Still Life?
Fifth Annual Philosophy & Art Conference
Stony Brook University

The Masters program in Philosophy and the Arts at Stony Brook University in Manhattan focuses on intersections of art and philosophy. Towards encouraging dialogue across disciplines, the Fifth Annual Stony Brook Philosophy and Art graduate student conference and concurrent month-long exhibition in Chelsea serve as an interdisciplinary event and welcomes participants working in a variety of fields and media to respond to this year’s theme: Still Life?

The theme Still Life? might provoke an existential, ontological, and/or ethical questioning of life as we know it. Additional topics might include: questions about (universal) human rights; the distribution of protections and risks; personal freedom, agency, and choice; disability and dependency; aging, decay and entropy; becomings, stunted potential, stutters and stammers; material, cognitive, affective or spiritual motion/mobility; vitality, time and rhythm; practices of preservation, plasticization and documentation; distillation and/or dilution; memory, nostalgia and haunting; exchanges, transitions and continuities between life and death; conceptualizations of eternity; enduring, waiting and patience; the life of art objects; ephemera(l) tracings; questions of motion and stasis; the uncanny or animate-inanimate; the inorganic life of things; causa sui or nascent morphology; contemporary still life; the endurance of painting/the painted gesture; the ‘freezing’ of photography; the stillness or kinetic affect or quality of sculpture; performance and the moving image.

 
 
Featuring:
Dr. David Wood, Keynote Speaker
Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University
Visit the Still Life? website for a full list of events

Participating Artists:
Shaila Wadhwani
Kate Brandt
Anna Hawkins
Melanie Perreault
Robin Pineda Gould
Dominique Paul
Fiona Annis
David Wood
Reynold Reynolds

THURSDAY SATELLITE EVENTS 
(starting at 5:30 pm @ AC Institute)

 
April 5, 2012

SECONDS: a film and food double feature
Tampopo (1985) & The Biggest Little Chinese Restaurant in the World (2008) organized by Kelly Rae Aldridge, Department of Art History & Criticism, Stony Brook University.

 
April 12, 2012
SIT STILL!
Figure drawing workshop for beginners & friends organized by Shannan Hayes, Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University.
 

April 19, 2012
Book Release: Heidegger Among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling
By Dr. Andrew J. Mitchell, Department of Philosophy, Emory University. Organized by the Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University.

All events are free and open to the public.