A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Artist Evan Fusco standing against a yellow wall

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Evan Fusco

Lecturer

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Bio

Evan Fusco (they/them) is a thinker based in Chicago, IL. Their work is invested in constructions of reality both socially and metaphysically, engaging a slow reading of the base components to achieve an understanding of things. Graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019, they currently teach their in the Contemporary Practices department and are a member of the union AICWU. Past writing has been published in Other Forms’ Counter Signals publication, Plates Journal, Caitlin McCann’s In a Car On a Road Going to a Place, and their book Pathologies of the Margin; a study in dissipation was self-published in 2021. Work of their’s has been shown and/or presented at MOCA Cleveland, Apparatus Projects, The Chicago Art Book Fair, Cybertwee Headquarters, and Carroll University. Their publications are in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Joan Flash Artist Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recently they presented the first iteration of their lecture performance A Secret Third Thing (Choreography of a Practice) and have been running a reading series called General Readings underneath the project umbrella of General Things.

Personal Statement

Timothy Morton: …to be a thing at all is to have been hurt. Harry Dodge’s paraphrase: …to be a thing is to have been wounded. My paraphrase of a paraphrase: to be a thing at all is to be with and to exhaust. To state a verbose practice is to fail it and never allow it to exhaust. I think often of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s conception of study, and in the practice consider its relational implications. Performances built towards productive failures and exigencies of the moment. A kind of autistic thingliness as I have begun to describe it. Disunification of a self following Aria Dean’s understandings of Robert Morris as a kind of fool, kind of dandy. Gregg Bordowitz stating that, “Nothing is as it appears to be and everything is significant.” A montage of a statement to hold space for the lecture-performances, plays, sculptures, essays, no longer here and yet to come in the practice. Thinking towards what constitutes a real, and how to grasp its process in works that prioritize collapse, sabotage, obtuseness in order to exist within what Jane Bennett would call thing-power in order to find what Erin Manning would call minor gestures.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

In this course we will focus on disciplinary and interdisciplinary art and design practices of contemporary art production. This team-taught, year-long class explores the materials and techniques of surface, space, and time (2D, 3D, and 4D), as well as the connections and interplay of these areas. Core Studio integrates the formal with the conceptual, traditional with the contemporary, and makes visible a variety of approaches in current cultural production in order to foster the development of students? emerging practices as makers and thinkers. In this interdisciplinary studio course students will be authorized to use a variety of school shops, materials and equipment; including the woodshop, plaster studio, digital lab, sewing machine, hand tools, sound and video production, digital workflows and principles of visual fundamentals. This is a hands-on making class, faculty present artists and content related to a particular toolkit and, or project theme. Every section of Core Studio has shared learning outcomes which are uniquely realized by each Core faculty partnership. Students should expect a fast-paced studio environment. In Core Studio students will complete short assignments as well as longer multi-week projects. Assignments are designed to help students develop their own ideas in relation to the materials, processes, and themes presented by faculty.

Class Number

1707

Credits

3

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

1343

Credits

3

Description

A small stone you keep in your pocket to rub for good luck. That one frame you can’t find a picture for, but you keep anyway. The old piece of furniture you got from your grandparents and keep even though you don’t know what it’s used for. Large slabs of concrete that grab your attention on your walks home because of their abandonment. A favorite t-shirt. The specific chords in your favorite song. Viruses in your computer and your body. The color blue. Thing as a word can denote all of these, as well as a whole universe of other things. It’s the word we use when the other is on the tip of our tongue, refusing us. Social things, promiscuous things, general things. In this class we’ll explore them all and more, with an emphasis on our relationship to them, and their relationship to each other. Thinking seriously about abstraction, formalism, performance, found object, and other 20th century avant-garde practices you will develop a practice around the thing as the non-human and examine how a relationship to things can operate as a research practice. As the art critic and collector Leo Stein put it, “Things are what we encounter, ideas are what we project.” This class is about encounter. The class is split up into four modules: “The Social Life of Things” where we explore our personal universe of things and begin to gather; Breakdown/Abstraction where we take this apart, glue it back together, zhuzh it up, and rethink ourselves in relation; Bodies where we begin to formalize works in relation to these things; and finally Platforms/Ensembles where we think them as a whole, as an exhibition, as something to grow with. We will look at artists such as Robert Morris, Devin T. Mays, Gordon Hall, and Thornton Dial and thinkers such as Fred Moten, William J. Simmons, and Jane Bennett. Each week will combine making and thinking as one and the same. Each module will build on the last with the goal of creating a body of work at the end of the semester that will allow for further thinking and making as you move into your sophomore year.

Class Number

1673

Credits

3