Weekend drop-in art studios at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
Weekend visitors to the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art will have the opportunity to drop in and take part in free studio workshops led by Sydney-born artist Elizabeth Corkery throughout the month of March.
Using prompts inspired by the artist as well as by the museum’s concurrent exhibitions, these weekend studio sessions engage the community and makers of all levels—offering up potentially transformational art experiences. In this month’s “Paper Theaters, Imagined Spaces,” Corkery invites visitors of all ages to create small-scale, paper theater environments by combining collage, monoprint, and stencil techniques.
She hopes the sessions will capture visitors’ imaginations and prompt them to think about how different art processes lead us to see in different ways. “It’s an interesting way of moving between dimensions,” Corkery says of the workshop’s activity. “You are not actually making a sculpture but you are making a space, only through the act of drawing or painting. So there is that transformation of working on a two-dimensional object, but having it become quite spatial.”
It’s not unlike the moment of opening up an elaborate pop-up book: “It’s a seemingly magical moment when you are young enough to not be fully aware of the engineering behind it.” And indeed the workshop activities will appeal to children. But the process, she adds “can stand for much more grown-up ways of visualizing the world, of understanding why we see it the way we do.”
Corkery’s own work—primarily in printmaking, digital media, and sculpture—often plays with spatial perception as a means to reflect on the politics of decoration and ornamentation. Her inspiration for this project stems from the Victorian tradition of toy table-top theaters, and the power or agency of being able to position oneself in a single, fixed perspective which would make the illusion succeed.
Her March residency at the Manetti Shrem will also feature a salon on the 26th—part artist-talk and part viewing and response to Doug Aitken’s exhibit, NEW ERA (on display through June 14), which also considers the different effects of one’s viewpoint. His multichannel installation of moving images, expanding architecture and surrounding sound creates a “liquid environment” which posits the viewer into the role of collaborator.
Visit manettishremmuseum.ucdavis.edu to find out more about current and future Art Studio activities. “Paper Theaters, Imagined Spaces” will be the featured workshop March 7–29. Thursday evening salons are free with RSVP (required; space is limited); please call (530) 752-6362.
Elizabeth Corkery received her master of fine arts from Cornell University and lives and works in Sacramento. She is the Founder/Director of Print Club Ltd. with UC Davis professor Graham McDougal. For updates and inquiries: @eacorkery or elizabeth.corkery@gmail.com.
