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

Stephanie Brooks

Professor, Adjunct

Bio

Education: BFA, 1994, Ohio University, Athens; MFA, 1997, University of Illinois at Chicago. Exhibitions: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center; Columbus, Ohio; Rotunda, NY; New Center for Contemporary Art, Louisville; Memphis, TN; New York, NY, Los Angeles, CA; Milwaukee, WI; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Gallery 400, Chicago; Kendall College, Grand Rapids, MI; San Francisco, CA. International Exhibitions: Berlin, Copenhagen, Ljubljana, London, and Vienna. Commissions: City of Chicago; The City of Phoenix, AZ; University of Arizona. Recent Publications: Green Lantern Press, Illinois State University Press, PrintText, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Perennial Press. Collections: Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Microsoft, Phillip Morris/Altria, The MacArthur Foundation.

Personal Statement

My sculptural works are fueled by the visual, physical, verbal and written. Equations, equivalents, and norms are in distress and readdressed in my art practice.

With my sculptures, I investigate and interrogate systems in our built, affective, textual, canonical and public environments. Through object-making, the works create complexities in order to expose the multiplicities of meaning inherent in the locations of forms. My artworks insert alternative narratives within, around and through the locations minimalism, building, abstraction, language, humor, and textuality.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Students in this course pursue assignment-based explorations in sculpture. Technical demonstrations help students develop material interests and studio skills, including innovative uses of both traditional and digital processes. Within the semester students will produce (three) projects with a focus on the artistic and social contextualization of their work. Multiple individual critiques help students analyze their work and articulate their intentions. Student presentations and readings deepen the student's theoretical groundings in the discipline. Class critiques are a workshop forum for application of the knowledge and verbal skills that define an artistic and aesthetic position.

Class Number

2483

Credits

3

Description

This studio course explores the multiplicity of meanings inherent in the objectness of sculpture practices. Our weekly classes address such issues as monuments, earthworks, and performance; history and temporality; materiality and dematerialization; research, manufacturing, and consumption; tensions and connections between sculpture, architecture, and designed objects; and the ways new media, especially the internet and other virtual sites, alter our notions of the permanent and the ephemeral. Each week we'll discuss readings from contemporary and art historical texts and critique student work. Students will be given assignments and projects to be completed and critiqued throughout the semester.

Class Number

1732

Credits

3

Description

How do we produce space and how does it produce us? More concretely, how can we think about the production of space in ways that help us develop our creative powers of resistance, invention, and transformation? This course examines the production of space through ideas about intimacy, movement, contact, accident, networking, the sacred, the virtual, enclosure, infinities, elsewhere, trespass, urban/rural, and public and private.





The course is structured around a wide variety of readings from philosophy, critical and architectural theory, and radical geography. These are combined with viewing and discussion of artworks and spatial practices, and students will engage in hybrid projects investigating actual and/or virtual spaces. Readings include selections from Samuel Delaney, Michael Sorkin, Rosalyn Deutsch, Saskia Sasken, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Jacobs, Michel Serres, Brian Massumi, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Mike Davis, Jonathan Crary, Raymond Williams, among others.

Class Number

2386

Credits

3