Judy Levy
Art in the Environment

Rich Della Costa
Making Movies

July 3 -
July 7

Nathan Lyons
Image, Sequence, Series

Karen vanMeenan and Rich Della Costa
Media Literacy for Teachers

Wendy Smith
Introduction to the Documentary Form: Film/Video Production

Heather Layton
Live Sculpture and Performance Art

July 24 - July 28

Marcella Hackbardt
Understanding Color Photography

Book artists often explore various approaches to the design and function of a “book” – as a container of information and as an art form itself.  This workshop is an introduction to artist books and basic bookbinding techniques, from simple pamphlet bindings to more intricate exposed spine bindings.  Participants will be introduced to a variety of materials and tools, as well as adhesive and non-adhesive binding processes. Participants will construct several blank books as models for reference and also be encouraged to work with visual ideas.

Rachael Hetzel received her MFA from the University at Buffalo and currently teaches at SUNY Brockport.  Utilizing printmaking and bookbinding techniques, her work focuses primarily on memory and storytelling.  Rachael’s work has been exhibited nationally and can be found in both institutional and private collections.

Who sees art? And where? Mostly artists. And the mostly academic friends who choose to come to the galleries where art is shown. Many artists havenot had a chance to explore ideas in a non-traditional setting, but what wonderful options there are to play, to communicate, to make visible the world that is taken for granted or hidden, to revitalize a participant's experience of living by creating events and artifacts outside the gallery! This workshop will be a stimulating and participatory exploration of art outside the gallery. It will be a mix of individual experiments, collaborative experiments, whole-group experiments, and exposure to the work of many powerful and serious artists who have involved themselves in art outside the traditional settings. Each action, each exposure, each exchange between us as a group, contributes to an evolving sensitivity--- to the qualities and "messages" inherent in any setting, and to the impact and interdependency of art-object and the context in which it is experienced. Students can participate in the envisioned sequence of activities as planned, tasting the range of possibilities presented.  They may adapt their current work to new options. They may choose to develop an idea that intrigues them over the course several days. They may be stimulated to try something totally unlike what they've done before, or they may use the exposure to these experiences to see “traditional" art locations in a new way.

Judy Levy has taught art for 15 years at RIT and 3 years at Alfred University. When she is not creating a Hanging Lawn from her 4th floor apartment, painting multicolor dotted lines in a parking lot, or setting up anonymous word installations, she is teaching drawing, 2D Design, Photography, "Off the Wall", "Words and Images" and "Visual Art and Performance.”  Judy has participated in numerous exhibitions, and her bookworks, are in collections all over the U.S. and in Europe.

The need for promotional materials comes with working in the media arts. Knowledge of text layout software, such as Adobe InDesign and how it relates to print production can help one’s ability to convey artistic ideas in terms of mainstream production values. Some of our time will be invested in basic typographical study and selecting font families that relate to one’s own art work. Throughout the workshop we will make high quality artists postcards, cd rom and dvd inserts, and better-looking c.v.’s or resumes. We will also design personal exhibition catalogs and discuss many options for their relatively inexpensive production. It is highly recommeded that participants bring digital files (in any format) of their own work or of those they wish to promote.

Tate Shaw promotes visual, sound and language artists as co-publisher of Preacher’s Biscuit Books, publications reliant on the material book as a metaphor to create meaning in the work. He is the layout designer of Afterimage, the journal of media arts and cultural criticism. His books have been exhibited and collected internationally.

The course is designed to give students a practical, hands-on experience with 16mm film production equipment with an emphasis on independent and experimental film. The course will cover pre-production (script writing, treatment writing, storyboards, shooting scripts, location scouting, shooting schedules), production (16mm cameras, light meters, lighting design, location shoots, working with actors), and post-production (pace and rhythm in the edit, analog off-line editing, digital systems, cutting film). Examples of short films and videos from the extensive Visual Studies Workshop archives will punctuate the course throughout the week, exposing students to a variety of film and video artists' styles and methods.

