Faculty
Jason S. Brown - Associate Professor
Office: A+A 244
Telephone: 865.974.3225
Email: jbrown45@utk.edu
Education: Rhode Island School of Design
URL: http://web.utk.edu/~jbrown45
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My production as an artist includes kinetic sculpture, performance, and installation. Throughout all forms, I temporarily transform places through actions that create a confounding spectacle in order to question routine patterns and social norms. This work represents a series of sculptures that are props and instruments for social interventions in urban and rural spaces. While the sculptures appear to have some measure of authority, they are intended to initiate a critique of power structures in state and corporate institutions. The elements of bright colors, wheels, and flashing lights are related to the utilitarian language of safety equipment in a construction site. These work zones also represent a kind of intermediary space – somewhere between order and anarchy – that is the core of social constructions and relationships. Designed to invite audience participation, I want my objects and projects to challenge users to engage in a civic dialogue about individual, community, and place.
Jason S. Brown received his M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999, and began teaching Sculpture at the University of Tennessee in 2001. Brown’s artwork has been exhibited throughout the country, including Arizona, Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. In 2005, Brown completed a four-month research residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the coast of Oregon. He is involved in a number of collaborative public art projects with social interventionist groups such as SURVIVAL DESIGN. Throughout his art and teaching, Brown emphasizes interdisciplinary cooperation amongst creative thinkers. His work engages other disciplines including architecture, ecology and engineering.
Patricia Tinajero - Assistant Professor
Office: A+A 131 A2
Telephone: 865.974.3225
Email: ptinajer@utk.edu
Education: University of Colorado at Boulder
URl: http://contemporaryfocus.org
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"My work explores objects and space in terms of cultural, social, and aesthetic constructions. Household items, discarded construction materials, and everyday objects serve to create imaginary landscapes.
Repetitive motion and the accumulation and repetition of forms are part of the collecting, sorting, and organizing process through which I gain an understanding of the material world around me. I catalogue and archive collected everyday materials in order to connect with epistemological and ontological concerns.
From a formal point of view, I am interested in composition and design as part of a concept of aesthetics which further expands on the meaning of the construction of beauty, as well as the consensus achieved in order for an object or environment to be regarded as aesthetically gratifying.
Another important aspect in my artistic practice is my collaborative work. Collaboration is a critical component because it challenges the paradigm of the isolated artist working within a hierarchical power structure, and sets up a lateral structure for the exchange of ideas and dialogue. Through collaborative art projects I become an active agent of social change: I learn about, I become aware of, and I affect my surrounding using an aesthetic language to address issues that I consider relevant to daily life such as humanistic values and ecological concerns."
Patricia Tinajero is an assistant professor in the department of
sculpture at the University of Tennessee. Born in Quito, Ecuador,
Tinajero often uses her work to raise questions about cultural
identity and social practice. As part of Contemporary Focus, Tinajero
has built a large sculpture in KMA’s south garden. This sculpture
takes the shape of tiered metal cubes, filled with small compartments
that are primarily meant to grow clover. By having the garden produce
only clover, Tinajero is working to attract honey bees from the
Beardsley Community Farm in Knoxville’s Mechanicsville neighborhood
(approximately 1.5 miles from the museum, the longest distance a bee
will travel). With this kind of “social sculpture,” Tinajero
poetically encourages Contemporary Focus to connect disparate parts of
Knoxville, with the bees acting as our symbolic ambassadors.
Tinajero received an MFA in 2001 from the University of Colorado at
Boulder. Her work has been exhibited at the Islip Museum of
Contemporary Art, New York; the Center for Contemporary Art, Grand
Rapids, Michigan; Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, Ecuador; Museum of
Contemporary Art, Iceland; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art,
Colorado; and at the Museo de la Cultura Parque de los Enanitos,
Venezuela, for the Internacional Biennal of Textile Women Artists.
STAFF
Olivier Odom- Sculpture Technician
Telephone: (office)865.974.3225 (shop)865.974.3224
Email:oodom@utk.edu