Visiting Artists & Designers series welcomes: Noelle Mason
Department of Visual Arts: Visiting Artist Lecture
In “Contact with the Screen,” Noelle Mason will focus on the theoretical roots of her forensic surveillance-based work in the Lacanian notion of the “Gaze” and its capacity to implicate spectatorial desire, all while “the screen” represses it. She will discuss how her strategic selection and fusion of mediums, ranging from photography and video (near-instantaneous means of creation) to embroidery and weaving (time-intensive creation), push viewers beyond quick responses in the visual cortex to layered vibrational responses within the body, ultimately challenging the naturalized authority of surveillance and remote sensing, and offering viewers a sense of agency toward making change.
Noelle has exhibited globally and received numerous awards, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Grant, Jerome Fellowship, and most recently a LensCulture Art Photography Award, PHmuseum Photography Grant, Santa Fe’s The CENTER Editor’s Choice Award, and Female in Focus award from the British Journal of Photography. She holds a BA in both Theatre and Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Noelle is Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of South Florida and Founding Director and Curator of Parallelogram Gallery in Tampa.