A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

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Mathew Wilson

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

BFA, 1990 Hull College of Art, England; MFA 1994, School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Exhibitions: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Renaissance Society, University of Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center. Bibliography: Catalogue, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. Collections: Gabriel Mayer, Munich, Germany; Aaron Levine, Washington, D. C.; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Victoria and Steven Burns, Los Angeles, California. Awards: Community Arts Assistance Grant; Illinois Arts Council New Performance Forms Artist Fellowship; Illinois Arts Council, Artist Projects Grant; Illinois Humanities Council.  

Personal Statement

Industry of the Ordinary (IOTO) created their first project for Patriot's Day in 2003, where we organized nearly 100 volunteers to drop white clothing on Daley Plaza in Chicago. It was intended that the combined weight of this clothing would match the average weight of an adult American. The work was political in intent, firstly to draw attention to the fiction of truly public space in the city and, for Patriot's Day, to ritualistically drop an 'American Body' to the ground.The project has now grown to include work that addresses a variety of subjects in a wide range of media. In addition to publicly sited performance works IOTO create installations sculpture, text, photography, video, and sound pieces that are dedicated to an exploration and celebration of the customary, the everyday, and the usual.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This studio course focuses on themes, practices, contexts, and questions undertaken by contemporary artists and designers. Research Studio I is a course that asks students to begin to develop and connect their own work and ideas with a diverse range of artists, designers, and communities. This course engages with cultural institutions including: museums, galleries, libraries and archives as resources of critical engagement.

Students will undertake various types of research activities: a) collecting and classification, b) mapping and diagramming, c) systems of measurement, d) social interaction, e) information search systems, f) recording and representation, and g) drawing and other notational systems.


Assignments in this course are faculty directed, open-media, interdisciplinary and idea based. The projects are designed to help students recognize their work habits, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Students will experience a wide range of research methods and making strategies. Critique as an evaluative process used in art and design schools, is a focus in this course. Various methods and models of critique are used in order to give students the tools to discuss their own work and the work of others.

Class Number

1355

Credits

3

Description

This course invites students to occupy and invigorate public spaces, both physical and virtual. Through site-specific gestures, installed objects, posters, projections and other interventions, students will take their work into places where accidental audiences can be found. Additionally, transgressive art more generally will be examined and discussed. Readings and discussions will focus on Situationism, Social Sculpture and Guerrilla Art, as well as the controversies surrounded the work of Burden, Buren, Kapoor, Serra, The Guerrilla Girls, Act Up, Theaster Gates and others. The class will visit local public works and also become familiar with the challenged status of `public space¿ in the city. Students would explore through assigned projects the various social contracts that we all experience in our daily and creative lives. For example, the first project would examine the social contracts that exist between the individual and the people and institutions around them. The students would be asked to consider how these contracts and assumptions, so often invisible and unconscious, might be gently subverted.

Class Number

1215

Credits

3

Description

Students who enroll in Capstone 4900: Senior Exhibition will participate in the fall exhibition at SAIC Galleries and will be ineligible to participate in the spring exhibition. Students enrolling in this course must have senior status--90 credits or more completed--when the Fall semester begins.

This interdisciplinary capstone class is designed to help students recognize patterns of inquiry within their practice and to help contextualize their work in preparation for their Senior Exhibition. An assessment of previous work will be the starting point for ongoing critical inquiry into your creative professional practice, and how you might position and locate your own work in the art-worlds of the 21st Century.

Readings, screenings, and field trips will vary. Class visits by local artists will provide the opportunity to have a conversation about their lived experience sustaining a creative practice.

With an emphasis on faculty mentorship, class meetings will support the development of a body of work or project for the Senior Exhibition, building a strong portfolio, and planning for post-SAIC life.

Class Number

1272

Credits

3