Slippages invite shifts between categories, meanings, and material states, unraveling expectations and opening pathways to new effects. In this studio course, we will explore the significance of relinquishing control, engaging with material processes that extend beyond our intentions, and embracing improvisation and responsiveness as foundational approaches to making. Students will investigate the physical and formal properties of materials alongside their historical, socio-political, bodily, and ecological dimensions, understanding them as interconnected systems. This inquiry will take shape through hands-on sculptural practices—including casting, metalwork, and assemblage—alongside other forms of material alchemy, such as cooking and composting. The course will delve into assemblage theory and philosophies of materiality from thinkers like Jack Halberstam, Jane Bennett, Mel Y. Chen, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Jasbir Puar, in conjunction with critical art discourses on sculpture and formlessness to deepen material investigations. We will contextualize projects through discussions of contemporary artists such as Carl Chang, Dora Budor, Dieter Roth, Kara Walker, Helen Marten, Lygia Clark, Robert Morris, Delcy Morelos, Mark Lecky, Carolyn Lazard, Eva Hesse, and Jack Whitten, among others. Throughout the semester, we will examine the limits of representation and explore what emerges through experimentation and abstraction, considering the capacity of artworks to act, decay, affect, evolve, or transform.

In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed suggests that queerness involves a particular orientation toward the objects that appear and disappear around us. To queer objects is to engage in a “politics of disorientation,” unsettling normative ways of perceiving and using both bodies and things. This course examines the significance of everyday objects and how their design shapes our way of being in the world. Artists working in three dimensions have long turned to the ready-made to address the body, history, and relationality. Building on this impulse, the course explores how re-sculpting found objects generates new meanings. Students will experiment with objects beyond their intended functions, using them as raw material for new meanings, reordering social and spatial relations, activating a sculptural moment, and exploring how these processes can be acts of self-fashioning.