How To Critique Towards Love
2018

This project began when I invited an upright bass player and a courtroom stenographer to the group critique of an abstract sculpture. On carpeted plinths, the bass player improvised accompaniment and the stenographer produced a live verbatim transcript for our conversation as it proceeded. As the group’s attention quickly shifted away from the presented sculpture to engage the comedic yet tense situation unfolding, critique participants began to feel a self-awareness of how these conversations are typically performed, and took the opportunity to experiment with how they might participate in different ways. A portion of the recorded bass accompaniment was transcribed and contemporaneous excerpts of the stenotype document were set as lyrics.

Object Language
2019

I invited my linguistics professor to perform a lecture on formal semantics during group critique. After outfitting the crit space to accommodate this event with custom benches, white boards, teaching props and an abstract sculptural form for us to critique, I asked the lecturer to conduct semantic analyses of comments generated by the participants. The resulting event fluctuated between group conversation and top-down explanation, with two divergent methodologies for

 conjuring meaning attempting to share space.

The conversations and feedback generated by these two pedagogical interventions grew into a series of discussion based workshops and became the basis for my master’s thesis research. Reflecting on the variety of structures which have been imposed-upon and removed-from group critique in visual arts education, my workshops and research query the efficacy and equity of this teaching tool, aiming towards more compassionate and constructive methods for giving and receiving group feedback. The inaugural workshop took place on the original campus of the Black Mountain College in 2019. The thesis writing can be read here.

^These projects were supported in part by funding from the Carnegie Mellon University Frank-Ratchye Fund For Art @ the Frontier.
^Thank you to Anna Cillo (stenography,) Riley Zimmermann (bass,) Osun Zotique (transcription,) Huidi Xiang (documentation,) and Tom Werner (semantics.)