Faculty
Emily Bivens - Assistant Professor
Office: A+A 242
Telephone: 865.974.7828
Email: ebivens@utk.edu
Education: University of Colorado- MFA
URL: http://www.emilywardbivens.com
Click on images to view
I want to start with a list of things that I like. I like people who tell you details of their life in an e-mail that is purely business. I am working on a project with a woman who does this. She tells me about her husband who is looking for a job when e-mailing me about a book that we are ordering. Just the other day I was picking something up for my husband's boss and I met a guy who gave me a short dissertation on a fungus that ruins cocoa crops and could create a chocolate shortage. He told me about the effect that this would have on some of the women in his life. He cited his mother as one to worry about in the event of this disaster. He went on to tell some chocolate facts. Chocolate is the best sweet to eat if you cannot brush your teeth afterwards because it repels the bacteria that causes tooth decay.
I like uncovering small insignificant mysteries about the people I know through observation. For example, I want to figure out if a friend is left handed or has parents who are European without being told. I want to know that a friend doesn't like tuna fish before it comes up in conversation. I like listening to long, drawn-out stories in the songs on the country music station. I like the way fiction unfolds around fact in novels. I like reading everything that one author writes to slowly unearth and dig out the recurring theme that might be based on something that really happened to the author. I like old houses that tell the story of the years of their use. I like things that are covered over to make a new start. I like the potential of a mystery. I like new starts. I like New Years resolutions. I like addictions and I like giving up addictions. I like the way that years of use creates history in an object. I like how everyday has a potential to be a question asked and answered. I like riding the bus.
It is my intention to awaken a curiosity in the viewer, by pushing the line between fact and fiction while still being truthful. I am interested in a narrative that is created and recreated in the mind of the audience, a question that leads to many different answers. When I was a kid I read the 'Make Your Own Adventure' books. In these books you would make a choice concerning the narrative, and depending upon your choice you would turn to a different page to read a different conclusion. In my work the audience has the opportunity to complete the narrative. I make work about history, real and imagined. I make work about the secret dreams that objects soak up after years of proximity to hopes.
Baldwin Lee - Professor
Office: A+A 246
Telephone: 865.974.9388
Email: blee@utk.edu
Education: Yale - MFA
... the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time ... It is, like the phonograph record and like scientific instruments and unlike any other leverage of art, incapable of recording anything but absolute, dry truth.
James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
From this day forward painting is dead.
Delaroche, 1839
I photograph what I do not wish to paint and paint what I cannot photograph
Man Ray
You can photograph anything now.
Robert Frank
I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
Garry Winogrand
You can’t say more than you see.
Thoreau
In my view, you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it.
Zola
Photography ... despite its astonishing realism, in many respects, it is merely a reflection of reality, a copy, which, as it were, falsifies because of its very exactness.
Delacroix
A literal document would be a police photograph ... a document has a use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document ...
Walker Evans
I have yet to see a fine photograph that is not a good document.
Berenice Abbott
A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith.
André Bazin
If our reading is satisfactory, the photograph analyzed offers us three messages: a linguistic message, a coded iconic message, and a non-coded iconic message.
Roland Barthes
To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
Duane Michaels
When all is said and done, reality is stronger than all our wishes.
Werner Heisenberg
With photography I did’t have to make things up; everything was already there.
Jan Groover
I invent nothing. I imagine everything.
Brassai
I am always saying that the best photographs are those I never took.
André Kertész
The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. One thing that struck me very early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in. I’ve never taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.
Diane Arbus
... photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and choose. With the camera, it’s all or nothing.
Walker Evans
Photography doesn’t take any brains. It takes sensitivity, a finger and two legs.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Perhaps in the future, photography would replace all art.
Man Ray
You press the button, we do the rest.
Kodak, 1888
Baldwin Lee teaches the photography component of the Photo/Media Concentration. His educational background includes an undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied with Minor White and a graduate degree from the Yale School of Art where he studied with Walker Evans. Lee’s work in photography has been shown widely including venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work has been recognized by the award of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lee teaches photography classes of all levels, spanning traditional silver-based image making through photography made by digital means. His efforts in the classroom have been honored with the University’s two highest teaching distinctions: the UT National Alumni Association Outstanding Teaching Award and the Chancellor’s Excellence in Teaching Award.
