Visual StudiesMatt Neff’s work is concerned with historical and current negotiations of power and privilege with regard to race, gender, and class, both as an observer of others, and in terms of his own processes and relationships to these dynamics. This process, which occurs on both levels of consciousness and dissociation, offers a fragile impermanence to the work. Formally, he is interested in a lack of image, anti-icons, and, much like semantic satiation, the repeated and shifting use of common materials like sugar, graphite, air, and ash evoke visual mystery and a visceral reaction to and curiosity about objects and images.
PEOPLE
-
Director of Fine Arts Undergraduate Program
-
Lecturer
Kaitlin Pomerantz is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and writer. Pomerantz comes to visual studies from the intersecting fields of fine arts, art history, cultural and ecological studies. As an artist, Pomerantz works across mediums to invite consideration of place histories and futures, and material and land relations. Areas of research include: land art, industrial histories, discard studies, ecological grief + justice, liberatory pedagogy, image + ethics. In addition to Visual Studies, Pomerantz teaches MATTERS, a course looking at material life cycles.
-
Associate Professor, Psychology
"Believing is seeing." - My research interest is to understand how our visual percept of the world is shaped by our beliefs and expectations about what there is to be perceived. More specifically, research in my laboratory is currently exploring (1) how the statistical properties of our visual environment shape our expectations (i.e. objective expectations), and (2) the degree by which our expectations reflect our own previous perceptual decisions (i.e. subjective expectations). How are these expectations formed?
-
Associate Professor of Painting and Fine Arts
Jackie Tileston's paintings are heterotopic spaces in which recombinant strategies and nomadic thinking create complex images that investigate the contemporary sublime and states of being. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Dallas, and group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston), Art in General and the Painting Center (New York), and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art.
-
An artist working at the intersection of photography, science, and history, Vershbow received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and taught most recently at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At UW, he participated in research research on color perception and molten salt fission reactors. His work can be found in the collections of the National Academy of Science, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Getty Museum, Harvard University and Smith College.
-
Visual Studies Associate Director
Ian Verstegen is the Associate Director of Visual Studies. He works on early modern and modern art history, theory and historiography. He has written a series of works on art and psychology, including Arnheim, Gestalt and Art: A Psychological Theory (2005), Cognitive Iconology: When and How Psychology Explains Images (2014), and Arnheim, Gestalt and Media: An Ontological Theory (2019).