The Department of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts will continue its Spring 2020 Visiting Artists’ Program, “Space and Body,” on Thursday, March 12. This lecture series will feature nationally and internationally acclaimed artists present lectures about their work, professional practices, and their perspectives on contemporary art and design.
Artist Caleb Weintraub will be the series’ second presenter. A University of Pennsylvania MFA trained painter, Weintraub chairs the painting department at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. A painter, sculptor, video artist, and musician, he works across platforms and has embraced the craft store but only as it suits a body of work at a given time. As an Easterner and a member of a religious minority, his fish out-of-water experience seems to free him to total experimentation as an artist. His previous bodies of work include theatrical life size multi-figure sculpture, craft store supply enhanced oil paintings, and reductive drawing stop-action videos.
A self-taught computer draughtsman and musician, he brings a painter’s sensibility to a myriad of mediums. His figures and landscapes are fusions of art historical references, Manga, science fiction, fantasy, and artificial intelligence. Weintraub approaches the computer-generated world as a craft, not code, and then segues back to traditional materials through his unique approach. Relationships between paintings, sculptures, video and music blend into one another. Weintraub also writes and performs electronic music and is planning an event for this exhibition that will incorporate some combination of his methodologies. For his Rutgers-Camden visit, he will bring his digital drawings into his Augmented Reality goggles and “perform” with them to formulate a 2-D painting. Weintraub’s seemingly endless curiosity keeps his practice fresh and fascinating.
The lecture will take place on Thursday, March 12, from 12:45 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. in the Fine Arts Building, Room 110. This event is free and open to the public.