Faculty Profiles
Frederick Wright Jones Associate Professor, Art, Sculpture |
Education
- M.F.A, SUNY at Buffalo
- B.A., University of Pennsylvania
Teaching Interests
My goal in the classroom is to provide students with an opportunity to define their artistic direction, take risks and learn from failure. Both in the studio and classroom, I weave together myths, history, contemporary politics and pop culture. I provide students with tools for manipulating form and body. Through a gradual journey through the relationship between form and concept, students take from their experiences—whether background, interests or identity—different ways of tackling notions of maker, object and audience.
Research, Scholarship or Creative/Artistic Interests
My discipline is body-related. It is related to the human condition: The violence of survival and the beauty of another day. I used to cut trees for a living. The tree’s memories and story are made in 3 dimensions. As the tree grows, layers upon layer, as it reaches to the sun and digs into the soil, as lightning strikes and wind weathers, the tree takes these events and embodies them in its form. The scars of history are ingrained in the body. I see the world and society with peripheral eyes and my process is a way of sense making. I look at history and social conventions: my family, my relations, the noises, and images that surround me, and with my eyes and hands I process these things. I invite the audience to interact, to shift from spectator to collaborator to perpetrator. I appropriate the visual language of those who have not written history: folk and utilitarian objects, with those who do: merchandising, populist propaganda, weapons. I am inspired by the brutal functionality of early industrial technology and the inversion of tools of labor into CrossFit body sculpting. My ethical stance hovers between dutiful responsibility and post-punk cynicism.
Sample Works
Professional Website
