Art Professor Andrea Wollensak receives Artist Fellowship Grant
Art Professor Andrea Wollensak, chair of the Art Department and co-associate director of events for the college´s Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, has been awarded a $2,500 Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism (CCT) Artist Fellowship Grant in New Media. The grant is awarded to the state´s finest creative artists to encourage their continuing artistic development. This is the second time Wollensak has received the CCT Artists Fellowship; she was selected on the basis of "artistic merit" from among more than 400 applicants statewide. Wollensak plans to use the grant to fund "Networked Landscape," a series of installations using video, audio and mobile media that explores Iceland´s geographically distinct locations and landscape through the narratives of the country´s residents and highlights the significant shift in cultural meaning of landscape. "With these stories and their connection to place, I hope to explore how landscape is understood and is shaped by conditions of mobile network culture," Wollensak said of her project. "I also intend to engage the way we apprehend and are comported by social and virtual networks, focusing not on the descriptive and superficial attachments between people and places but rather on allowing the historical, personal and semantic background behind these attachments to be made expressive and visible." Upon returning from sabbatical in the fall of 2011, Wollensak plans to introduce a new studio course that will incorporate her research and introduce Connecticut College students to creative uses of mapping.
July 20, 2010
