Sue Wrbican
Professor
Director of Photography
Darkroom Photography, Digital Photography, Documentary Photography, Graduate Seminar, Photography Practice and Research, Senior Project, Visual Thinking
2016 Art and Design Building; MSN: 1C3
(703) 993-8570
swrbican@gmu.edu
Sue Wrbican
Professor Wrbican has an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. Her studio is located in the Monroe Street Market Arts Walk in Washington, DC. Wrbican is currently the Associate Director of The School of Art at George Mason University where she is also Director of the Photography program.
Wrbican’s work is informed by her life’s history including work in a steel mill at Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation in the late 70’s to employment at Morgan Stanley in first five years of the millennium. With regard to her interests in philosophy and literature she creates situations from mining narrative within unique experiences.
Her site specific sculptures referencing the work of Surrealist painter Kay Sage will be installed at the Seligmann Center in Sugar Loaf, NY in the fall 2015 as part of a walking tour providing material for a new photographic experimental documentary project “The Eventual Outcome of an Instant.”
In 2014, she presented her sculptural work project “Continue the Temporary and It Becomes Forever” at the Zizek Studies conference at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning. Her article about this work was published in The International Journal of Zizek Studies in 2015. As an artist in residence at Robert Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida where she collaborated extensively with acrobat Arnaud Caizergues on the hurricane-damaged beaches of North Captiva Island. Images of this work will be published in the fall 2015 edition of So To Speak-A Feminist Journal of Language and Art.
Wrbican was an Associate Artist with Rineke Dijkstra at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida in 2009 funded by a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation Residency Fellowship. In 2008, she completed a 4-year collaborative project with Mary Carothers entitled “The Frozen Car” at Michigan Technological University funded through a Mathy Fellowship and research grant from George Mason University. In January 2007 Wrbican exhibited “The Impala Diaries” at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her video work has been screened in various venues such as WNET 13’s “Reel New York,” “The World Wide Video Festival” in Amsterdam, “Artists’ Television Access” in San Francisco, The Midnight Special Bookstore’s “Documental,” in Los Angeles, “The Avignon Film Festival” at the Alliance Francaise, NYC, NY and HEMPHILL Presents “SATELLITE: Workingman Collective” in Washington, DC. From 1997-1999 she was a video Artist In Residence at Experiements in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) working with Billy Kluver and Juli Martin on a series of films entitled “9 evenings: theatre and engineering” documenting the 1966 performances of Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, David Tudor and Yvonne Rainer among others. She worked closely with Robert Whitman to compose historical film footage of his 1960 performance American Moon.
Professor Wrbican works collaboratively on numerous projects with the internationally recognized DC based art organization Floating Lab Collective, whose work has been exhibited at various venues such as the Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York City, MDE11 in Medellin, Colombia and the 5×5 Public Art Project for the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities. She has delivered presentations on these projects at The College of New Jersey in Ewing, NH and the Soceity for Photographic Education, 2014 National Conference in Baltimore, MD. Images of her photographic work “Scream at the Economy” with Floating Lab Collective are published in Global Activism, Peter Weibel, editor, MIT Press, forthcoming 2015.