The students in associate art and multimedia design professor Leon Johnson’s Visual Continuity course set out to express their definitions of “home” this term, and the variety of projects suggests the concept has a starkly different meaning for each person.
The class is part one of the art department’s multimedia offerings. The students are currently working on various individual projects, a book they plan to publish in New York and a benefit for FOOD for Lane County, which takes place today and Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Lawrence Hall atrium.
The course was founded in the 1960s by Professor Emeritus David Foster, who recently died in a car crash. Several other professors taught the class before Johnson took over in 1994.
“(Foster) considered it a sort of experimental laboratory of ideas,” Johnson said. “I wanted to return the class to its experimental roots.”
In keeping with the course’s avante-garde beginnings, Johnson said the class is structured loosely, incorporating everything from video presentations to guest lecturers to photography. Students have
complete freedom in deciding which medium the individual projects will be delivered in, as long as the creations pertain to the theme the professor chooses for the term.
“It’s absolutely wide open,” Johnson said, adding that students present their work in writing, video and countless other forms, individually or in groups.
This term’s theme is “home,” which Johnson said pertains to “issues of (the students’) own childhoods but also the range of issues about home between transients to ownership.”
Senior multimedia design major Toby Ensign said he is working on a solo project centering around how a person prepares at home for his or her “performance” in the outside world.
“I’m looking at dental care and piano practicing,” Ensign said. “They’re kind of two very weird things to combine, but those are things that really hit home for me.”
Ensign is creating a music video showing clips of himself engaged in this home preparation set to a techno-dance version of a classic Franz Liszt composition. Ensign, who is part Hungarian, said he identifies with Liszt because the composer also hailed from Hungary.
Senior multimedia design major Diana Yom said she also went back to her roots, focusing the project on childhood memories.
“When I first started thinking about home, the first thing that came to my mind is how impermanent it is for me,” she said.
Yom added that her family moved from South Korea to the United States in 1990, rendering her first memories, “very vague, dreamlike.”
“(Home) is not a physical place where I live or do my daily tasks,” she said. “It was somewhere that I had to really dig into — very emotional, very personal.”
Yom said after brainstorming, she decided to present her project in digital form.
“Ultimately, it will be published on the Web with an interface that lets the user navigate through my memories, images and stories,” she said.
Beyond their separate projects, the participants are compiling a book incorporating parts of their creations — three images and text from each student — which they plan to submit to eclectic New York art book publisher, Printed Matter Inc. The company catalog will include the collection.
The class also built a kitchen for today and Wednesday’s FOOD for Lane County benefit at Lawrence Hall, where they will serve soup, which people can purchase in reusable bowls created by art Assistant Professor Justin Novak’s ceramics students. Visual Continuity students also worked on publicity for the event and composed a soundtrack to give the venue a street fair atmosphere. Johnson hopes the projects help the students become “more informed practitioners.”
“Through this one theme, they’re able to cultivate enough research that means something to them in their lives and relates to the world,” he said. “Conceptual breadth, I think, would be the bottom line.”
Ensign said the course has given him a new appreciation for home.
“I think there’s something really honest about everyone’s home story,” he said. “Don’t take it for granted.”
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