Please join us for a dialogue which positions screenings, presentations, and moderated exchanges of seven contributors to the forthcoming anthology: Diagrams of Adjacency: Formation – Pyrometrics – Currency. This anthology is organized as a response to the prescriptive conventions circulating through current practices in ceramics, art, and cultural theory. The anthology and panel will bend—and perhaps break—those conventions by foregrounding the aesthetic, political, and theoretical propositions made by its contributors. This event gathers together a broad spectrum of positions represented in the anthology, scaffolding out an enfranchising dynamic, one that is decentered, not preoccupied with how things should be, and open to possibilities. The artists will introduce their work, perspectives, and practices, while exercising and testing out the propositions of the anthology projected in real time with one another, the moderator, audience, and respondents.

The event is a performative manifold, drawing together the artists’ predicates that they attribute to the subject of ceramics as a medium, process, and trace. These realizations neither canonize nor offer answers. Instead, they arc out a space for how we look toward the field’s pluralities of possibilities, opening a space of vibrant exchange and opportunity for the work and artists. This reaction is a necessary part of sharing our experiences in the field. The presentations are thus the motor which pushes the structure forward, each adjusting to the realizations of their process. The dialogue offers a dynamic rather than prescriptive approach to such topics.

The project offers a rereading of position, agency, and plurality of possibility when engaging with this nexus of history, materiality, and practice, re-plasticizing the currency of clay. It is an avenue for re-approaching the medium, while reproaching the ossified schismogenic conventions of its center's proscriptive forms and contents, through the materiality and process of clay itself. That is all we have left. It is what we start(ed) with: A desire to work, explore, share and learn.

Friday, May 5, 2017 – 10:30am to 2:30pm – CAC 3201

EVENT SCHEDULE:

10:30 am  Coffee Meet & Greet

11:00 am  Part 1: Introduction + Video Screening

Alexandra Engelfriet: ‘Tranchée’

Jacob Raeder: ‘On Warm Adobe’

11:40 am   Part 2: Forms of Practice and Possible Forms of Agency

Julia Haft-Candell: Presentation and Moderated Panel Dialog

Anton Reijnders: Presentation and Moderated Panel Dialog

12:50 pm  Short Break & Light Refreshments

1:00 pm  Part 3: Mediation, Deformations and Semiotics

Matt Fisher: Presentation and Moderated Panel Dialog

Stephanie Lanter: Presentation and Moderated Panel Dialog

2:10 pm  Short Break, Light Refreshments & Further Dialogue Welcome

2:30 pm  Formal conclusion to the event

Contemporary Arts Center (Bldg 721)
Colloquium Room 3201

Presented by the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, Department of Art, Critical and Curatorial Studies Concentration at the University of California Irvine, and in conjunction with the University Art Gallery.