As part of her outreach as the Levine Museum Artist-in-Residence, Sheila Turner partnered with CMS and the Levine Museum of the New South in a project called Adjusting the Signal: The Projected Landscape, which connected high school students with the concept of courage.
Adjusting the Signal coincided with the Levine Museum of the New South’s 20th anniversary celebration who reinstalled the Courage exhibition and invited young people to participate. Turner worked with students from South Mecklenburg High School and posed the question: “Where does courage come from?” Students responded that families, friends and peers inspire courage but were then introduced to Turner’s concept that television also inspires courage. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, adolescents in the United States spend 22 to 28 hours per week viewing television, more than any other activity per week except sleeping. By the age of 70 they will have spent 7 to 10 years of their lives watching television. It’s because of this statistic that Turner believed television must inscribe courage.
“As part of the project, I asked students to photograph whatever they wanted on the weekends. I didn’t ask them to look at anything particularly different, but I believed that through their photographs they would have the opportunity to see television inscribe courage. Television drives stereotypes, style, and so many other things, so I believed that once you let a young person know that television inscribes courage, then perhaps they may begin seeing it. That’s really what the project was about, just adjusting the signal, adjusting the way they see the things that they’re normally around, and that’s become the phenomenal part about this project.”
After the images were collected and discussed through a series of classroom conversations with Turner, the work from the students will be proudly exhibited at McColl Center for Visual Art on November 18 from 6 to 9 PM and on December the 10th at the Levine Museum of the New South where they will appear like flat screen TVs .
Artist Website
Levine Museum of the New South
Shelia Turner is a photo documentary artist who teaches at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and the Art Institute of Charlotte. She thematically linked her work and classroom lessons to the concept of ‘new’ courage using the exhibition at the Levine Museum as the catalyst. In preparation for this project, Turner designed and delivered two day-long curriculum development workshops for the teachers at ten high schools. Through curriculum-based classroom activities, exhibit visits, dialogue and other activities