Fifth Annual Stony Brook Philosophy & Art Conference and Exhibition

Exhibition on View March 29 – April 21, 2012
Opening Event: March 29, 6-8pm

Conference Schedule:
Friday, March 30, 9:15am-8pm
Saturday, March 31, 9:30am-9pm

Special Events:
April 5, 2012 SECONDS: a film and food double feature, 5:30pm-9pm
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! 5:30pm-9pm
Figure drawing workshop for beginners & friends organized by Shannan Hayes, Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University

April 19, 2012 5:30-9pm
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


Contact: [email protected]

All exhibitions and events are free and open to the public.

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

Dr. David Wood, Keynote Speaker
Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University
March 30-31, 2012

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.

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