Rich Della Costa has taught 16mm film production at the Visual Studies Workshop since 1987 and also teaches media and communications at the Edison Occupational and Technical High School in Rochester, NY. He holds a Masters degree in secondary education with a concentration on Media Literacy. He has been a film and video producer for twenty years, eleven of those years in Washington, DC producing training and recruitment films for the Peace Corps. He has lived and worked in India and Guatemala and currently resides on the family farm west of Rochester.

This workshop explores the process of making animation beginning with an engagement with material rather than character. This fine art perspective, unlike the theatrical standard, allows video animation to be understood as a visual medium rather than a narrative one. We will use video cameras, scanners and Final Cut Pro to make video animation that explores texture, color, shape, motion and meaning. In this one-week workshop we will learn the basics of stop motion techniques, frame series animation, and digital tweened animation.  The concept behind this type of work is a combination of the messiness of the real world and the "graph paper" mind of the computer.

Chris Pearce is currently a film instructor at the University of Colorado. He has been making experimental film animation for 10 years. Before he began making films he studied and worked in molecular biology, an experience that underlies his focus on experimentalism. His films have shown at festivals and galleries in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Telluride and Seattle. His work deals with issues of experiments in seeing, transformative and scientific experiences, faith and hypnosis.

Artists’ books, functioning as both personal and public site, have become an important venue for new narratives that weave text and image within a physical structure to tell a story. How can the form and structure of a book intensify its content? Using materials you bring and/or generate on site, we will work on a series of exercises concerned with integrating multiple notational systems into book structures. While exploring a variety of book bindings, photographing for the "page" and developing text, you will produce several book mock-ups. A number of artists’ books will be shown and discussed, with emphasis on how book artists have incorporated sequential and narrative structures into bookworks.   Participants should have a toolkit with sissors, small steel ruler, X-acto or snap-off blade knife, glue stick, small Sobo or Elmers glue, drawing matrials, a self-healing cutting board (or a piece of cardboard to cut on. Bring a camera if you have one. While we will be generating new materials on-site during the week, you might wish to bring images, collage materials and writing samples to incorporate into your work. Basic text and cover papers will be provided, but if you want to work with special colored, decorative or rag papers for text, endsheets or covers bring them along.

Joan Lyons, the founding Coordinator of Visual Studies Workshop Press, has worked with artists and independent publishers on over 400 book projects since 1972. She taught in the M.F.A. Program in Visual Studies at VSW. Lyons works in a variety of media including photography, print, photo-quilts, moving between computer-basedwork and more hands-on media. She has produced a score of her own bookworks, recently focusing on digital editions.

Turn back the clock and enter into a world of photographic wonder and amazement! Begin the journey with wet-plate collodion on glass!  One of the most archival photographic processes to date, wet-plate collodion images, an early type of photograph, are more commonly known as ambrotypes or tintypes.   The ambrotype is, in reality, a thin negative on glass that when backed by a dark surface, appears as a positive. This process was popular in the mid to late 1800's and is currently experiencing a revival as a result of the decreasing availability of contemporary films and papers. During the course of this week, we will roll up our sleeves and learn the basics of the wet-plate collodion process.  We will make one-of-a-kind in camera ambrotypes, ambrotypes in the enlarger from personal slides and collodion positive transparencies from modern negative film. Everything from cutting and cleaning glass, mixing chemicals, making our own film, burnishing and hand-coloring to varnishing and housing will be covered.

Heather F. Wetzel is the Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Photographs at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.  She is also the founder of the Historic Photographic Process Initiative at the Visual Studies Workshop and teaches graduate courses in 19th and early 20th Century photographic processes. Wetzel learned wet-plate collodion from France Scully Osterman and Mark Osterman during an internship while earning her MFA at VSW. Wetzel is co-founder of the laboratorium, an organization dedicated to the advancement, dissemination, promotion and exploration of historic photographic processes, film and book arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally.

