Humanities on the Edge presents Saya Woolfalk: World Builder

Humanities on the Edge invites you to join us for the first lecture of spring 2016:

Saya Woolfalk: World Builder

Sheldom Museum of Art
Thursday, March 3, 5:30 pm

Woolfalk's work considers the idea that symbolic and ideological systems can be activated and re-imagined through collaboration, imaginative play and masquerade. To effect this re-imagining objects, bodies, and landscapes are constructed to immerse us in the logic of another place.

In many ways her works become the repository of the dreams and ideas of the many people who participate in producing and imagining the contours of the works. In the tradition of the fable or folk story, she maps the desires and ideas of people to create narratives that attempt to be relevant to a contemporary audience.

From 2006-2008, Woolfalk worked with anthropologist and filmmaker Rachel Lears to develop Ethnography of No Place, a 30 minute video about fictional No Place, a future constructed for the investigation of human possibilities and impossibilities: configurations of biology, sociality, race, class, sexuality, and the environment designed as reflections on human life and its future. The name is derived from the English word, "utopia," coined by Thomas More from the Greek "no" (ou) and "place" (topos).

With her current project, her focus shifts away from the future to develop a narrative about a contemporary group called Empathics whose politicized collective action is informed by what seem to be contradictory positions of a semi-religious commitment to No Place, and the desire to understand the truth through reason and observation.

Each of Woolfalk's projects builds on the logic of the last. She attempts to capture as much information as she can, and approximate in a parallel fictional space and time how things might come to be.

More information about this event is available from the Sheldon Museum of Art and on Saya Woolfalk's website, sayawoolfalk.com.