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Conference ‘09

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Conference 2009: Speakers

Educator’s Forum

Sean Justice, “Marketing Photographic Education to China”

“This artist presentation will focus on my work in China since 2005. The Scanning China Project has three parts: an exhibition, a visual essay, and a web-based guide for artists who want to explore working in China.

“The project as a whole is a meditation on learning about a culture that is different from one’s own. Swimming at the Center of the World: Learning to live and work in China is a collection of short essays and photo-montage that explores the pragmatic and philosophical challenges I encountered while working in Beijing and Shanghai.”

Sean Justice works as an artist, curator and educator in New York. He teaches photography and digital art at New York University, the International Center of Photography, and Parsons The New School for Design.

His art practice spans photography, collage, animation, book making, and visual arts performance. Previously he worked in the fields of arts organization and commercial photography. For the past several years his work has been focused on arts and photography in China.

Keith Shapiro, “Looking at Photography Education as a Market”

Photo educators do not often consider their own teaching environment as a competitive marketplace. In difficult economic times, schools need to attract new students as they struggle to maintain the support necessary to carry on their programs. By having a good understanding of the educational market educators can more effectively recruit students, design superior curricula, and develop rational strategies for attaining sustainable funding.

With his presentation, Looking at Photography Education as a Market, Keith Shapiro will present and discuss the results of his recent research regarding practical aspects of teaching photography such as class sizes, coping with technological changes, adequacy of funding, and student educational and career expectations. View the results of his previous research.

Keith Shapiro is an Assistant Professor of Integrative Arts at Penn State. He received his BFA from RIT and MFA from Penn State. He has a great interest in the use of technology in photography and he has taught digital photography at Penn State since 1997. He is currently writing the book Photography: A Visual Language.

In his most recent research, he is working to understand the big picture of how educators teach photography in the United States. In 2009 he conducted an extensive Photography Education Survey, which available at the website www.psu.edu/photography. View his photographic work, which has regularly appeared in juried exhibitions.

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Education Panel: The Adjunct Instructor in Today’s Market

Historically, colleges used to bring in adjuncts primarily to get someone with specific job expertise that their full-time faculty did not possess and to share their talents on a temporary basis or who can bring plenty of real-world experience into the classroom. He/she is a working professional who is willing to give back to academia what it has given them.

In recent years colleges have relied on adjuncts more heavily to save money and avoid having to commit to someone for more than a semester. Herein resides a dilemma. The aforementioned definition and practice has become blurred, leading some to believe that an adjunct position is a gateway to an eventual tenure-track position. A rationale develops; the more adjunct positions at different institutions, the better one’s chances to make that leap. So in the culture of academia, a certain lower class emerges as a majority.

Enter the road warrior! This panel discusses the challenges that adjuncts and institutions face in this economic recession.

Mark Ensslin worked for thirty years in public service and at a time when most of his colleagues are looking to or already have retired, he is seeking to make a transition from a life of crime to a life in academia.

He lives and works in Bergen County NJ and currently teaches art/photography at Bergen Community College in Paramus, NJ as an adjunct and mentor students in photography at Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, NJ. He currently serves as a board member of SPEMA.

Carl Gunhouse was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1976. But he grew up in suburban New Jersey where he developed a love/hate relationship with his surroundings that lead in turn to the angst so familiar to suburban youth. This unrest led to his discovery of hardcore punk rock and, through participating in the hardcore scene, to a love of photography.

Since graduating from Yale with an MFA, he has produced a body of landscape photographs that deal with his complex personal relationship to suburbia. He has found a great deal of personal satisfaction teaching as an Adjunct at Montclair State University, Cooper Union, and Nassau Community College. He also has also gained some renown for his straightforward writing on photography for such web sites as Skuawk and Big Red and Shiny.

Carl also holds a BA in European History, a BFA in Photography, and MA in American History from Fordham. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Markam Keith Adams has worked professionally in the field of photography for over 25 years and has acquired an extensive knowledge of the medium. Since 1990, he has been working with digital media and alternative processes, utilizing techniques that redefine the concepts of perception and reality. His explorations into the boundaries of photography have resulted in award winning works that have been included in numerous exhibitions, both nationally and worldwide.

For the past ten years, Adams has been teaching photography and digital media and working in instructional design. The integration of new technologies into existing or evolving curricula represents one of the fastest growing areas of academics that exist today and Keith’s work reflects a commitment to the advancement of teaching, learning and creativity through these efforts.

Keith has an MFA in Photography and Digital Media from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts and an MA in Art and Humanities Education from New York University. In addition, he attended the Southeast Center for Photographic Studies in Daytona, Florida. He presently teaches photography at Rowan University as an Assistant Professor.

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Image Makers

Leigh Metzler, “Sucking the Plastic Tit: The New Culture of Sexual Terrorism”

(3:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.)

Baudrillard’s theoretical system dubbed “the orders of simulacra” outlines that there is no longer any evidence to prove the existence of reality. As physical beings that exist in the world, we are not exempt from this phenomenon. We have given rise to a world of purely symbolic, non-entities. Our crime occurs not in the naming of some exterior reality- but through simple omission. The Real Doll product epitomizes a hyper-real version of the un-real. What do we do when our avatars no longer refer to us but to edited super-human projections?