Creating a successful artist's book demands an understanding of the physical elements of the book format in relation to formal visual structures. This workshop is for people who want to take their practice a step beyond general notions of an artist's book.  The week will include instruction, which integrates binding and formatting strategies with formal and conceptual aspects of the book form. Elements of the book (the page, binding, text and/or pictures, itinerary and display) will be examined through hands on experimentation and observation utilizing individual participants' choice of image making practices (photography, drawing, collage, etc).  Participants are encouraged to bring projects in progress and/or elements for our "book experiments." (A discarded set of encyclopedia will be provided as a communal source for images and texts.) Field trips to local artist book collections and selected readings will broaden the scope of individual projects.  

Scott McCarney has been experimenting with making books as works of art from the perspective of a designer, photographer, sculptor and teacher for over twenty-five years.   His bookworks assume many forms, from offset editions to one-of-a-kind objects to sculptural installations.  He lectures, teaches and exhibits internationally, most recently at the 2nd International Seoul Book Arts Fair in Korea, and the 3rd Australian Artists' Books Forum at Artspace Mackay, Queensland Australia.

You can “play” an image in the same way that you practice a musical composition on an instrument. The goal is the same; to understand the composition, learn the basic structure, personalize the expression, and heighten or change the meaning. This concept of “play” creates the focus of this workshop where you will examine ways to heighten or change the content of an image after the original exposure is made. Using old negatives and/or images made specifically for this workshop you will be working with techniques such as collaging, sewing, printing and drawing on lith film, hand coloring and toning with different substances, copy camera work and various other basic yet transformative processes. You will also be creating images with light sensitive material without the use of a camera negative, working from drawings on various translucent materials (cliche-verre), rubbings and found material. Physically deconstructing and reconstructing an image tends to bring out ideas and attitudes that were not necessarily conscious when the initial photograph was made. Working with images in this way helps to understand how the combination of material and action creates meaning and is as much about content as the image itself. This exploration is fun and intense when you come to understand that "handwork" is a powerful act of expression. The following materials are needed for the workshop: negatives, some drawing materials, tracing paper, sewing supplies, exacto knives, favorite brushes, found images and materials that are significant to you.

Jill Gussow lives in Rochester where she has been working on the concept of ritual and practice in the creation of art. Using photographs, cut paper, found material and fabric from used clothing she is creating two separate bodies of work "Antidotal Fans" and “Iconic Constructions”.  She has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was awarded a residency in photography by the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, Ithaca, NY in 1997, a residency in Oaxaca, Mexico in June, 1999 and a NYS Council on the Arts- Decentralization Grant, Artist Projects, 2001, for work on a tile mural at Highland Hospital, Rochester, NY. Jill is currently working in her studio and teaching workshops.

Frank Petronio will guide students through the myriad options for making images using digital cameras, scanners and inkjet printers. Working primarily with Adobe Photoshop software in the VSW Macintosh computer lab, this hands-on workshop will show you how to create high-quality, consistent and Archival inkjet prints from scanned film and popular under $1000 digital cameras. We will show artists how to document and organize their digital images; help photographers adapt their technique to incorporate digital technologies; and help people master their digicams and build their own digital darkroom.

Participants should have basic Mac skills and photography experience. If you have equipment, bring it: digital cameras, laptop, inkjet printer and images to scan. We will be photographing for a period every day. A limited amount of inkjet media and inks will be provided, including access to a large format Epson printer, but be prepared to buy an additional ink cartridge and paper.

Frank Petronio has worked as professional photographer and graphic designer for over 18 years. He became involved with digital imaging in the late 1980s and pioneered the use of Iris printers to make large format fine art prints. Frank also operated a scanning and color proofing business which created digital images for national advertising campaigns and some of the first websites. A graduate of the University of Oregon, Frank has taught workshops at the Center for Creative Imaging, the International Center for Photography and the Palm Beach Photo Workshops.

