From LSU to LSSU: Prof. Patricia Suchy visits as artist-in-residencePosted: March 25th, 2006
March 27, 2006
POETRY IN MOTION – Visiting Louisiana State University Scholar Patricia Suchy takes Lake Superior State University arts students through the symbolic layers of “Question,” a poem by May Swenson. Students are making a video short based on how the poem metaphorically relates our bodies to a house. Suchy offered the daylong workshop on the LSSU’s Arts Center stage on Sunday. She is on campus exploring aspects of performance art with students and faculty through March 29. (LSSU photo by John Shibley)
SAULT STE. MARIE, Mich. -- Patricia Suchy Ph.D., an associate professor of performance studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, is working with LSSU communication students March 24-29 as an artist-in-residence.
Suchy, who teaches in LSU's Dept. of Communication Studies and is director of the program for study of film and media arts, is assisting LSSU students with a performance art exhibit that they will present to the public April 7-8. She was invited to campus at the request of LSSU Professor Gary Balfantz Ph.D.
"During my residency at LSSU, I will be working with a group of students to create an installation piece based on images of domestic space and their relationship to the human body," Suchy said. Students working on the project include Aaron Kopitz, Jared Little, Elisa 'EC' Solomon, Kyle Stockdale, John Dorcy, Cassandra Hillier, Faye Pendaz, Dariel Tauriainen, Liz Sippl, Geoff Girolamo, and Heather Mydosh. LSSU Adjunct Art Professor Michelle Ranta and community member Liz Izzard join the students.
Titled 'Body My House,' Suchy said the piece is inspired, in part, by LSSU's new Arts Center and, in part, "by the recent violent displacement of so many people from their houses in southern Louisiana due to hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
"Body My House will ask spectators to re-imagine how their bodies inhabit the spaces they call home," Suchy said. "The workshops leading up to the installation will engage methods drawn from various experimental theatre and surrealist artists."
Suchy continued, "Although most of us probably don't think of ourselves as engaged in 'performance' when we visit an exhibit at a museum, in the last several decades artists have become increasingly aware that where and how a piece of art is seen is not neutral; the context for its display is part of the display. As such, the viewer becomes an important 'character' in the viewing. Installation art might be said to cast the spectator as its 'hero' -- but unlike conventional displays of works of art, installation puts the spectator and context front and center."
Suchy said installation art is a term broadly applied to "art making that rejects concentration on one object in favor of a consideration between elements or of the interaction between things and their contexts." She said it might best be described as a strategy, or set of strategies for making art.
"Although installation relies upon concrete materials assembled usually with some degree of site-specificity, it is a performance-based art form. It shares with the institution of theatre a sense of democracy, ephemerality, spontaneity, and the creation of a different, parallel world, perhaps with its own set of 'rules.'"
Suchy said that rather than ask spectators to lose themselves in the illusion, installation
art "defamiliarizes the spectators, confronts them, distances them, isolates them or joins them with others, asks them to act like detectives, to take imaginative possession of the things they encounter, and to develop an intense consciousness of their experiences as a performance."
Installation artists aim to create 'walk-in worlds' that wait for the spectator to arrive and take up temporary residence.
Working with LSSU students and Balfantz, Suchy said she hopes to produce a work that is site-specific and will turn parts of the new Arts Center into such "walk-in worlds."
The project takes its name, 'Body My House,' from the first line of 'Question,' a poem by May Swenson.
Suchy holds an MFA in directing and a Ph.D. in performance studies, both from Northwestern University. Her artistic work includes several experimental media theatre
productions, such as "13 ways to kill a mockingbird," which used the idiom of installation art to explore the cultural impact of Harper Lee's novel, and "Lake Effects," a surreal connection of the iconography of 1940's Hollywood star Veronica Lake and the legends of Saint
Veronica.
She teaches courses in the history and practice of film and video, performance of poetry and fiction, and seminars in documentary film and cultural theory. Her current projects include a documentary on tourism connected with the sugar industry in southern Louisiana, and a book-length study of Bakhtinian theory in its relation to live and mediated performance.
For more information on Suchy's visit and the April student exhibit, contact Balfantz at 906-635-2278 or gbalfantz@lssu.edu. --LSSU--
 Digg -
 Reddit -
 del.icio.us -
 Google -
 Facebook -
-  StumbleUpon
|
