Rosemary Holliday Hall, Joshua G. Stein and Kitty Ross
Field Guide to Destabilizing Objects
May 27, 2023
Summary:
Forthcoming
Select Readings:
Anthropocene Insecurities by Thomas S. Davis
Empire, State & Building (intro) by Kiel Moe
Reciprocal Landscapes by Jane Hutton
Redrawing Ecology by Martha Elizabeth Fourie
Mapping Chicagou/Chicago: A Living Atlas by Various Authors of the Settler Colonial City Project
Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center by Various Authors of the Settler Colonial City Project
The Petro-Biennial Complex by Various Authors of the Settler Colonial City Project
Discussion Guide:
Field Guide to Destabilizing Objects Discussion Guide
About the topic
In this collective conversation we will generate a Field Guide to Destabilizing Objects. Although a field guide is usually written from a point of encyclopedic authority, we aim to develop an alternative format in which we ask questions, suggest methodologies, and stake out positions from which we can embrace roles of uncertainty so as to best learn from the materials that surround and support us.
Many practitioners focus upon the completion of an object (and often its end point as a marketable object) but the materials and parts of the land with which we choose to work are not finite; they are part of larger systems and histories, and therefore the objects we make have the capacity to tell larger stories. By following and observing the trajectory of materials, we investigate whether the unstable and uncertain process of engaging with ceramics (in an unstable and uncertain world) can be transcribed into open-ended objects and, in turn, expand the approach of the broader ceramics field.
About the Lead Artists
Rosemary Holliday Hall is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, and performance. Hall's evolving projects draw attention to connections between more-than-human agencies and cultural ecologies to explore human's relationships with nature and culture. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA with a minor in Environmental Horticulture from the University of California, Davis.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington DC. She is the recipient of multiple residencies, fellowships, and collaborative grants which include participation in the UC Davis Bilinski fellowship with PhD Candidate Tracie Hayes researching beetle scavengers, Ex.Change: Artist and Scientist on Climate Change grant and exhibition examining climate change in the Chicago region, Art, Science & Culture Initiative Collaboration Grant with PhD Predrag Popovic at the University of Chicago researching swarms and termites, Oxbow School of Art Fellowship, the Maria and Jan Manetti Shrem UC Davis Royal Drawing School Fellowship, and Vashon Artist in Residence.
Hall is a Co-Founder of Viral Ecologies, a digital publication that focuses on human and more-than-human ecological entanglements, and Spore Space a tiny artist-run gallery in the Ojai Valley, CA. Hall is the recent recipient of the first Artist Researcher in Residence at Taft Botanical Gardens in Ojai, where she currently resides.
Joshua G. Stein is the founder of Radical Craft, a Los Angeles-based studio that advances an experimental art and design practice saturated in history, archaeology, and craft. This inquiry inflects the production of urban spaces and artifacts by evolving newly grounded approaches to the challenges posed by virtuality, velocity, and globalization. His recent projects reimagine the construction and resource extraction industries as anthropogenic geological processes while investigating new applications for earthen materials. Joshua G. Stein has received numerous grants, awards, and fellowships, including multiple grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the AIA Upjohn research award, the European Commission’s Science+Technology+Arts initiative, and the 2010-11 Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture. He is Professor of Architecture at Woodbury University.
As a ceramic sculptor, Katherine Ross is interested in the historical role of porcelain as a status symbol valued for purity and strength, elegance and propaganda. Her work has always been concerned with the complex relationship we have to this material and the subtle, coded ways it operates within our culture. Her expertise is in ceramic production for large installations addressing biological technology, disease and prophylaxis, notions of the obsolete and personal histories. Currently, she is writing a book related to her family history.
Katherine has been a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago faculty since 1981, serving also as the decades-long Chair of the Ceramics Department and Interim Dean of Graduate Studies. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1976 from the State University of New York at Fredonia and her MFA in 1980 from Tulsa University.
Katherine has exhibited across the world from the Jingdezhen National Ceramic Museum to The Centers For Disease Control Museum in Atlanta. She is the recipient of many awards at local, state, and national levels, including an Arts Midwest/NEA Grant and being recognized as a Walter Gropius Master Artist for 2012 by the Huntington Museum. Her work is published widely in periodicals and books on ceramic art in the U.S., Great Britain, China, Australia, and Switzerland. Katherine has also worked with several architects including Michael Graves to produce porcelain objects for the Taubman/Kalisman residence, and Ullman and Fil Architects to restore terra cotta facades, as well as numerous others on residential and restoration projects.