IB Visual Arts Final Show

TASIS Art, Photography, and Architecture/Design students held their IB Visual Arts final show April 16-18, 2016.

This final exhibition, spread across the Palestrina, the Palmer Cultural Center and the Horst Dürrschmidt Gallery in the Śahenk Fine Arts Center is the culmination of the students' IB Art experience. Students presented a selection of their best work in the form of a curated final show, and defended and articulated their purpose and intention in a written rationale. The exhibition represents 40% of final grade awarded.

A busy and often challenging day of moving screens, creating installations, placing and hanging pictures and models saw an abundance of good humor with students and teachers collaborating closely to get the show ready for the opening.

The exhibition remained open for three days. During that time the show receive a variety of visitors from both TASIS and members of the local community, and was also assessed and marked.

Click on any image below to view the photographs in a slideshow. For more information about the TASIS Visual Arts Program please visit the TASIS website. Click here for more information about the 2016 IB Architecture and Design students' work.

The TASIS Spring Arts Festival runs from May 20 - 22, and all the Visual Arts students will be displaying work along with Sunday workshops, and musical/dramatic performances throughout the weekend. The Spring Arts Festival program will be posted soon!  

Great Reads and Inspiration

Articles, videos, ideas, photos, and artwork....the TASIS Visual Arts Faculty often share links and ideas with one another. We have decided to collect a few of our favorites so alumni and students can see what is inspiring the TASIS Visual Arts faculty these days! We plan to post 'Great Reads' at least twice a month. 

Our hope is to challenge and inspire current and former TASIS Visual Arts Students. Let us know your thoughts and share your favorite links with us in the comments section.

Old Masters at the Top of Their Game
 Portraits of men and women in the 80s and 90s, rich in the rewards of substantial and celebrated careers. 

She Who Tells a Story  (From Digital Photo Pro) 
A glimpse of the lives of Arab women captured by the lenses of women photographers living in that world.

Truthtelling (From Digital Photo Pro)
An article about Barbara Davidson, Pulizter Prize winning photojournalist

Cutting and Layering Clay Slabs to Create Organic Texture (From April 2016 Ceramics Monthly)
Potter Jeremy Wallace shares how he makes a textured slab-built cylinder. 

15 Iconic Buildings Celebrate the Monumental Modernism of Louis Kahn
Reflections on one of architecture’s most influential figures of the 20th century - Louis Kahn

Scanning the Covers of Fortune Magazine (From CreativePro)
Gene Gable did a column on the covers of Fortune magazine, especially those published before 1960 when the magazine was one of the most lavishly produced in the United States. 

The Place of Craft (David duChemin, former Senior Humanities Speaker) 
David states that we ".....suffer from a lack of visual literacy, imagination, and the willingness to connect emotionally – and vulnerably – with our subjects."

The Disease of Being Busy (OnBeing.org)
An article just as its title suggests - 'being too busy'.

Out of an Ivory Tower and into the World
An article about Swiss photographer Werner Bishof (Note: TASIS students and faculty visited a Bishof exhibition in Chiasso last year.)


 

 

 

 

 

Porcelain Workshop held at TASIS

IB Visual Arts students participated in a one day workshop in creating a table lamp from Paper-Porcelain with TASIS Art teacher and ceramics artist Simona Bellini.  The workshop was a complete experience as students prepared the porcelain material and created the lamp forms from their own designs.  

Despite the heavy snow on the day of the workshop, ten students plus Mr. Mark Aeschliman, working under the supervision of Ms. Bellini, created the paper-porcelain in the ceramics studio, mixing clean toilet paper in hot water to create a pulp mixture which was then added to a porcelain mix (1:3) and then blended together.  The clay mixture was then stretched out and left to dry on plaster tablets and allowed to dry to a workable consistency.

After lunch, the students returned to the studio and began to work their paper-porcelain material, further rolling the clay to the proper thickness and then beginning to impress their design ideas into the soft material.  The paper porcelain sheets retain a great strength after firing, but are thin enough that the light from a small lightbulb will pass through, creating a beautiful glow.

The students used various stamps – letters, designs, lace doilies, leaves – to press their design into the porcelain sheet.  The sheet was then wrapped around the form which was to be the basis of the lamps’ shape.  The base piece was joined to the form and the finished piece was left to dry, and then be fired.  After the firing, the electrical lamp is added to complete the piece.


View a gallery of images from the workshop taken by TASIS Photography teacher, Frank Long. These images can also be viewed in the Porcelain workshop gallery on TASIS SmugMug.

 

 

Cultural Events - Museum Visits in Milan

“To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.”  Robert Doisneau 

“The mystery of love is more mysterious than the mystery of death.”  Oscar Wilde  

Giulio Aristide Sartorio in his studio

Giulio Aristide Sartorio in his studio

The photographer Robert Doisneau's and the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde's words adequately convey the attitude of the Symbolist painters of 1900. Between the Belle Epoque and World War I, groups of artists in several European countries took the suggestive themes of love, death, and mysterious mythology as their subjects for works of art. The Symbolism exhibition visited by 25 TASIS art history students at Palazzo Reale in Milan on Saturday featured 180 works of art, among which 150 paintings, many large-scale, and many by well know artists such as Hodler, Segantini, Redon, Moreau, and Böcklin. But there were also masterpieces by much less well known Italian painters such as Gaetano Previati, Giulio Aristide Sartorio, and Vittorio Emanuele Bressanin. One part of the exhibition was a recreation of the "Room of the Art of the Dream" from the 1907 Venice Biennale the 1907, which elevated Symbolism to the status of an important style in Italy.


We also visited Leonardo's Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie. Students preparing for the IB exam in art history on April 29th were able to see for themselves what Leonardo meant by "the motions of the soul." 
- Mark Aeschliman, TASIS Faculty

Photograph by Filipe Malczewski '16 

Photograph by Filipe Malczewski '16 

l'Italia Exhibition Features Venice Film

While on Academic Travel this past October, sophomore Tyler Miller filmed this breathtaking footage of Venice. This video along with a series of black and white photographs by faculty member James Shields are being shown in the Horst Dürrschmidt gallery in the Ferit Şahenk Fine Arts Center as part of the current exhibition.