Bob Dylan still sings that \u201cthe answer is blowin\u2019 in the wind,\u201d but for artist Ash Arder, the wind is where she found the question.<\/p>\n
Rochester\u2019s first artist-in-residence, Arder brought an artist\u2019s sensibility to her exploration of research papers by computer scientists working to mimic the movement of plant leaves in virtual reality. She likens the experience to eavesdropping, and she translated their technical terms\u2014such as \u201cwind-vector collisions\u201d and \u201cwind-cell cube\u201d\u2014into images and symbols more evocative to her. It was an imaginative process, one that involved an effort to understand their work and, even more important, to investigate her own reactions to it.<\/p>\n
New this year, the artist-in-residence program brings an artist or art collective to the University for two academic years to conduct research, produce a body of work, and teach a selection of studio art courses. The program aims to draw artists\u2014either established or recent graduates of MFA or PhD programs\u2014who are able to collaborate across disciplinary fields and draw on the University\u2019s wide range of resources, including labs and facilities, practice and performance spaces, libraries, archives, research centers, and special collections.<\/p>\n
New artists-in-residence will arrive every other year. The schedule means that \u201cstudents will have the opportunity to meet and to work with potentially two additional artists-educators during their undergraduate studies,\u201d says Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge, an associate professor art and the associate chair of the Department of Art and Art History.<\/a> \u201cThe more exposure to different art practices, the richer an art education is.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIs \u2018convincing\u2019 the new \u2018real\u2019? And where does that leave the real \u2018real\u2019?\u201d she asked the audience last fall at a lecture introducing her Hartnett Gallery exhibit of the work, \u201cA Study: Collision Detection.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Arder, who was born in Flint, Michigan, and is now based in Detroit, works across the boundaries of formal artistic disciplines to explore physical and conceptual systems, especially those involving ecology. She earned a bachelor\u2019s degree at the University of Michigan in 2010 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Arts in 2018.<\/p>\n Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge, an associate professor of art and the associate chair of the Department of Art and Art History<\/a>, calls Arder a \u201cperfect fit\u201d as the University\u2019s inaugural \u00a0artist-in-residence, both within the department and for the University as a whole, because of the \u201cexciting ideas she explores in her work that cross-pollinate with other programs, such as environmental humanities and digital media studies.\u201d<\/p>\n Recently, Arder has been visiting the Sibley Music Library<\/a> and talking with ethnomusicologists at the Eastman School of Music<\/a>. She\u2019s researching the role of jazz music in the expression of ideas between people and the environment.<\/p>\n Says Arder of her Rochester year: \u201cIt\u2019s been a whirlwind, in a good way.\u201d<\/p>\n I teach two introductory courses and one advanced course. Last semester, I taught introduction to drawing and introduction to video art. The introduction to video art felt natural\u2014I use video in my work. Drawing isn\u2019t something that I do as a polished portion of my creative practice. It\u2019s something that I use when I\u2019m thinking through ideas, so I taught it in the way that best reflected my own practice. Students were drawing with light and drawing with wire. We were thinking about the relationship between performance and drawing.<\/p>\n This semester I\u2019m teaching a class on the idea of the swamp. It\u2019s an opportunity to design my own course. I\u2019m thinking about the swamp mainly as it is in the U.S., but particularly as it\u2019s explained through the media and popular culture. The course is considered an advanced new media course, and the undercurrent of my work is the relationship between people and plants, and human and nonhuman nature.<\/p>\n Over the holidays, I did a residency in New Orleans, at \u201cA Studio in the Woods.\u201d<\/a> [Associated with Tulane University\u2019s ByWater Institute,<\/a> the nonprofit organization works to preserve and protect the Mississippi River bottomland and provide a place for artists and scholars to engage with environmental issues.] Working there, I was proximate to a city that has an important relationship with the swamp. It\u2019s been special to teach about something that I\u2019m so invested in now, in my own practice.<\/p>\n The swamp has been villainized so much in Western media, and I wondered, what\u2019s the cause of that? When did it start? And I went down a rabbit hole. The course is framed as a case study\u2014the swamp is a particular study in the way that art can challenge or maintain narratives, and in the relationship between people and place.<\/p>\n A lot of what I learned in school was dealing with the environment from the perspective of science, or politics, or civics. I think it\u2019s really important to acknowledge the role that art and creativity play in reflecting our relationship to place.<\/p>\n The environmental humanities use different disciplines to help paint the picture of what our relationship to place has been, what it is now, and what it might be in the future. I think that the future component is critical, in the face of climate change. We can create abstracts for why climate change happens from a scientific perspective, but to attach that to story and emotion is also important, because we aren\u2019t at the stage of the abstract anymore, and we haven\u2019t been for quite some time.<\/p>\n This is something I deal with daily as a millennial. I\u2019m fluent in digital technologies, but I\u2019m also very uncomfortable with what they\u2019ve done as socializing tools\u2014or maybe as anti-socializing tools. I\u2019m constantly trying to navigate what is real. I think the idea of what\u2019s convincing versus what\u2019s real is almost the question of this generation.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve gotten to a place where cultivated images of ourselves online is for some people as productive a tool for social mobility as their corporeal existence is. When it comes to virtual reality, what are the implications of a digital plant moving in the wind so convincingly that you don\u2019t need the real plant anymore? The question is, is convincing good enough? And is \u201cgood enough\u201d good enough?<\/p>\n I think about my creative practice as a series of questions. I don\u2019t think about a work as a proclamation or a resolution or a line in the sand. I make art to make tangible the questions that I have. For me, the components of the process of discovery can exist anywhere\u2014for example, science, food culture, or fashion.<\/p>\n I thought about the works I exhibited at Hartnett as \u201cmeditations.\u201d That term felt good to me because it allowed me, as the artist, to have a continual involvement with the works, even when they\u2019d left my studio and gone to the gallery. For me, the whole point of existing as a creative practitioner is a kind of dialogue, either with myself in a new way or with viewers\u2014or between viewers, without me. Calling these works meditations gives people permission not to search for meaning, but simply to be with the objects in space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the University’s first artist-in-residence, Ash Arder brings her artist\u2019s sensibility to explorations of conceptual systems, from computer science and the nature of virtual reality to ecology and environmental humanities. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":752,"featured_media":378162,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13092],"tags":[20522,16072],"class_list":["post-378112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-arts","tag-department-of-art-and-art-history","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnswers with Ash Arder<\/strong><\/h2>\n
What have you been teaching?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Why the swamp?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
What do you see as the relationship between the virtual and the real?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
How do you describe your work as an artist?<\/strong><\/h4>\n