Join the Pensacola Museum of Art and UWF Department of Art and Design for “The Art of Fieldwork” with artist Claudia O’Steen, Friday, April 14.
Claudia O’Steen and Aly Ogasian work collaboratively to produce multimedia, research-based installations, incorporating sculptural elements, digital media, drawing, writing, and photography. Their work focuses on their relationship with the changing environment and uses methodologies borrowed from citizen science to critique traditional notions of exploration and conquest.
O’Steen will discuss artistic fieldwork and the role that it plays in their work and will look at how artifacts and “data” collected from the landscape itself appear in their installation that was part of the Pensacola Museum of Art’s 2023 STEAM Exhibition.
The talk and reception will be held at Voices of Pensacola, 117 E Government St. The reception will begin at 6 p.m. and the talk will be held at 6:30 p.m. Both are free and open to the public. Seating is limited and based on a first-come basis.
Through her research-based practice, Claudia Steen examines navigation, exploration, perception, and the experience of being lost. She creates landscapes supplemented by scientific curiosity and human memory and invents languages to convey distance, scale, and direction, giving evidence to a process that has taken place.
O’Steen has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as apexart, Flux Factory, Manifest Creative Research Gallery, University of New Brunswick, Salamanca Arts Centre, and the Russian State Arctic Museum. She has been awarded residencies at The Wassaic Project, Montalvo Arts Center, The Arctic Circle, NCCA Saint-Petersburg, Hambidge Center and Haystack among others.
Claudia received a BFA from Watkins College of Art, Design & Film and an MFA in Digital + Media at Rhode Island School of Design. She currently resides in South Carolina and is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Winthrop University.
Aly Ogasian attempts to re-orient herself in a contemporary world dominated by data and technology. In these zones, science and technology give rise to the nebulous, the enigmatic, the mysterious — the primary goal is to “make sense” rather than to objectively know.
Rather than grapple with the “polarity” between the arts and sciences, her work argues that both fields operate in a territory of wonder that exists at the border between sensation and thought. Within this context, wonder is connected to an instance of “new knowing”, a re-encountering of familiar terrain.
She is currently based in Los Angeles where she is an Assistant Professor of Art and core faculty in Intercollegiate Media Studies at Scripps College.
