VPR3011 - Professional practice advanced - 2018

This is a core unit in the Visual Arts sequence and is first of the two 3rd year units. The unit provides students with an advanced perspective on the various modes of publication available to cultural practitioners engaged in Visual Art. This unit gives students an opportunity to incorporate theoretical frameworks that reflect and expand upon a breadth of fields that include education, business, information technology or the liberal arts into their production of visual culture. This unit asks students to develop self-directed strategies that extend upon traditional gallery based exhibition modes. These modes might include: artists' books, editioned objects; site-based research and exhibiting; digital broadcast; collaborative, social and/or performative processes; curatorial contexts; and creative arts writing. The workshop program encourages an experimental and critical approach to conceptual and material outcomes whilst providing opportunities to cultivate curatorial, critical writing and administrative skills. Students are required to initiate individual and collaborative solutions to a series of creative public outcomes. Teaching methodology involves lectures, fieldtrips, critical dialogue, class discussion and peer-review. Safe and sustainable approaches to fabrication techniques and materials are promoted as core values in the unit.

On successful completion of this unit, students will be able to:

1. Justify their conceptual, material and logistical approaches to their cultural production in relation to a range of diverse public platforms;
2. Position a critical perspective within a field of research using various analytical strategies appropriate to the presentation and material outcomes of their practice;
3. Devise a self-directed program that identifies different phases of experimentation and consolidation within a field of research;
4. Initiate and present interdisciplinary, collaborative or curatorial approaches in contemporary visual art practices that are consistent with a complex research questions;
5. Contextualise through the creative application of writing the theoretical and material rationale for their work within the field of contemporary cultural production;
6. Understand and apply the rules of occupational health and safety appropriate to sustained independent studio practice and in order to collaborate safely with peers.

100% mixed mode assessment (includes progressive assessment and folio)

12 hours per week, including four hours of taught studio and eight hours of personal study and studio practice.

See also Unit timetable information