Geography, in its most literal translation, is "earth-writing"— an act of inscription and intervention in the land rather than a neutral recording. Maps, expedition photographs, survey drawings, landscape paintings: these are correlations of the physical place they describe but are also fabrications of it, assembled from fragments in the service of particular political, colonial, and imaginative desires. Terra ficta — fictive land — names what was always true of geographic knowledge: that it is constructed, projected, and contested. This course takes montage as both its theoretical framework and its primary studio logic. The cut, the juxtaposition, the edit, the fragment lifted from one context and repositioned in another — these are the operations by which geographic imaginaries are built, and artistic strategies by which they can be critically, playfully, subversively dismantled and remade. Students will move between foundational texts in critical geography, visual culture, and art theory — from Said and Mitchell to McKittrick, Goeman, Didi-Huberman, and Steyerl — and a studio practice that encompasses collage, fabrication, and installation. The course builds from short technical and conceptual exercises toward a sustained site-specific investigation developed in the second half of the semester, culminating in a body of work investigating a particular place, testing the shared visual and theoretical vocabulary developed over the semester’s readings and studio work. The final project will expose a terra ficta, proposing new pictorial and sculptural terms for how a geographic site can be understood, disassembled, re-made and re-inhabited.

Painting and speculative fiction are unlikely but kindred spirits. Both routinely explore alternative temporalities and potential futures, peering into the unknown, the alien, and the monstrous while reflecting the pressures of developing technologies and envisioning new ones. This class attempts to forge a further dialogue between these two creative pursuits, using passages and ideas culled from speculative fiction, horror, and weird fiction as prompts for discrete painting projects. What can the writings of JG Ballard, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, James Tiptree Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, Meg Elison, China Miéville, Cixin Liu, H.P. Lovecraft, and other notable speculative fiction writers offer the contemporary painter? This class will explore how literary and speculative conceptions can be expressed visually while developing the student’s knowledge of the materials and techniques of painting. Throughout, it will consider the history of painting and its current debates, highlighting the key differences and bridges between art, illustration, and other fields exploring speculative motifs. A course for painters and interdisciplinary artists, this class will ask students to imagine painting as something that can model alternative histories and societies while keenly critiquing our own.