Visiting Artist Program has stellar spring lineup

The Visiting Artist Program has been a vital component of the University of Colorado’s Department of Art and Art History since 1972. Each year, eight to 10 nationally recognized artists present diverse ideas and their body of work during their visit to the university’s Boulder campus.

During their stay, artists give a public lecture, teach a seminar class, participate in a recorded interview and provide individual critiques with graduate students. The following is a list of this spring’s visiting artists, all of whom will appear on the dates noted (each one a Tuesday) at 7 p.m. in Room 1B20 of the new Visual Arts Complex.

Kira van Lil will deliver a faculty lecture on Jan. 25 titled “Creative Qualities of Mourning: Artists Responding to Loss Today.”

Van Lil’s primary field of research is modern and contemporary art, with a particular interest in the neglected connections between Minimal art and Arte Povera and the common concern of artists in Europe and the United States. Her dissertation was devoted to Otto Dix and the World War I, from which her research has shifted towards war in contemporary art.

She received her Ph.D. from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Munich).

Chris Sauter will appear on Feb. 22. As a mixed-media artist, Sauter works with a wide range of materials, exploring unique relationships and dynamics, which result in innovative spaces and environments.

Sauter’s conceptually driven installations and sculptures experiment with form and material, injecting humor and materiality into domestic and social subjects. Sauter’s work explores the intersection of biology and culture, the present and the primordial, the personal and the universal.

Although not his main focus, rural imagery positions the non-urban experience as something equally as interesting, important and complex as the urban. His principal strategies are the transformation of common objects into other recognizable objects, extreme scale shifts and the juxtaposition of disparate materials and images.

The work draws from varied sources such as architecture, history, science, agriculture and rodeo.

Sauter attended the University of the Incarnate Word (then Incarnate Word College), where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and latter received an MFA degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio.

The Clayton Brothers will appear on March 8. Rob and Christian Clayton have been collaborating since 1996. They now live in California and work in a high street studio where people are welcome to walk in and have a look at what they’re doing.

During their process, they contribute to the mixed pieces separately while continually adapting, transforming and re-working what the other has previously completed.

Their unconventional process, in which they leave visual clues or messages for one another, strands of ideas for each to pick up on and elaborate upon, produces an organic flow of subverted content that is finalized only when a fraternal consensus has been reached.

Their process results in a rich and dynamic work, filled with multiple marks, gestures and techniques, symbols and metaphors that delve into memory and subconscious, highly personal and idiosyncratic yet engaged with the culture that surrounds them. Much of the work’s humor is intentional, but with all its exuberant extremity and unabashed pastiche, it spills well over into absurd kitsch.

Both Rob and Christian serve as faculty at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Their work has been exhibited across the globe, including major shows in China, the United Kingdom and Denmark. They are both graduates of Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, Calif.

Shana Moulton will appear on March 29. Moulton creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance work. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew.

As her protagonist navigates the enigmatic and possible magical properties of her home décor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny.

Moulton’s work reflects her own fears and anxieties. Surrounded by hysterically colorful and studiedly kitsch scenarios, her filmic alter ego, Cynthia, is obsessed with her health and well-being. In Shana/Cynthia’s hands, inoffensive and awkward medical and orthopedic devices are transformed into surrealist machines and gateways to parallel realities that are directly linked to her perceived psychological and physical illnesses.

Her adventures mirror the insecurities of whole generations while also exploiting stylistic forms and tropes excavated from the recent history of mass-mediated history.

Moulton studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, where she received her MFA.

William Basinski will appear on April 12. Basinski is a classically trained musician and composer who has been working in experimental media for more than 25 years. Inspired by minimalists such as Steve Reich and Brian Eno, he began developing his own vocabulary using tape loops and old reel-to-reel tape decks.

Throughout the 1980s, Basinski created a vast archive of experimental works using tape loop and delay systems, found sounds and shortwave radio static. He was a member of many bands, including Gretchen Langheld Esemble and House Afire.

In the 1990s, he performed and produced records and intimate underground shows for various New York City artists including Antony, Diamanda Galás, Rasputina, The Murmurs and his own ad-hoc experimental electronic/improvisational band, Life on Mars.

In 2001, he set to work on what would become his most recognizable piece, “The Disintegration Loops.” The recordings were based on old tape loops that had degraded in quality. While attempting to salvage the recordings in a digital format, the tapes slowly crumbled and left a timestamp history of their demise.

Basinski’s lecture is made possible by a James and Rebecca Roser visiting artist grant, and by collaborations with the College of Music and Communikey Electronic Arts.

Alvin P. Gregorio will deliver a faculty lecture on April 26. Gregorio’s paintings deal with issues of imagination, disintegration/rebuilding of family, globalism, violence and war, spirituality, post-nomadism and the defense mechanisms used to contain these issues.

Gregorio received his MFA from Claremont Graduate University and soon after was awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship to the Philippines.

The Visual Arts Complex is located at 1085 18th Street, behind the Euclid AutoPark, east of the University Memorial Center. For more information on the Visiting Artist Series, contact Valerie Albicker at 303-492-2539 or albicker@colorado.edu. More information can also be found at www.colorado.edu/arts/events.