Category — Faculty Updates

MFA Director Rebecca Duclos will work with artists Donna Akrey, Jon Knowles, and Leah Garnett for a one night performance in Montreal this March.

Telepathic Drawing Session
Articule | Montreal
March 24-27, 2010

I’d say I’m transmitting it. If someone picks it up, then that’s communication. Someone might pick it up a thousand years from now. Someone might pick it up five minutes before I’ve thought about it. You see, because that sort of transcends time and space, and these things sort of exist for all time, so to speak.

Robert Barry speaking with Patricia Norvell about his telepathic pieces, May 30th 1969

“Black Holes 2008″ by Leah Garnett

Telepathic Drawing Session is a modest (if not largely invisible) project which brings together fascinations with extra-sensory perception, preoccupations with conceptual art, and a special interest in the expansiveness of Canadian geography and its scalar restraints on collaborative artistic practice. Rebecca Duclos’ proposal results from of a series of explorations that have brought together research on the 1960s telepathy works of Robert Barry with Ted Serios’ parallel experiments in photographie de la pensée in order to propose a project in which telepathic communication is used to generate images between remote individuals. Telepathic Drawing Session proposes a new model for a thoughtful, collaborative art practice that strives to overcome the pesky limits of time and space—so long a perennial problem for Canadian artists hoping to work with one another across provincial boundaries without the financial assistance of travel grants, the luxury of residencies, or access to unlimited Air Miles. Duclos will work with artists Donna Akrey, Jon Knowles, and Leah Garnett for a one night performance in which drawings will be transmitted between Montreal, Quebec and Sackville, New Brunswick using telepathy and live radio broadcasts.

2009 Visiting Artist Ken Lum creates large-scale installation for The Vancouver Art Gallery.

Ken Lum from shangri-la to shangri-la, 2010 (detail)
site-specific installation in progress. Photo: Brian Howell

The Vancouver Art Gallery has commissioned a large-scale site-specific installation by internationally renowned artist Ken Lum for display in one of the city’s most prominent locations during the 2010 Winter Games. On view from January 23 to September 6 at the Gallery’s recently launched outdoor exhibition space, Offsite, the artist’s large sculptural work includes three scale replicas of squatters’ shacks that once populated North Vancouver’s shoreline.

Titled from shangri-la to shangri-la, Lum’s rustic cabins resemble those of the Maplewood Mudflats squatters’ community. Located along North Vancouver’s intertidal zone from the early 20th century until 1971, this improvised village was home to a number of artists, writers and activists. For his project, Lum has recreated the homes of renowned writer Malcolm Lowry, artist Tom Burrows and Greenpeace leader Dr. Paul Spong. Propped up on stilts over the surface of the Offsite reflecting pool, the huts strike a sharp contrast with the surrounding downtown architecture. Located at the foot of the Shangri-La Hotel, Vancouver’s tallest building at the busy intersection of Thurlow and West Georgia Streets, these dissimilar structures evoke the character of the mudflat community and draw attention to the rapid advance of urban development in the Lower Mainland.

The work of Vancouver artist Ken Lum questions the relationship between modernism, mass culture and everyday experience, often blurring the boundaries separating high art and popular culture. Over the past twenty years, Lum’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions throughout North America, Europe and Asia. He has also represented Canada at the Istanbul Biennial, São Paulo Biennial, Shanghai Biennale, Gwangju Biennale and Documenta.

Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite offers a rotating program of innovative public art projects by local and international artists in Vancouver’s downtown core, which respond to the city’s unique urban environment. The exhibition space presents new projects organized by the Gallery two times a year, funded by the City of Vancouver through its Public Art Program.

Offsite: Ken Lum is curated by the Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, Grant Arnold, with assistant curator, Kathleen Ritter. The Gallery deeply appreciates support for Offsite: Ken Lum from the Michael O’Brian Family Foundation. Offsite is also supported by Ian Gillespie, President, Westbank; Ben Yeung, President, Peterson Investment Group; and the residents at Shangri-La.

JUST LOOK AROUND THIS PLACE
Baer Ridgway Exhibitions | San Francisco
January 22, 2010

Baer Ridgway Exhibitions of 172 Minna Street, San Francisco, presents Just Look Around This Place, a program of new works in video curated by Kenneth White. The one-time screening will begin at 8pm on Friday, January 22, 2010. Total running time is approximately one hour. Admission is free and open to the public.

Just Look Around This Place is a collection of seven short works in video that explore the transformation of social relations by the video medium. Using a diverse range of methods, including video-diary, home video, animation, direct address, and appropriation, the artists dissect their means of creative production and the mutations of social performance that their medium instigates. Video is an environment through which interaction is conditioned. In each work, we are beckoned to “just look around this place,” and recognize the (often hilarious) scenes of life performed for electronic media. Works and artists include “Let’s watch this guy at a coffee shop.” (Julie Perini), “HOME / VIDEO” (Michael Hession), “Video Terraform Dance Party” (Jeremy Bailey), “Pine Point” (Kenneth White), “Beauty Plus Pity” (Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby), “West Nile” (Tom Sherman), and “The Frills 3.0” (Jimmy DiPasquale).

