include: Gabbeh (Iran); Pepe le Moko (France) and The Battle of Algiers (Italy/Algeria); The Saragossa Manuscript (Poland); The Tracker (Australia); The Searchers (USA); Head On (Australia); The Wizard of Oz (USA);Gerry (USA); The Blair Witch Project (USA); The Bourne Identity (USA); Peggy and Fred in Hell (USA).

You Are Here

Course Type / Media: Painting, Drawing

Instructor: Dahlia Elsayed

How does our sensory understanding of place inform our work? This class focuses on using the body as the tool for exploration of place, both literally and metaphorically. We’ll approach the idea of mapping by using the body as a starting point: in an age of Googlemaps and GPS systems, how do we chart the physical, intimate and ephemeral interactions with place? Through various painting and drawing exercises, we’ll look at the figure as narrator, how external information (weather, color, sound, texture) informs our work, tracking movement and expression, sequential drawing, identity and personal history, and go deeper into the idea of visually representing internal and external states. Our goal is to explore figuration beyond traditional forms and to experiment with temporal and sense based data in our work.

Image and Text

Course Type / Media: Painting, Drawing, Installation

Instructor: Dahlia Elsayed

Maps communicate information by using images and text, and both are equally important tools to understanding location and direction. Inspired by the binary nature of maps, this class explores the fluid boundaries between visual art and writing, and the fusion of text and image as devices of visual communication. How does text make comprehensible what seems elusive and abstract? We will experiment with the combinative power of words alongside or integrated into image, from the meaning of the words themselves to the way they are visually depicted. We will look at compositional strategies, how text augments the visual concepts of mapping, and by using your own writing or found text we will explore ideas of contemporary cartography through painting, drawing and installation. Our objective is to move deeper into the interdisciplinary possibilities of your artistic practice.

Personal Landscapes - 3D models and maquettes

Course Type / Media: Sculpture, Installation, Site-specific Work

Instructor:Hedwig Brouckaert

This class investigates the various ways artists have worked with the landscape - both historically and in the present day - in a formal as well as conceptual way. The artificial character of landscape images is a significant topic in contemporary art. We will look at the work of artists as Hans Op de Beeck, Marine Hugonnier, Tinka Pittoors, Monica Struder/Christophe van den Berg, Rapedius/Rindfeish, Bodys Isek Kingeles, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller etc. The goal in this class is to come to a personal artistic interpretation of the modern-day landscape. The surroundings of Pont Aven and our travels to European cities will be the starting point for models, maquettes and sculptures. From the maquettes we’ll explore further steps with other media (photography, video, drawing, etc.). We will use a variety of techniques and materials in sculptural, installation and site-specific work.

UN / RE / MAPPING/h3>

Course Type / Media: Sculpture, Assemblage, Installation, Site-specific Work

Instructor:Hedwig Brouckaert

In this 3D class, mapping is understood in the broadest sense of the term, as diagrams of both spatial and temporal relationships. We will explore systems as a basis for making work and experiment with rules, data, chance, action, collaboration and other processes that often lead to surprising images. We will work with a wide variety of materials and techniques and interdisciplinary is encouraged. We will look at contemporary artists whose work is ‘rule-based’ and art that specifically deals with mapping time and space, (On Kawara, Tehching Hsieh, Tatsuo Miyajima, Fishli & Weiss, Mark Manders, Georges Perec, and John Cage amongst others). Through assignments, readings and regular critiques by peers and faculty, the class seeks to assist students in finding and refining their own visual language.

French Language, Literature and Culture

Course Type:  Language Studies

Instructor:  Carine Charof, MA

PASCA students live with French families and have frequent contact with the people of Pont-Aven through social and artistic exchanges. Classroom work at all levels of instruction builds the language skills needed for these encounters and focuses on French as it is used in everyday situations.

Level 1
A serious class for complete beginners. Basic grammar and vocabulary will be covered through exercises, homework and discussion. Conversational skills will be emphasized, as students move out of the classroom on a regular basis to open-air markets, cafes, and field trips to engage in real conversation. Students study with textbooks custom designed by the teacher and focus on vocabulary for daily life in France, and especially for artists.

Level 2
Intermediate students will improve their French conversational skills and grammar through exercises like reading required books, oral presentations, listening to French music, and watching French movies. Conversational skills are emphasized, as students move out of the classroom on a regular basis to open-air markets, cafes, and field trips to engage in real conversation. Students study with textbooks custom designed by the teacher and focus on specific topics and vocabulary especially for artists.

All courses are junior/senior (third or fourth year) art school level courses. They meet the NASAD required contact hours of 90 for a studio course and 45 for Liberal Arts. Study Trips are considered part of the curriculum and are led by the professors.