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

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Sara Condo

Lecturer

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Bio

Sara Condo is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois. She uses personal experiences as a living site for exploration into complex narratives surrounding gender, technology, and history. Condo uses an experimental media based practice to explore unwritten stories and deploys them in the present form to envision new futures.

Education: Condo studied Media Arts at DePaul University, received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2009 and received her MFA at University of Illinois at Chicago in 2016. Group Exhibitions: Condo’s work has exhibited her work nationally and internationally with selected group exhibitions at Gallery 400, Sullivan Galleries, Roots and Culture Contemporary Art Center (Chicago, IL). Recent Solo Exhibitions: Recent solo exhibitions include at Rare Air Exhibitions Governor’s Island (New York, NY), Randy Alexander Gallery (Chicago, IL). Performances: She has screened her performance and moving image work in various experimental platforms such as Palace Film Festival(Chicago, IL), ACRE TV: (Chicago, IL, Pensacola, FL) and Temporary Resurfacing (Milwaukee, WI). Residencies: She has held residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residency, ACRE Artists Cooperative and Residency, and WZFR Residency for Experimental Filmmakers. Research: In addition, she has completed research in software programming for sound and video at the Center Computer for Research Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. Condo continues to live and make work in her home studio in the Heart of Chicago, Illinois where she is a professor teaching Intro and Advanced Topics in Photography, Audio and New Media.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

In this class students will create photographic work inside and outside in the natural elements. This three-week course, Inside / Out, delves into both digital and analog using solar-printing techniques, with a unique focus on printing not only on paper but also on textiles and organic materials. Students will work with a variety of printing processes such as solar fast dye, cyanotypes to transform photographic imaging utilizing digital and analog methods. Students are encouraged to create sculptural contraptions to best capture the sun¿s rays to their preferred substrate of choice.

Students will investigate how artistic internal forces can influence the external changing sociopolitical landscape and vice versa. Class visits will include excursions to Chicago¿s parks and gardens. We will research historical scientific photography and local botany. Through digital printing, students will learn to work with inkjet printers to create negatives, while sun-printing techniques will allow them to create eco-friendly designs on cotton and other textiles. By the end of the course, students will develop a diverse portfolio that includes both traditional photographic prints and textile artwork, blending the technical precision of indoor printing with the organic, unpredictable results of outdoor sun printing to stitch together new photographic forms.

Class Number

1189

Credits

3

Description

Exploratory Media examines the fluidity and connection between various forms of media. The course builds on the history of Conceptualism, an artistic practice born in the 1960s that prioritized the idea, allowing the medium to follow as well as the highly influential theory of the medium itself being meaning and message. This course will highlight the history of artists who worked with a wandering ¿nomadic¿ mindset due to access to new technologies such as video art collectives of the 1970¿s as well as photographers who work within a non-traditional lens based practice. This laboratory-like course encourages students to experiment and iterate: In this course students are asked to consider their artistic intentions through different kinds of media like performance, sculpture, sound, while also focusing on different outputs for lens based work such as alternative photographic substrates, performance, installation. The course structure relies on assignment-based projects, frequent hands-on studio experimentations, peer-to-peer feedback, and looking at other artists' work in a variety of mediums. Intermittent readings, lectures, and screenings provide a conceptual framework for this work.

Class Number

1825

Credits

3