A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
SAIC faculty member Kate O'Neill.

Kate O'Neill

Associate Professor, Adjunct

Contact

Bio

BFA, 2005, and MFA, 2013, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include Apparatus Projects, Chicago; M. LeBlanc, Chicago; and Roots and Culture, Chicago. Selected group exhibitions include The Chicago Cluster Project, Chicago; Bensheim Museum, Bensheim, Germany; Goethe Institute, Chicago; Carr Chapel at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago; Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany; M. LeBlanc, Chicago; Rainbo Club, Chicago; Soccer Club Club, Chicago; Lease Agreement, Baltimore; and Johalla Projects, Chicago.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Taking its title from Andy Warhol¿s eerie, steady-shot 1960s film portraits and Mary Shelley¿s Gothic tale of an assembled body animated by new technology, this course investigates convergences between photography and the screen, with special attention to hybrid media practices; collage and montage; the body; and images that are animated, reanimated, or stilled. Foregrounding experimental uses of photography in relation to moving images, animation, and screen-based display, the course introduces artists who challenge conventional boundaries between still and moving image, photography and cinema, body and machine. Students will produce a series of short projects investigating these ideas through photographic, time-based, and hybrid media experiments, culminating in a final project situating photography within the expanded field of screen culture.

Class Number

1535

Credits

3

Description

This interdisciplinary studio symposium course introduces students to key principles and practices of surrealism with particular focus on theories of photography and strategies of photographic image-making. Treating surrealism not only as an art-historical moment but a living body of attitudes, theories, and possibilities for thinking, art-making, and action, students will develop their own ideas and a body of work in formulating a surrealist praxis. Students will read texts by and about surrealists/surrealism, querying into the poetics, politics, and possibilities of photographic surrealism. The class will treat ideas including: erotic desire, pleasure, gender, chance, dreams/unconscious, walking, play/games, politics, race, anticolonial thought, freedom.

Students will study work by surrealist thinkers including Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Aime Cesaire, Georges Bataille, Maya Deren, and Claude Cahun; modern surrealist potes including Juliana Huxtable and Billy-Ray Belcourt; and contemporary theorists such as Rosalind Kruass, Susan Laxton, Angela Carter, and Tina Campt. Artists of special focus will include: Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Jacques-Andre Boiffard, Pierre Molinier, Maya Deren, John Akomfrah, and Aruther Jafa. Students will also engage contemporary Afrosurrealism based in photography and film, e.g. Beyonce's ?Lemonade,' Donald Glover's ?Atlanta,' Boots Riley's 'Sorry to Bother You,' and Jordan Peele's ?Get Out.?

Students write two short analytic essays and a cumlinating research essay synthesizing ideas from across the semester. Students will also engage in generative photographic exercises designed to break habitual attitudes toward seeing and staging, as they build a focused body of personal work. Research, writing, and studio practice unfold in conjunction with one another, providing students with a working model for synthesizing art history and theory, political engagement, and making.

Class Number

1493

Credits

3

Description

This interdisciplinary studio symposium course introduces students to key principles and practices of surrealism with particular focus on theories of photography and strategies of photographic image-making. Treating surrealism not only as an art-historical moment but a living body of attitudes, theories, and possibilities for thinking, art-making, and action, students will develop their own ideas and a body of work in formulating a surrealist praxis. Students will read texts by and about surrealists/surrealism, querying into the poetics, politics, and possibilities of photographic surrealism. The class will treat ideas including: erotic desire, pleasure, gender, chance, dreams/unconscious, walking, play/games, politics, race, anticolonial thought, freedom.

Students will study work by surrealist thinkers including Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Aime Cesaire, Georges Bataille, Maya Deren, and Claude Cahun; modern surrealist potes including Juliana Huxtable and Billy-Ray Belcourt; and contemporary theorists such as Rosalind Kruass, Susan Laxton, Angela Carter, and Tina Campt. Artists of special focus will include: Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Jacques-Andre Boiffard, Pierre Molinier, Maya Deren, John Akomfrah, and Aruther Jafa. Students will also engage contemporary Afrosurrealism based in photography and film, e.g. Beyonce's 'Lemonade,' Donald Glover's 'Atlanta,' Boots Riley's 'Sorry to Bother You,' and Jordan Peele's 'Get Out.'

Students write two short analytic essays and a culminating research essay synthesizing ideas from across the semester. Students will also engage in generative photographic exercises designed to break habitual attitudes toward seeing and staging, as they build a focused body of personal work. Research, writing, and studio practice unfold in conjunction with one another, providing students with a working model for synthesizing art history and theory, political engagement, and making.

Class Number

1548

Credits

3