Leigh Metzler was born in 1984 and raised at the Jersey Shore. Her on-going series dubbed “NUTRITION!” can be described as a regretful love letter to the all-American, strangely synthetic, comestibles she ate regularly for the first 15 years of her life. At 2-parts toy and 4-parts high-fructose corn syrup these foods still bring forth feelings of nausea, nostalgia and a lurid, almost erotic appeal.

Today, at age 24 she is a fructose-intolerant vegetarian with a BFA in Photography from The University of The Arts. Her work is an exploratory effort mainly asking how the average American expresses creativity in an increasingly neutering and homogenized society? And of course, the ever popular, “Who Are We? What are we doing? and Where do we go from here?” She enjoys Misfits records recorded before 1983, National Public Radio and skateboarding. Leigh would like to pursue a Master’s Degree in Cultural Studies / Criticism.

Sean Fader

(3:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.)

Much of Sean Fader’s work focuses on his own image and its duplication or mutation. Before becoming an artist, he had a career as a professional actor, and it was this experience more than anything that informs his practice. He is concerned with the disjunctions between how one appears to oneself and to others, neither of which for him is fixed or secure.

His early work represented him as having a relationship with himself—doubling his image to create scenes from a narrative of a relationship. What was crucial to this work was how dissimilar these doppelgangers became in each image and across the body of work. Fader’s more recent work further deepens his exploration of these issues. His “body suits” with their visible zippers would seem at first to be a one-liner, but he has made the intersubjective portrait event—rather than just the resulting image—his focus.

All of his subjects are people that he desires something from. That is, they have something he respects and covets. They discuss this during the sitting, which takes place in the sitter’s home and with both mostly naked. The always emotionally charged negotiation between photographer and sitter is made here more intense and contentious, as both must take the same pose (in order for the two photographs to be wedded) and both most discuss how they see themselves being seen.

Fader has managed to find a practice in which the seamlessness of his technical manipulation of digital photography is counter-posed with messy, funny, uncomfortable, and charged psychological and intersubjective negotiations that make the work alluring and, ultimately, unsettling.

Raised in Ridgewood, NJ, Sean Fader spent most of his life as an actor, acting, singing, and dancing since he was five years old. After attending Northwestern and The New School University he performed on several national tours with stops both on and off-Broadway. Sean then earned his MA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he was the recipient of the Murthy Digital Arts Award and his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He was named Fringe Underground Magazine’s “Art Star” in their Fall 2005 issue. In 2007, his work was featured in First Look II: the best of the new artists in the U.S. at the Hudson Valley Center For Contemporary Art. Recently, he was awarded the Critics Choice Award in the Professional category at the 11th Annual Chicago Art Open. Sean has shown his work around the world, from London to New York and Chicago. Sean has upcoming shows in LA, San Francisco, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia. Sean resides in New York City.

Amber Hawk Swanson

(4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.)

In 2007, I commissioned the production of a life-like sex doll, a RealDoll, made of a posable PVC skeleton and silicone flesh, in my exact likeness. My doll, Amber Doll, began as a Styrofoam print-out of a digital scan of my head. Her face was then custom-sculpted and later combined with the doll manufacturer’s existing, “Body #8” female doll mold.

After completing, “The Making-Of Amber Doll” and ”Las Vegas Wedding Ceremony” (both 2007), Amber Doll and I went on to disrupt wedding receptions, roller-skating rinks, football tailgating parties, theme parks, and adult industry conventions throughout the United States. In the resulting series, “To Have, To Hold, and To Violate: Amber and Doll,” ideas surrounding agency and objectification are questioned, as are ideas about the success or failure of negotiating power through one's own participation in a cultural narrative that declares women as objects.

My work with Amber Doll, herself a literal object, deals with such themes through an oftentimes-complicated feminist lens. Similar concerns emerge in my series, “The Feminism? Project” (2006). The script for each video in “The Feminism? Project” was generated from interviews with women across my home state of Iowa on the subject of feminism.

Amber Hawk Swanson (b. 1980 Davenport, Iowa) lives and works in Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include Locust Projects (Miami), Non Grata Art Container (Estonia), and The Redhouse (Syracuse). Recent residencies include Fountainhead (Miami) and Vermont Studio Center (on scholarship). Her work is included in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago) and has been reviewed and featured in Map Magazine, Sex TV, The Associated Press, Time Out Chicago, and Flavorpill.

Hawk Swanson holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and two BFAs from Iowa State University. Notable projects include “The Feminism? Project” (2006) and “Amber Doll” (2006–2008).

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Warhol and the Market discussion

Neil Baldwin

PhD, cultural historian, biographer and critic, Neil Baldwin is the Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance, College of the Arts, Montclair State University. He was born in New York City and attended the Horace Mann School. He was a Visiting Student at the University of Manchester, England, and received his B.A. in English from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D. in Modern American Poetry from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

William V. Ganis

As a critic, William V. Ganis investigates the relationships among contemporary art, media technologies and art markets. He is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Wells College in New York where he also the Director of the school’s String Room Gallery. He has formerly taught art history at Stony Brook University, New York University and the New York Institute of Technology.

His reviews and articles have been published in numerous magazine and journals including Afterimage, Art in America, Border Crossings, Contemporary, Glass Quarterly and Sculpture. His book, Andy Warhol’s Serial Photography was published by Cambridge University Press in 2004.