FRANK PETRONIO'S WEB PAGE

The workshop will be a weeklong exploration of the Social Landscape.  We will investigate the construct of the landscape, from the picturesque and the sublime to the sprawl and architecture of commerce, industry and leisure.  We will look at the way we mark and claim the land and how that shapes our view of nature.  The subject is as much about human intervention as it is about place.  Participants should be familiar with B&W photography and be prepared to shoot lots of film.  A small format digital printer will be available for those wishing to work digitally.  The workshop will be a mix of daily shooting, contact sheets, viewing work of photographers current and historic, and visits to local exhibitions including the George Eastman House.  Critiques and discussions will stress aesthetic, conceptual and technical picture making strategies.  The main goal is a high degree of foto-fun.

Keith Johnson has his MFA form RISD, studying with Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, and spent a year with Nathan Lyons at VSW.  Ten Years of teaching photography led to move to the business side of the medium and an MBA.  He now supports his fine art making as a Manufacturers Representative.  Recent exhibitions include the Print Center in Philadelphia and the George Eastman House in Rochester.  He has been Artist in Residence at Light Work in Syracuse and VSW in Rochester, and a recent Artist Fellowship grantee from the Connecticut Commission for the arts.  He is represented in collections throughout the country.

In an age of constant media bombardment, children are exposed to ever increasing levels of image, sound and other sensory stimulation.  Evidence from the many studies conducted on the effects of mass media on children over the past fifty years indicate that children learn from this pervasive presence in both positive and negative ways.  It is no mystery to many parents and teachers that learning has become difficult for many students without the accompanying presence of media.  Teachers need to understand the language of the moving image and other media, students’ awareness of and intuitive use of media and ho w media can be effectively incorporated into the classroom to positively enhance the learning experience.  With a focus on student learning styles, behavior and effective learning outcomes, this course introduces primary and secondary teachers to the history of the moving image in film and video, computer games and popular music. Participants in this workshop will view films and videos from the extensive Visual Studies archive, learn about film and video production techniques, analyze music styles and lyrics and plan a strategy to use these materials and skills in their classrooms.

Rich Della Costa has taught 16mm film production at the Visual Studies Workshop since 1987 and also teaches media and communications at the Edison Occupational and Technical High School in Rochester, NY.  He holds a Masters degree in secondary education with a concentration on Media Literacy.  He has been a film and video producer for twenty years, eleven of those years in Washington, DC producing training and recruitment films for the Peace Corps.  He has lived and worked in India and Guatemala and currently resides on the family farm west of Rochester.

Karen vanMeenen, MA, CPT, was a participant in the Summer 2005 Catalyst Institute at the New Mexico Media Literacy Project and is enrolled in the Certificate program in Media Literacy at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Karen has taught poetry, personal writing, memoir, poetic performance and journalism for teens and adults for numerous organizations including Writers & Books, the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester, the African Urban Arts & Cultural Organization, the PEN Prison Writing Program and Hillside Children's Center. She also serves as an adjunct professor of writing, literature and cultural studies at Rochester Institute of Technology and teaches contemporary art at Visual Studies Workshop. Karen is Editor of Afterimage, the Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. She earned her MA in Transformative Language Arts from Vermont College in 2002 and is a Certified Poetry Therapist (CPT).

Understanding how to design and publish for the web is an important tool for the visual artist. Web sites can serve as a place to promote or display a portfolio, can function as a part of a larger community-in which one shares thoughts, writings, and ideas, or is the medium in which an artist works, producing pieces that are web specific.

The web presents unique constraints to the presentation of information and ideas. Principals and elements of design must adhere to specific modes of production but understanding these technical constraints allows one to ‘break’ with the rules and move beyond the average site. This class will cover multiple approaches to design and various ways in which to present work. We will look at incorporating animation, interactivity, and multiple forms of media into a web site.

