Way Finding
What is a found object? Finding objects means discovering new ways of meaning making. Our investment will be in the process of finding itself. “To find” means to retrieve something lost, but also "to be situated," "to deem something so," for "something to be the case that…" suggesting a search for a conclusive answer or determination. We will explore strategies for working with found objects which foreground the task of finding itself as one which is deeply situational, subjective, and at the heart of our own curiosities and creative impulses. Work with found objects involves negotiating with an inanimate interlocutor. Individual objects have their own lived histories, use values, presences, auras—they are already speaking and arrive with their own agendas. Working with findings entails negotiating and collaborating to form new meaning beyond what we could achieve independently.
Visiting Artists augment the summer sessions and do not lead studio workshops.
jina valentine (she/her) is a visual artist, educator, and mother. Her practice is informed by traditional craft techniques and interweaves histories latent within found texts, objects, narratives, and spaces. valentine’s work involves language translation, mining content from material and digital archives, and experimental strategies for humanizing data-visualization. She is also co-founder of Black Lunch Table, an oral-history archiving project. Her work has received recognition and support from the Graham Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and Art Matters, among others. Valentine received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon and an MFA from Stanford University, and is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.