Kenneth White is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator. He is currently a graduate student in the Art History / Film Studies Ph.D. Program at Stanford University. He received his B.F.A. in film production from Syracuse University in 2005. He is a co-founder of the Portland Film + Video Artists Collective, of Portland, Maine. White will serve as a visiting curator in the summer 2010 session of the Maine College of Art M.F.A. Program.

Director Rebecca Duclos has been invited to be an External Reviewer for Concordia University Open Media’s end of term reviews on December 2nd and 3rd.

image: Brigitte Dajczer

In keeping with the MFA’s appointment of extraordinary visiting faculty during the summer intensive semesters and to broaden our reach internationally, a panel of recommenders is for the first time working with the graduate program at MECA to nominate visiting faculty for 2010.

We are excited to be working with Alex Pilis (artist + faculty at the Metropolis  Masters and Graduate Program in Architecture and Urban Culture in Barcelona), Kelly Gellatly (Curator at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne), Ken Lum (artist, writer and curator in Vancouver), Camilla Brown (Senior Curator at the Photographers Gallery in London), Roger Conover, Executive Editor, MIT Press), as well as our own MFA faculty, Andrea Ray and Peter Simensky.

Chris Whittey, Dean of MECA and Rebecca Duclos, Director of the MFA, will shortlist visiting faculty recommendations with the help of one of the current MFA students on December 16th. A full list of visiting faculty for 2010 will be posted in the new year on this site.

Hello Meth Lab in the Sun #13,  2008
MECA 2009 Visiting Faculty, Jonah Freeman, with Justin Lowe and Alexandre Singh/Courtesy of Ballroom Marfa)

MFA Director Rebecca Duclos is the recipient of a Research Fellowship at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.

Following a year of interview-based research, Duclos will collaborate with the Faculty of Fine Art Gallery at Concordia University to organize a two-day symposium entitled “Artists and Information: new paradigms for research” in November 2010.

Here is an excerpt from Duclos’s research proposal:

I am interested in what library scientists call the “information-seeking behaviours” of artists—how and why arts practitioners pursue research, often in the form of primary source archives, objects, and interviews, but also from sources as diverse as statistical records, song lyrics, scientific data, archaeological reports, amateur film, architectural plans, found documents, unpublished recordings, and so on. While not necessarily new, this desire to examine, extract, and enfold “real world” information into artistic practice is a phenomenon that, in my twenty years as an artist, curator, art historian, and now MFA director, I have seen intensify significantly in recent years.

As a Fellow in the Jarislowsky Centre, I have proposed a close study of contemporary work being produced in Canada since the mid-1980s as a way to begin assessing what I see as a new vigour and rigour driving artists’ research. I hope to document and analyze not just the “what” and “how” of these information-seeking behaviours (which is the domain of library science) but the why of artists’ in-depth investigations. Do research-focused practices find affinities with process-based artworks prevalent in the 1970s? Are these methodologies, in part, informed by a rejection of a 1980s artworld so heavily invested in post-structuralist theory? Are we seeing a return to the tangibilities of material culture and archival evidence as a counterbalance to the performativity of relational aesthetics in an era Nicolas Bourriaud has recently described as the “alter-modern”?

My research diverges significantly from claims made by theorists who variously see creative practice as a form of research or who aim to infuse traditional research practice with “creative methods” derived from the arts. My approach is perhaps closer to what Paul Carter has called material thinking (“how ideas are turned into artworks”) in that I wish to develop an analysis of interpretive studio processes that embrace a research-based posture to recuperate micro-histories, investigate obscure archives, and locate esoteric ephemera. I am also interested in documenting artists’ own methodological vocabularies that describe research processes that are often intuitive, associative, synchronous, non-linear, and highly subjective.

Reverse Pedagogy
The Model Satellite
Opens on Friday, September 25th
The project runs from September 26th – November 22nd

Paul Butler’s Reverse Pedagogy project heads to Sligo, Ireland for a project at The Model Satellite.

For their time in Sligo, the group of artists are occupying the Model Satellite space on Castle Street and will be submerging themselves and responding to local culture, including a tag rugby game with local team The Supermodels this evening, surf lessons in Strandhill, mountain climbs, and informal meetings with local arts and cultural groups

Read more about it on The Model Satellite blog.

Personal Views:
Contemporary Portraiture In Philadelphia
Gallery 339 | 339 South 21st St. Philadelphia, PA
Sept. 16 – Nov. 14, 2009 | Opening Sept. 16th at 6pm

Congratulations to MFA studio advisor, Hartmut Austen, who recently received the prestigious Kresge Artist Fellowship.

Hartmut Austen, SDS 2008

Kresge Arts in Detroit, funded by The Kresge Foundation and administered by the College for Creative Studies, provides significant financial support for 18 Kresge Artist Fellowships annually, each consisting of a $25,000 award and customized Professional Development opportunities for Metropolitan Detroit artists in the Visual, Performing, and Literary Arts.

Paul Bloodgood (MFA’03) and Tom Burkhardt (former MFA Visiting Artist and NRSI) are recipients of the 2009 Guggenheim fellowship.