Contemporary sculptural practice confronts us in our physical space, and asks us to consider our relationship to and with the material world. In this studio course students will take a deep dive into materials and processes as makers of meaning. Using contemporary materialist theories of scholars Karen Barad, Anne Anlin Cheng, and Elizabeth Grosz, students will examine the cultural, political, ecological, and global implications of materials, while considering the intrinsic qualities and scientific properties embedded in the materials they use. The goal is to gain a deep understanding of the language of materials, and how to shape that language to function literally: as a perfect sentence, but also metaphorically: as poetry. The course probes beyond the familiar meaning of wood, plaster, metal, and clay, and asks students how these materials might function figuratively, abstractly, symbolically, and conceptually. What can materials do in the world and how can artists activate them? The class will be introduced to processes in the wood, metal, and wet shops not only as the means for fabrication, but also as opportunities for hands-on exploration and in particular, how each artist can learn to cultivate a distinctive approach through manipulations. Our emphasis will be on experimentation, not perfection.

Where something is placed shapes what it becomes. The pedestal, the vitrine, the shelf, the hospital tray, the shop window, the ethnographic case: each proposes a distinct relationship between object, body, and meaning. But commodities promise something else, a condition of sitelessness, an ability to circulate anywhere without friction. This studio course investigates the tension between the grounded specificity of things and the placelessness that display cultures produce. We will trace the migration of sculpture from its attachment to architecture and the monument, through the pedestal's promise of autonomy, to the modernist descent onto the floor and into the expanded field. We will also consider how museums have ordered and classified captured material, and how commodity logic promises a circulation free from the weight of place. At each stage, the apparatus of presentation is never neutral but always already a conditioning force. Students will investigate the physical and structural properties of display alongside their colonial, socio-political, and economic dimensions as interconnected systems. The course will engage thinkers such as Rosalind Krauss, Sara Ahmed, Elizabeth Grosz, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Saidiya Hartman and Céline Condorelli, alongside critical discourses on sculpture, orientation, and the politics of the museum. We will contextualize projects through discussions of contemporary artists such as David Hammons, Pope.L, Rachel Harrison, Robert Rauschenberg, Jessica Stockholder, Cameron Rowland, Liz Magor, Diamond Stingily, Duane Linklater, Park McArthur, and others. Students will work in the wood, metal, and wet shops while engaging CNC and digital fabrication technologies, developing projects that move between the handmade and the industrially produced, the site-specific and the portable, the singular and the reproduced. Throughout the semester, students will interrogate the conditions under which things appear, asking what it means to place, to displace, to support, and to withhold, and how art might refuse the terms of its own display.