Paul Lee - Professor
Office: A+A 213
Telephone: 865.974.3407
Email: Paul_Lee@utk.edu
Education: Cranbrook Academy of Art - MFA
URL: http://web.utk.edu/~plee3/
Click on images to view
"The central idea in my work deals with problematical situations caused by the process of translation. The process of translation bridges the gap between two separate entities: different languages, cultures, values, virtues, histories. The differences between these two entities show up because of the inadequacies inherent in the process of translation. As an artist, I translate my personal feelings and knowledge of my surroundings into a visual language for others to decode. This translation of my personal experience in turn becomes my work. The cycle of translation is broken when internal conflicts arise between the two different bodies joined in the process of translation. These conflicts are particularly powerful because they are so deeply rooted. My images exist among these conflicts in the space between seeing and knowing. I try to use my work to examine the decoding (translation) and coding process of images."
Paul Lee previously served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Washington State University. He received his M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work has been included in group and solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, San Antonio, and Vladivostok, Russia. His work is represented by Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle. His architectural photographs of Shanghai, China were published in the International Herald Tribune (1999) and featured by the BBC World Service (2001). He has received many grants and awards, including two Rockefeller Foundation Travel Grants and a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellowship. He has also received artist’s residencies from the New York State Council on the Arts and The Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia. In 1999 Governor Gary Locke appointed him to the Washington State Arts Commission; the following year he was elected Vice-Chair of the Commission.
Norman Magden - Professor
Office: A+A 424
Telephone: 974.2527
Email: nmagden@utk.edu
Education: Case Western Reserve - Ph.D.
URL:
http://web.utk.edu/~nemagden
Click on images to view
"My works involve the creation of multi-image performances in which performers move in an integrated environment of projected images. The performers interact with the projected images by carrying portable screens as an extension of their performance personae or by wearing specially-designed reflective costumes, allowing their bodies to become screens. These moving screen surfaces include variously formed white shapes that can be extended away from the body or passed over the body in continuous motion causing the images to appear three-dimensional, as they seem to project or recede.
Because the performance often takes place without stage lighting, the projections provide the main illumination. The performers’ actions only become visible when the portable screens or the white costumes interject the projection beams. In some works, both the screens and costumes have black sides on which the images will not appear, adding to illusions in which there are no precise divisions between the real and the projected performance. Performers acting as screens become a metaphor for the polemical human struggle between the beauty and terror of technology and its ever increasing presence in contemporary society.
To push the dissolution of boundaries between realities even further, the images being projected on the performers often contain a reiteration of the performance actually taking place, creating an intriguing visual confusion in which it becomes almost impossible to separate the images of the performance from the live performance. These multi-image environments are created as extensions of the living energy in the movement and the sounds of the actual performance."
Norman Magden is an intermedia artist working in film, video and multi-image performance. Many of his works have received awards from various venues such as the London Film Festival, the International Canadian Film Festival, the Athens International Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the National Endowment for the Arts Short Film Showcase. He has been awarded numerous grants from organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts, The Illinois Arts Council, The Illinois Humanities Council and Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago. His multi-image works have been performed nationally and internationally, most notably at the Theatre des Amandiers, Paris; the International Carnival of Experimental Sounds, London, England; the Polytechnic Institute, Mexico City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Automation House, NYC; and the Avant-Garde Festival, NYC. Magden served as Director of the School of Art (1993-2001).
David Wilson - Professor
Office: A+A 426
Telephone: 865.974.9402
Email: dwilson@utk.edu
Education: University of California, San Diego - MFA
Click on images to view
Using unconventional materials and approaches, including collaboration and performance, David Wilson creates large temporary artworks, videos, and drawings. Wilson has shown his work internationally at Kunsthalle Basel and Kunstlerhaus Boswil in Switzerland, the Experimental Art Foundation and Performance Space in Australia, the Robert McDougal Gallery in New Zealand, and the Center for Icelandic Art, Reykjavik. He has had solo exhibitions in the United States including at the Southeastern Center For Contemporary Art, Old Dominion University, Auburn University, the Florida Center for Contemporary Art, and the Dietrich Jenny Gallery. His group exhibitions venues include the Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Spaces Art Gallery, The Mint Museum, Cheekwood Fine Arts Center, the University of California (San Diego), and Wake Forest University.
Wilson’s videos were selected for the Dallas Video Festival, the Sydney Underground Film Festival, Australia, the DigiFestival, Florence, Italy (juror’s special recognition) , and the Alternative Film and Video Festival, Belgrade, Serbia (award of significant achievement).
Wilson’s artwork has been featured in periodicals such as Schweizer Kunst and Art Papers and reviewed in newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. Wilson has been artist-in-residence at the International Artist Exchange, Basel, Switzerland, SIM, Reykjavik, Iceland, and the Academy of Fine Art, Bratislava, Slovak Republic. He has also designed sets for the National Theater of the Deaf Children’s Theater that toured the U.S.
Wilson received his M.F.A. from the University of California at San Diego where he studied with Allan Kaprow, Italo Scanga, and Manny Farber.