Skip to main content

In a world where so much information is misleading, this course looks at how images can lie to us. Examining art, advertising, and other visual situations, students will learn how we understand and interpret what we see. In the face of an image, viewers actively participate in creating its meaning. We will question our belief in the documentary and witnessing nature of photography; explore how the meaning of an image changes when it moves from one place to another; and will examine how images reference other images and the way we use texts to enhance and alter our understanding of them. Each day will focus on a specific way that images can be misleading and provide case studies with global examples. Students will gain multiple perspectives on how to create and recognize images that drive specific narratives and ideas.

After an introductory discussion of each topic, students will produce their own works that influence, appropriate, and persuade, in order to discover how cultural objects are doing this all the time. Through playful but intentional exercises, students will develop works that experiment with how we construct meaning through art and other visual strategies. Each day, students will develop works specific to the main topics: documentary images, intertextuality, appropriation, image-text relations, modes of influence and visual persuasion. Evening sessions will provide students with an initial group critique and then individual discussion sessions to continue to develop work.

Lecturers

CHARLOTTE KENT

CHARLOTTE KENT, PhD is the Assistant Professor of Visual Culture and Program Director for Art History at Montclair State University. Her work focuses on how various linguistic and visual rhetorical devices constrain what we are capable of seeing; whether examining art criticism, museum wall text, ekphrastic poetry, data visualizations or social media posts, her work questions why some things are so easily ignored. Her current research builds on that foundation to investigate the cultural context contributing to the rise of the absurd in contemporary art and speculative design. 

LIVIA ALEXANDER

Livia Alexander is a curator, writer, and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Montclair State University. Her work is focused on examining the relationship between art infrastructure and artistic production, urbanity, cultural politics of food and art, and contemporary art from the Middle East and Southeast Asia. 

This studio is part of the following program(s):

Art, Body, Space

16 June 2019 - 30 June 2019

This programme will be delivered by two artists working in the fields of dance and performance (Aslı Bostancı and Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu) along with two curators and academics (Livia Alexander and Charlotte Kent). At the Visual Lies Studio that takes place in the first week of the program, there will be theoretical and practical exercises as well as mind opening discussions on our perception, comprehension, and production of images.