The class is a hands-on workshop. Participants should be prepared to design and develop a web site as well as take part in discussions surrounding aesthetics and strategies used in web design. We will examine the work of Internet artists; discuss current trends, issues, and techniques; look at various portfolio sites, and have an opportunity to apply these ideas and concepts to your own web pages.

Tracy Rudzitis has been designing and building web pages since 1995. She worked as a web developer for Starwave (Outside Online, ABCnews.com), Microsoft, Real Networks, and several interactive advertising agencies in both Seattle WA and New York City for 6 years before going into teaching public school full time. She currently teaches media-arts at a middle school in New York City, and designs and builds web pages for several clients when she is not teaching.

Throughout the history of photography, the body has been the subject of the lens. Potential paths of exploration include the body functioning as a symbol of technology/machine, the agent of knowledge or the bearer of crisis, the embodiment of nature or the vessel of culture. In this workshop participants are challenged to explore these paths of meaning.  Participants will create photographic works and series which offer their own metaphors associated to the body. Slide presentations and readings, will offer inspiration and introduce a plethora of artist working with the body as a place to create metaphorical meaning.  Discussions will help redefine and create new definitions associated with the body in this digital age. 

Myra Greene is currently an Assistant Professor of Photographic Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Many of her projects include photography, printmaking, and sound, as well digital production work.  She melds these processes into exploring issues about the body, memory and the absorption of culture and the shifting identity of African Americans.  Her work was recently included in of Double Exposure: African Americans Before and Behind the Camera, at the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in Hartford Connecticut. 

Performance art is one of the most exciting and misrepresented forms of artistic expression in contemporary art. It intentionally defies any precise definition, giving artists the authority to combine traditional and non-traditional aspects of painting, drawing, photography, literature, physics, fibers, video, sound, poetry, found objects, architecture, costume design and sculpture. Performance art often blurs the boundaries between art and life and often encourages us to reconsider our beliefs regarding identity, body, space, politics and the definition of art itself. In this workshop, we will look at the most fascinating performance artists from the 1960s to the present while designing our own “live sculptures” and “time-based art.” No previous knowledge of performance art is necessary.

Heather Layton is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Studio Coordinator at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY, where she teaches a range of courses in Painting and Drawing, Mixed Media, and Performance Art.  Her creative research navigates the space between personal identity and the “other,” specifically addressing areas of tension: spaces that have the potential to result in conflict or intimacy depending on the mechanisms of communication.  Recent exhibitions include, “Hearing Aids and Other Personal Prosthetics” at the Union Gallery at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and “When the Gods Prayed Back” at the A.R.C. Gallery in Chicago.

Documentaries have become more popular due to recent technological and social changes that have impacted the form itself.  This one week workshop will provide an introduction to the documentary form, the basics of
shooting, a day or so to shoot a short digital video, the opportunity to hone interview skills, evaluation of your footage in preparation for editing and an introduction to Final Cut Pro editing software. Besides discussing
your video, we will screen both contemporary and historic documentaries. From pre-production through post production, the documentary form will be questioned, evaluated and experienced.  

Wendy Smith teaches at Nazareth College, conducts workshops and has been making documentaries since the 1970's in France and the USA. Currently Wendy is producing a documentary on the healing arts and a chapbook entitled "Tales told with two feet broken" with an accompanying experimental documentary.

There has been an influx of vernacular and domestic materials introduced into the contemporary art scene -- often married to a resurgence of process- based art. This workshop will investigate artists who have inspired new ways of thinking about public and private space, process and object, and the art object versus the art subject.  We will examine art where the process comes to bear as much meaning as the actual object.  Class time will be divided between seminar discussions, slide lectures, screenings, and studio production. We will work on a series of exercises that consider how vernacular materials and repetition can create a discourse about gender, identity and the body. The role of methodology and process will be considered in the conceptualization of a large-scale piece.  Bring images, objects, writing and other materials you may wish to incorporate into your work. 
 
