Steve Gurysh
- Associate Professor
Contact Info
Lawrence
1467 Jayhawk Blvd
Lawrence, KS 66045
Personal Links
Biography —
Steve Gurysh is an artist whose work is recognized by a fluid approach to process and material; using sculpture, time-based media, and art in the public realm, his work responds to communal, technological, and beyond-human ways of understanding place and the scale of planetary phenomena. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, public art commissions, and residencies at Wassaic Project, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the WATERSHED+ Dynamic Environment Lab and a fellowship at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. He has exhibited works at Contemporary Calgary, Alberta, Canada; the Knockdown Center, Queens, New York; W139, Amsterdam; El Museo de la Ciudad, Querétaro, Mexico; La Société des Arts Technologiques, Montréal; The Engine Room, Wellington, New Zealand; and in the center of the Allegheny River.
Gurysh is an Associate Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas where he has been a faculty member since 2020. He regularly teaches courses such as Digital Fabrication, Public Art, Woodcraft, Fundamentals of Sculpture and Graduate Seminar.
Education —
Research —
Steve Gurysh uses sculpture, time-based media and art in the public realm to make tangible the distances between communal, technological, and planetary subjects, exploring relationships to place and the anxieties of a global ecological crisis through the layering of dislocated experiences. Gurysh’s practice compresses expansive logics into potent objects that contain wild materialities, digital to physical translations, and speculative relationships to time. His projects are often developed in collaboration and correspondence with scientists, engineers, municipal employees, material specialists, craftspeople, other artists, communities, and non-human participants.
His works range from the transformation of uranium ore into a radioactive photographic print to a sprawling public artwork in a city park that includes a series of tree planting tools made from a meteorite and the recreation of a column from a historic astronomical observatory carved into the volume of a 200-year-old wind fallen oak tree.
Teaching —
As an Associate Professor of Sculpture, Gurysh has a broad knowledge and experience of the sculpture fabrication facilities in the Department of Visual Art. He is responsible for expanding the department’s digital fabrication resources in the VAST Lab, integrating software and computer-aided systems within the traditions of woodworking, metal fabrication, mold-making and casting, as well as other more idiosyncratic techniques in the field of sculpture. In his courses students develop thoughtful conceptual approaches, critical sensibilities, and an attuned awareness of the unique capacities of materials, processes, and the environments in which art can be made and experienced. Students learn how to implement technical skills, integrate technology with traditional methods, and how to work fluidly across interdisciplinary modes of thinking and making while developing an independent voice in the expansive field of contemporary art. He has taught core curriculum such as Fundamentals of Sculpture and Graduate Seminar, and specializes in advanced sculpture courses in woodworking, digital fabrication, and public art.