June 27, 2007

Visiting artist to offer lectures, workshops in July

by Andrea Hahn

CARBONDALE, Ill. — July will be a month of Juno at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Visiting artist Violet Juno will be on campus July 2-27 with a series of 25 events, including lectures, performances and workshops. The series, called "Campo Truth Charmer: An Interdisciplinary Performance Expedition," is meant primarily for artists of all types, from musicians to writers to painters to dancers, and for the "art-curious" in any discipline.

Juno is an arts learning activist for the Alameda County, Calif., Office of Education. She is also a performance artist, having participated in exhibitions in more than 30 cities over the past 17 years, including a premier performance at SIUC's Kleinau Theater of "Swallowed Whole: Stories from Inside the Painting," an exploration of her work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Juno was born in Germany, but raised in Normal, Ill., where, according to her biography, she learned to recognize the "absurd masquerading as the mundane." She earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at Washington University and a master of fine arts at the University of California-San Diego.

Juno's visit here is funded in part by the Student Fine Arts Activity Fee. All of her events are open and free of charge. Each week has a theme. The schedule follows:

July 2-6 – Burning Questions: An exploration of how artists use inquiry to focus their creative process on the things they really care about and to generate answers they don't anticipate. Learn how to use your own "burning questions" to explore and investigate ideas.

July 9-13 – Terra Incognita: Juno introduces cognitive mapping techniques to chart "unknown territories" to be explored through art, using individual burning questions along the way.

July 16-20 – Variable X: Learn to turn unexpected obstacles into opportunities by engaging "Variable X."

July 23-27 – Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: This final week focuses on the audience for any given public expression. Juno tackles perceptions of real and imagined audiences, teaching that who we believe the audience to be affects our creative process.

Each week follows the same pattern. Mondays introduce the topic with an "imaginary lecture" at 7 p.m. in Kleinau Theater. Tuesdays and Thursdays are workshop days, times and places to be announced. Fridays are performances featuring "Juno and Community" at 7 p.m. in Kleinau Theater.

For more information or to reserve your space, call the SIUC Department of Speech Communication in the College of Liberal Arts at 618/453-2291.