College of Visual and Performing Arts
SAM VAN AKEN
Associate Professor; Program Coordinator
School of Art and Design
Sculpture
Education:
M.F.A. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Office: ComArt Rm.013
Telephone: 315-443-2318
Biography:
Mining our media-saturated and technologically immersed culture for his subject matter, Sam Van Aken's art is staged between the false realities we come to inhabit through media and technology and the lived reality we experience apart from it. Taking the form of multi-media installations and environments his work explores such subject matter as documentation and fiction, authenticity and imitation, artifice and nature, selfhood and impersonation.
Born in Reading Pennsylvania in 1972, Sam Van Aken's work has been recognized nationally and internationally since the mid-1990's for exposing and unfolding perceptions on such diverse topics as genetic engineering and the psychological impact of media. Immediately following his graduation from Slippery Rock University in 1994 with degrees in communication theory and art, Van Aken lived and worked in Poland under the auspices of the Andy Warhol Foundation and the United States Information Agency. Working with dissident artists under the former communist regime, his work was shaped by the belief that art provides an alternative message, view, and concept of the world. Returning after several years in Europe, Van Aken received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001.
Avoiding material specificity and intuitively allowing idea to search for new forms, his work has grown to employ such elements as sculpture, video, performance, installation, and interactive environments. Through this his work transcends immediate encounter to become part of our own everyday thoughts as we engage the same media and technology immersed culture his work explores.
Avoiding material specificity and intuitively allowing idea to search for new forms, his work has grown to employ such elements as sculpture, video, performance, installation, and interactive environments. Through this his work transcends immediate encounter to become part of our own everyday thoughts as we engage the same media and technology immersed culture his work explores.