Join PlySpace Spring 2020 Resident Jonathan Korotko for an inspiring workshop focusing on working with fiber materials to create drawings. This adult (16+) workshop will be held at Cornerstone Center for the Arts on Saturday, March 14th, from 1-3:30 PM, and is free, though space is limited.
Please register through the Cornerstone website: https://cornerstonearts.org/collections/adult-workshops-1/products/plyspace-resident-artist-jonathon-korotkos-fiber-drawing-workshop
About the workshop:
This workshop illustrates and works with drawing principles through and in collaboration with materials, such as yarn, fiber and paper. During the session, we will be examining the transformation and definition of drawing (line, movement, shading, value, balance), while considering how to intersect this traditional medium with the use of materials -- including hard and soft, flexible, found or alternative materials -- and the meanings these materials invoke. Focus will be set on how these materials aid in the thematic presence of finished works. To begin, we will be focusing on the act of rendering, and its relationship to materiality as a way to challenge and reconsider what a drawing can be. Through discussion and demos, students will be asked to work with ideas of interior/exterior, representation, responsiveness, and begin to question when do these gestures of drawing enter into a spacial plane. This workshop is introductory and open to all levels. Students will leave with a finished, fiber based drawing project.
Korotko will also teach a three day workshop for kids during the Cornerstone Spring Arts Camp on March 23-25. In this workshop, young students will learn how to apply fibers to wireframe forms to create vibrant sculptures. Learn more!
About the artist:
Jonathan Korotko is an artist who works with fiber in sculptural form. He visually and critically investigates domestic interiors in terms of gendered power dynamics. Working with yarn and string, Korotko wraps objects and creates new skins for them, cloaking and distorting the often sexualized associations of the original. Playful hand-rendered and applied surfaces create alternative imaginations of opulence and theatricality. He wants people to think about the significance of ornamentation and decoration as part of political mobilization in feminist and queer history. He received his MFA in Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019 and has exhibited across the United States as well as internationally. Jonathan has been an artist-in-residence at Ox-Bow School of Art and Franconia Sculpture Park, and will be a resident at PlySpace and The Studios at MASS MoCA in 2020.
Korotko’s work looks at how exotic animal imagery was incorporated into ornamental designs and patterns that covered all manners of wall surfaces and furniture in eighteenth-century France, England, and the Netherlands. The popularity of these designs and objects was part of a program of cultivating aesthetic taste that focused on exotic animal imagery as signifiers of class and as vehicles of desire. The pursuit of the exotic spoke to imperialistic ideologies of territorial expansion and the acceleration of consumption as part of fashion under colonial modernity. Korotko would like to combine this historical research of how taste and desire were formed through exotic animal imagery with his long standing interest in perfume bottles. After all, perfume bottles hold scents that are associated with romantic pursuit, which has historically been coded in predatorial terms. While at PlySpace, Korotko will work on a new body of sculptures that would incorporate fiber-based materials that allude to exotic animal commodities, be it feather, fur, leather, or ivory. He will also collaborate with the Cornerstone Center for the Arts to teach two workshops, Rendering Through Material, a Saturday class for adults, and Intro to Sculpture, for children at the Cornerstone Spring Arts Camp.
Learn more about Muncie Arts and Culture Council by visiting www.munciearts.org. Questions or comments about the PlySpace Residency program, events, and community collaborations can be directed to hello@plyspace.org.
PlySpace is a program of Muncie Arts and Culture Council in partnership with Ball State University College of Fine Art and Sustainable Muncie Corporation. PlySpace is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.