Images from End-of-Semester exhibit (Dec 12 2015):
For more images, visit our Facebook albums of the end-of-semester exhibit: fb.me/4f3jIA7DH and fb.me/3qZqi8SEE
Images from Florence event CITYSCAPE ≤ X ≤ LANDSCAPE (Dec 3 2015):
Mid-term project statement
Our stay in Siena has reached its’ official midpoint, which makes us reflect on what we have been going through since the start of September, in the heart of Tuscany. Walks in and out of the city, visits in unexpected and semi-closed spaces, a real mind-and-body experience. Freedom in thinking and expressing our ideas has been a major positive factor in the making of a productive environment for everyone. The most important thing, in my mind, has been our active participation in the city’s events and happenings. It has given me a real feeling of being an integral part of the place I live in, of its’ thoughts and actions. A friendly and open-in-ideas relationship between us, “the outsiders”, and the city’s artistic scene has been feeding me with confidence in expressing myself and my personal perception of zeitgeist. I couldn’t ask for anything else.
Reading response to “What art is and what artists do” by Jerry Saltz:
JERRY SALTZ
A holistic, quite existential approach on art
Constellations instead of closed, introvert systems
A constant, momentous time that only you think are experiencing
When everybody is connected with every thing
We all live it simultaneously
Work
That is being made through you, not by you
Failure that leads in more time to do your work
Therefore in success
Communication between cats and dogs and owners
An ancient purpose
Reading response to excerpts from “Unstable Territories” catalogue:
WALKSCAPES
To cross a point
To open a circle
To recognize aesthetic values
To discover a place
To attribute a territory
To comprehend propensities
To invent place names
To assign symbolic values
To descend a mountain
To climb a path
To trace a geography
To draw a map
To tread a ravine
To inhabit a stone
To visit sounds
To narrate dangers
To traverse a line
To perceive a form
To guide oneself elsewhere
To observe ditches
To listen to a city
To celebrate an adventure
To navigate through smells
To sniff a grating
To breach a forest
To meet thorns
To host an archipelago
To measure relations
To grasp sensations
To populate a desert
To construct phrases
To find a continent
To take objects
To not take a dump
To tail a wall
To track an instinct
To enter an enclosure
To interact with animals
To hurdle a station platform
To investigate a hole
To follow traces
To leave bodies
To not leave people
Reading response to “Blue of Distance” from “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” by Rebecca Solnit:
Painters have always used the color blue in many ways. In Renaissance, they added another special way of using it, by creating blue worlds somewhere in the background of their paintings.
“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths”. Science tells us that the reason the sky and the sea look blue to human beings has something to do with the reflection of the light of the sun. But this knowledge hasn’t stopped us from mentally connecting this particular color with distance and, gradually, with the idea of distance, both physical and mental.
Leonardo himself encouraged the use of a blue shade over the distant buildings in a painting, a method used too by Hans Memling on his Resurrection. The result in the background produces what Rebeca Solnit describes as “the third realm”, one that exists between Heaven and earth, somewhere far away.
Mental distance is linked with desire, between the subject and the desired object. When one heads for the distant blue mountains in the horizon, he shouldn’t expect to ever reach this distant land. The color of distance is always one step in front, always going beyond the place you can ever reach.
Reading response to “Shape of a Walk” by Rebecca Solnit and “On the Being of Being an Artist” by Alfredo Jaar:
Art as a unique order of reality. Art as revolution, and the freedom to create your own revolution. Art as the light in the ominous dark future lying ahead, as a way to endure the brutality and the pain, and Art as the necessity to do so. Art as the belief in one’s belief, Art as creation, destruction, war and peace.
Art as consciousness, as action or reaction against any alienation. Art as involvement in life through ritualistic acts, as the relationship between body and world. Art as multiple viewpoints, impressions, qualities, traces of presence or presence itself. Art as absence, as a demand to work you own way out of the unknown. Art as an idea with physical consequences, as a notion that takes a particular shape in a particular place and time. Art as spirituality. Art as a test of one’s boundaries. Art as a question with no answer. Art as the only answer to a question that does not exist.
Personal bio:
Born in 1993 in Heraklion, on the island of Crete, Greece, he is an undergraduate student in the Architecture School of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He became interested in the art world and its’ history at an early age, and wishes to infuse some of its’ vibrancy and qualities in his architectural work.
His synthetic approach on a composition revolves around matters of form, materiality, identity and contrast. His work varies in scale, process, and field, always maintaining a particular space-and-time awareness.
The participation of Greek students in the Siena Art Institute‘s Fall 2015 semester is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
Siena Art Institute Blog 