Detailed description of the impact of proposed research
I have created an audio version of this portion of my proposal, for your convenience but also because my practice is deeply rooted in sound. You can find a text based version below. Feel free to follow along. Thank you for taking the time to review my application.
Sasha Petrenko,
Associate Professor Sculpture and Expanded Media
Department of Art and Art History
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TRANSCRIPT:
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF IMPACT OF PROPOSED RESEARCH
Contents:
I. Impact on Creative Activity and Professional Development
II. Impact on Teaching
IMPACT ON CREATIVE ACTIVITY AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
The time requested for my professional leave is crucial to my creative practice, not only for the scale and scope of my proposal, but for this moment. While I have continued to make work through years of teaching and service, this project requires a greater commitment, to develop and maintain relationships with the people and places I’ve identified. It will not suffice to visit, as an outsider and observe. The work I propose necessitates I become embedded, working in and with these communities over the course of a year.
Why now? The double punch of moving from the San Francisco Bay Area, and leaving my arts community, followed by the Lockdown, has hindered my ability to fully establish myself in my new home region. While I’ve had opportunities to present my work, most notably at On the Boards, in 2019, part of the NorthWest New Works Festival, and as a Media Artist in Residence at Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle, 2022-2023, this new body of work will be vital to my continued professional development, providing me with the creative impetus to expand my skill set, professional network, creative community and audience.
My most pivotal work has invariably been the result of a time when I was fully immersed in my subject. When I am able to embed myself into a site and community I produce large scale, interdisciplinary projects like Lessons from the Forest, Forest Time Fire and Forest Time Water, all deeply researched works, involving extensive collaborations with scientists, artists, and arts organizations. In 2018, I volunteered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to eradicate invasive plants on the Farrallon Islands, a 10 day adventure 30 miles out at sea that resulted in the first written drafts of Forest Time Fire. Later in 2018-2019, as an artist in residence at Sagehen Field Station, UC Berkeley’s experimental forest in the Lake Tahoe Basin, I was able to write and record Fire which later premiered at On the Boards, in Seattle, and at a sold-out fundraiser back at Sagehen in Truckee, CA. Earlier still, In 2015 and 2017, I had the opportunity to reside in Schwandorf, Germany, in the heart of Bavaria, where months of field work and collaboration resulted in a critical body of work, a poly-lingual video series called Lessons from the Forest, which has screened in numerous venues for San Francisco to Switzerland. It takes time to develop collaborations, conduct research, write drafts, capture and edit video, and compose and produce soundtracks. Given my past successes however, embedded as an artist into subject sites and communities, I am confident and determined, with the time provided by this sabbatical, I will achieve my creative goals. This next body of work, and subsequent screenings and exhibitions, will serve as creative catalyst to expand my practice and creative community here in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
IMPACT ON TEACHING
Fall 2025 will mark the start of my 8th year of teaching at Western. I’m grateful to all the students and colleagues who have made these past years so memorable and enriching. Despite the remarkable challenges of the Pandemic, and continued social struggles and political uncertainty, my Western community made it possible for me to feel a sense of purpose and belonging. That is maybe why it is so important to me to create a inclusive, supportive environment in my classroom. I am most happy at the end of a long teaching day as I pack up to leave, students remain, engrossed in their work and in conversation with one another. I’ve worked hard to revive the sculpture area, bringing digital technology, like laser cutters, 3D printers, and CNC machine into my labs and curriculum. I’ve replaced older equipment, with new, safer tools such as a wood lathe, 2 new bandsaws, drill press and plasma cutter. And I’ve invested part of my area budget towards quality people powered tools so my students can develop a deeper sense of their process and material and learn that “Knife skills are Life skills!” Through working with their hands, learning new and traditional skills, applying their imagination to creative challenges, my students develop a sense of autonomy and self assurance no app or tablet can provide.
It’s no secret, we teach from our area of expertise, our discipline. And so, it makes sense that my creative research has and will always impacted my teaching. But what’s maybe unique about my curricula is how frequently I collaborate with my students to provide them with experiences beyond the classroom. Some examples include when I first collaborated with Director of Dance, Susan Haines, to develop movement for Forest Time Fire. Haine’s contemporary choreography class created an original dance score for my performance, and after repeated rehearsals, about a dozen Western dance students joined me in Seattle for 3 public performances, part of the NorthWest New Works festival in 2019. My media students and Susan’s dance students have collaborated several times since, to produce original dance videos, screening them on the side of the Herald Building in the fall of 2020, and with Bruce Hamilton’s electro-acoustic composition students, at the Bellingham Alternative Library and Makeshift Art Space in downtown Bellingham, 2021, 2022. Most recently, in May 2024, when I was invited to perform at SoundBox7, a music festival celebrating improvisation, organized by Oregon State University, my students and I live streamed a 30 minute sound art piece featuring sonic sculptures the students made themselves in my Sculpture in Wood class.
During the academic year, I pour a great deal of my creative energy into my teaching because I enjoy collaborating with my students, which may explain why I’ve been nominated for Teaching Excellence Awards in 2021, 2022, and 2023. With all that I’ve been able to accomplish, I feel confident my area will continue to grow and evolve even in my temporary absence. Moreover, I believe strongly that my teaching will benefit immensely from the opportunity to pursue my creative professional goals.
In fall 2026, I will teach ART 335: Intermedia Public Art. Drawing upon my new research, I will continue to teach my students through ecopoetic strategies, a curriculum that merges the fields of art and science. To further enhance their educational experience, I will reach out to colleagues in the College of the Environment, in ecology, biology and geology, to develop new project based collaborations between our students where they can visualize, sonify and make manifest scientific data in new media. My aim is that our students take field trips together, conduct research, collect data and co-create across their individual disciplines. I hope these collaborations can be established and grow into regular rotation each academic year.
It can be argued that every generation faces their own (r)evolutionary struggle, from the great depression to world wars, fascism, civil rights, reproductive rights, 911, COVID, reproductive rights, and the climate crisis. From watching the news, doomscrolling social media, an unstable economy and a seething political system, it’s no surprise Gen Z, while the most culturally diverse, is also, possibly, the most anxious. That’s why I feel that engaging in acts of resilience, reparative action, and habitat restoration will resonate particularly with our current generation of students who are facing an uncertainty beyond precedence.
Rather than allow ourselves to be consumed by consumerism, crapitalism, bad news, and mind numbing media, we will seek out those people and places that give us a spark of hope, and sense of belonging and purpose. The words of authors like Cleo Wolfle Hazard, Benedictine Meillon, whose research I’m indebted to, will find their way into my classroom, much like ecopoetics strategies already have, through the merging of science and art, creative writing, interactivity and sound, interdisciplinary methods that bring together many ways of being and understanding.