Sabbatical Presentations - Claire Brunet & Nina Leo

Claire Brunet presents: 

Sculpture Allegory: Displacement of Referential Elements from Natural, Cultural, and Historical Contexts

Claire Brunet’s Sculpture Allegory project seeks to express the passage of time through sculptural objects embedded with symbolic meaning. Drawing inspiration from the world around her, she creates assemblages using 3D scan photograms of digitized referential objects. Brunet captures or appropriates various elements drawn from natural, urban, and historical contexts. These photograms are digitally combined to create Sculpture Allegory 3D print prototypes, which are then further altered through hands-on processes; selected works are cast in bronze.

The Sculpture Allegory series is grounded in a narrative enriched by layered meanings and open to interpretation. The Glacier project explores the merging of temporalities as a metaphor for expressing climate change. Socrate/Socrates, referencing Erik Satie’s 1919 Socrate composition for voice and piano, combines a reformatted 3D music sheet with the philosopher’s historical statue, forming a sculptural allegory that suggests openness to diverse forms of knowledge.

Inspired by data collected during two artist residencies in Italy, Brunet integrates digital data from past and present referential elements to create sculptural projects that are both digital and tangible, navigating spatial-temporal dimensions. During her sabbatical leave, she explored a range of approaches to analogue and digital data creation and application, moving from 2D to 3D processes through exploratory visual representations.

Nina Leo presents:

The Irrefutable Border

Nina Leo’s presentation will focus on work created with her collaborator, author and poet Moez Surani, during her half sabbatical in fall 2024. Their practice resides at the intersection of contemporary politics and autobiography, exploring how identity, ideology, and culture interrelate. 

Specifically, she will discuss three works, Summa, which stems from their ongoing research into contemporary sites of migration; Pjostcards, which uses typical postcard strategies to foreground the often common, yet intimate personal landmarks cities hold; and Every Day of Peace in the Last Hundred Years, a drawing performance focused on the precise days over the past hundred years when there was peace between nations.