Sarah E Webb is an artist and independent scholar residing in Rochester, NY. She is currently on faculty at Rochester Institute of Technology. Webb co-edited the anthology, Singular Women: Writing the Artist (UC Press, 2003), and has curated two national exhibitions on the work of women: Stories from Her, and The Female Gaze: Women Look at Men. Her recent exhibitions include a solo show, “fat & blood (and how to make them),” at Kristen Frederickson Contemporary Art, New York, NY, and the forthcoming group exhibition, “Maternal Metaphors," Ohio University Art Gallery. Webb’s performative-based installations combine text with image and object as she explores the historical construction of femininity within the realm of the domestic.

Marni Shindelman is an Assistant Professor of art and an Associate of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Rochester.  Her recent exhibitions include “Introducing” at the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY “Lobster Bisque Tales” at the O’Connor Gallery of Art in Chicago, IL and The Space Gallery at Western Michigan State University in Kalamazoo, MI. Her work incorporates found hypertexts, medical myths and news events with icons of the banal, and ranges from printmaking to photographic imagery to sculpted soap and carpet.

This course is intended to develop an understanding of color photography as a medium for contemporary art, and as a ubiquitous messaging system doubly bound to veracity and deception.  Color theory, the psychology of color, and use of color as an element in photographic design will be covered.  Through readings and discussions, students will be introduced to different ways of conceptualizing photography and photographs as cultural products.  Students will shoot both slide and color negative film.

Marcella Hackbardt has taught black & white photography, color photography, digital photography, and web design since 1998.  She currently teaches art at Kenyon College in Ohio.  Her own creative work draws heavily on the use of color for symbolic and psychological effect.  She has taught various levels of color photography, using chemicals, ink jet printers, and digital enlargers for output.

This workshop addresses all of the stages involved in book production. Participants will apply principles of sequencing, and image and text editing, to create a working maquette. They will then learn how to assemble and print their photographic book using Adobe Photoshop InDesign and QuarkXPress . By the end of the workshop participants will have a book that can be further editioned by being printed commercially, or at home on their desktop printer. This course is designed for those photographers who already have a collection of images and who would like to further amplify and extend the expressive content of their work. From a conceptual standpoint, the workshop will address the particular ability of the book (through the juxtaposition of images and text) to clarify content and extend meaning, and subsequently present this as a coherent and self-contextualizing object. No prior knowledge of either QuarkXPress or Photoshop is necessary, however, you should have basic computer skills. More important is to have as many images as possible (and ideally some text) and the desire to present your work in a way that amplifies and clarifies your intentions, not just to others, but also to yourself.

Douglas Holleley completed his Ph.D. at the University of Sydney,Australia, in 1997. His thesis, Luna Park: the Image of a Funfair, is an extensive book which examines a major amusement park in Sydney through historical research and photographs as well as the author’s own images. Holleley works extensively with Macintosh computers and digital cameras and has completed a score of digitally produced books combining photographs and text. Douglas’ work is a part of many collections throughout the US and abroad and he is the author and publisher of Digital Book Design and Publishing, a comprehensive textbook on computer bookmaking

From concept to visualization, workshop participants will be engaged throughout the production process of making a short digital video. Participants can expect to learn about basic camera operation, microphone use, lighting techniques and post production skills. Using Final Cut Pro software, by the end of the workshop participants will be able to create and edit a short video on their own.

James Lohrey is currently a tenure-track faculty member of the Department of Communication & Theatre at Mansfield University in Mansfield, PA.  He has previously taught production courses at St. John Fisher College, SUNY Brockport and Visual Studies Workshop.  Lohrey has worked with film and video for over a decade and is currently working on a couple of short digital video projects in the Rochester area where he presently resides.  In addition to production, he also writes screenplays as well.