Visual, sound artist David Schafer to speak April 26

David Schafer, a visual and sound artist and faculty member at Parsons The New School for Design, will present a lecture on Tuesday, April 26, at 6:30 p.m. in Shemin Auditorium in the Dorothea Ilgen Shaffer Art Building. The free, public lecture is sponsored by the fiber and textile arts program as part of the Department of Art’s Visiting Artist Lecture Series in the College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA). Parking is available for $4 in Booth Garage. Patrons should mention that they are attending the lecture to receive this rate.

Schafer works across multiple platforms of production, including collaborations with architects, graphic designers, voice actors, digital engineers, fabricators and sound studios. His work is driven by a wide range of theoretical and personal references that manifest mostly around the idea of site, language and the built environment.

Working with sculpture, sound and graphic design, Schafer’s cacophonous pre-recorded and live mixed material is culled from instructional records, voice actors, sound effects and noise. His interest in collapsing the structures of language and spatial grammar superimposes aspects of the intelligible with the unintelligible. He has been invited to perform sound at a variety of venues, including Beyond Music Festival, Sonopticon, Mildred’s Lane, {SØNiK}Fest and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Schafer’s recent public project for a Los Angeles hospital, “Separated United Forms” (shown), involved the 3-D scanning and appropriation of a small Henry Moore sculpture from the Norton Simon Museum. The forms were then remixed and combined using modeling programs and then cast in bronze, resulting in two large sculptures resting on a lighted concrete platform.

In addition to public art projects, Schafer’s work has been shown nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Learn more at http://davidschafer.org.

For more information about the lecture, contact the Department of Art at (315) 443-4613.