WORKSHOPS

You are invited to explore the creative process and personal approach to artistic growth in this entry in a series of exciting lectures featuring nine Djerassi Program resident artists. The program concludes with a Q&A session with the featured artists. Tonight's featured artists include Xia Gao, visual artist, Lincoln, NE; Ravi Shankar, poet, Chester, CT; Thu Kim Vu, visual artist, Hanoi, Vietnam.

When Xia Gao, a visual artist from Lincoln, NE, relocated into a Western culture, the geographic migration brought her new insight into the cultural milieu of her native East. Her work tells stories, personal experiences, and of her renewed connection to her cultural tradition and Eastern origin. The transformations in her own life and in contemporary Chinese culture are new inspirations for her creative expression.

Ravi Shankar, a poet from Chester, CT, is currently working on his third full collection of poetry, The New Transcendence. These poems encompass a range of subjects from divine and corporeal love, art, travel and artificial/natural phenomenon. At the core of this collection are a series of pastorals, all four tercets long and revolving along a philosophical axis that turns from the object of perception to the act of perception itself. From something as miniscule as “dust”  to something as bewilderingly machined as a “bulldozer,” these poems constitute a cosmos, a way of looking, a mode of entering into and being in the world.

The current focus of Thu Kim Vu, a visual artist from Hanoi, Vietnam’s, work is the experimentation provided by the process of black and white doodle drawing with mini three-dimensional paper construction. For Thu Kim Vu, doodles reveal one's personal character in hand writing and signature. They are drawings without intention or meaning, created spontaneously. It is a form of meditation where the lines lead you to next unknown step, to expect the unexpected, and to observe one's physical and mental inner self in each moment.