CAA News Today

CAA Media Lounge
105th Annual Conference NYC 2017
Submission Deadline
Nov 30, 2016

Craft Action: Genre Bending 

Craft Action: Genre Bending is a juried video screening exploring the role of process, skill, and action as it relates to craft mediums. The growing interdisciplinarity of craft practices is the impetus for this call for submissions of video work by practitioners engaged craft media, such as ceramics, textiles, metals, wood, and glass. The use of video with craft enables the artist to engage in using materials and tools in combination with their representation to express new ideas, addressing making by investigating not only what is shown, but how it is shown.

Media Lounge is CAA’s main stage of new media explorations where students, academics, and artists come together to build camaraderie. These methods of working with conceptual and technical content provides fodder for a dynamic dialogue of how artists’ place themselves in the larger distinction of media, both analog and digital.

Each year Media Lounge coordinates a central theme to explore the interrelationship of media across a topic. This year in NYC, Media Lounge presents screenings, panels and discussions that explore the genres of craft and video, politics and strategy, and inter-related material explorations of new media and footage that entangles what is expected of cross-disciplinary explosions of content, surrounding the theme of Genre Bending.

Genre is a way to group practices into categories that are familiar-or frame an expected experience from the audience. Media Lounge NYC 2017 uses genre and the elasticity of bending to explore new media genre relationships and their impulse of hybrid crossovers.

Anne Sophie-Lehman has theorized that the combination of craft and film produces its own unique genre, which she calls “showing making”. Part archival, part instructional, part visual pleasure, and part showmanship, this idea of genre bending and genre production is the starting point for this year’s Media Lab theme.

Craft Action: Genre Bending seeks to explore how artists bend, break, subvert, or invent new genres for craft and film. Artists will be asked to note in their application what genre/s they see themselves as bending or creating. This may be a traditional genre, like comedy, tragedy, animation, or a craft-based genre like the instructional demonstration – or a genre yet-to-be defined that can provoke new understanding and considerations.

Artwork Requirements

All video submission must be original works of art completed within the last 3 years.

Submission Guidelines

• Entries will be accepted from the link HERE
• Artists are required to submit video as Vimeo files, opening up the access of the files to shared
• The video(s) should be an excerpt totaling no longer than 5 minutes.
• Artists may submit up to three videos to be selected

Screening Dates and Panel Discussion

CAA Conference Media Lounge
February 16, 2017
Thursday 1:30-3

Guest Curators and Conference Panelists

Marilyn Zapf is the Assistant Director at The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design (CCCD) and Curator of CCCD’s Benchspace Gallery & Workshop in Asheville, NC where she has curated a number of nationally-traveling exhibitions including Made in WNC (2015) and Gee’s Bend: From Quilts to Prints (2014). Zapf teaches courses on the History of Craft at Warren Wilson College and publishes articles and reviews in international publications, including Art Jewelry Form and Crafts Magazine (UK). She is a founding member of the international experimental history of design collective, Fig. 9, holds a MA in the History of Design from the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, and a BA (English Literature) and BFA (Jewelry and Metalworking) from The University of Georgia. Her areas of research include craft, postmodernism and de/industrialization.

Namita Gupta Wiggers is a curator, writer, educator and artist based in Portland, Oregon. She is the Director of Critical Craft Forum, and Exhibitions Review Editor, Journal of Modern Craft. From 2004-12 Wiggers served as the Curator, and later Director and Chief Curator (2012 -14) of Museum of Contemporary Craft. She curated over 65 exhibitions, including: New Embroidery: Not Your Grandma’s Doily, Touching Warms the Art, The Academy is Full of Craft, Object Focus: The Bowl, and Manufractured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects (curated by Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov), and Gestures of Resistance (curated by Judith Leemann and Shannon Stratton.). She curated the first museum exhibitions on Betty Feves, Laurie Herrick, Nikki McClure, Emily Pilloton, and Ken Shores. Recent exhibitions include Across the Table, Across the Land with Michael Strand for NCECA’s 50th Anniversary, and Everything has been Material for Scissors to Shape, on view at the Wing Luke Museum of Asian American Experience. Wiggers is editing a Companion on Contemporary Craft (Wiley Blackwell), and collaborating on a project focused on gender and jewelry with Benjamin Lignel.

Entry Fee

Free

Venue

Hilton New York Midtown, College Art Association Conference, Media lounge

ArtSpace + Media Lounge

CAA’s Services to Artists Committee hosts offerings in ArtSpace and Media Lounge, a “conference within a conference” of innovative programs that are of special interest to artists, emerging professionals, and artist / educators. ArtSpace and Media Lounge programming offers an informal, dynamic setting with sessions, panels, screenings, curated media, distinguished artists interviews, exhibition opportunities and other social events. These programs are free and open to the public, and do not require CAA membership or registration fees for the conference to participate or attend.

Thank you in advance for your participation and please feel free to contact carissacarman at gmail.com if you have questions regarding the submission.