2009 Visiting Faculty Bios
PAUL BUTLER
Paul Butler is an artist, curator and dealer with an interest in multidisciplinary, social and alternative pedagogical practices. His practice includes hosting the “Collage Party,” a touring experimental studio established in 1997, and directing the operations of The Other Gallery, a nomadic commercial gallery focused on overlooked artists’ practices established in 2001. In 2007, he founded the UpperTradingPost.com, an invitational website that facilitates artist trading. In 2008, he led an experimental residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts entitled “Reverse Pedagogy.” He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Hart House, University of Toronto; White Columns, New York City; Creative Growth Art Centre, Oakland and Sparwasser HQ, Berlin. His curatorial projects have included works by Matthew Higgs, Mitzi Pederson, DearRaindrop and Guy Maddin. He has contributed writings to the book Decentre: Concerning Artist-run Culture (2008) and to the magazine Canadian Art (2008). In 2010 he will curate The Milwaukee International’s Ice Fair on Winnipeg’s Red River, and organize “The Exchange,” a two-part exhibition at Dorset Fine Arts, Cape Dorset and The National Gallery, Ottawa, in an effort to bring together Canada’s southernmost and northernmost art communities. Butler lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
BRIAN DUNN
Brian Dunn is a doctoral candidate in affective neuroscience at Concordia University in Montréal. In his research, he uses fMRI to map human emotional reactions, in particular, experiences of pleasure and displeasure. His work is rooted in the tradition of experimental psychologists and philosophers of mind who view emotion as a primary, somatically-driven phenomenon, and the long tradition of philosophical-religious inquiry that seeks to investigate the nature of the self through the close scrutiny of hedonic preferences. His academic work includes a BA in Philosophy, and graduate study in Philosophy of Religion, which he ended in order to write and record music professionally. Returning to research and clinical work, he conducted studies of mood disorders and substance abuse at a psychiatric hospital for five years. Dunn is a practitioner of traditional Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga and a formal student of the Mountains and Rivers Order of Zen Buddhism. His direct collaborations with studio artists began in 1994, and most recently take the form of consultations with artists on the neural and psychological bases of their concerns. Dunn lives and works in Montréal.
JONAH FREEMAN
Freeman’s work has been primarily focused on the phantasmagoria of the constructed world. In the past five years two of Freeman’s major projects, The Franklin Abraham and Hello Meth Lab in The Sun (in collaboration with Justin Lowe and Alexandre Singh) have produced several bodies of work that include a quasi-feature film, a historical photograph/print archive, sculptural installations, and a 16 room environmental installation. The Meth Lab project will be continued in a sequel installation at Deitch Projects, NYC titled Black Acid Co-op (in collaboration with Justin Lowe) scheduled for the summer of 2009. Screenings and exhibitions of Freeman’s work have occurred at several galleries and museums including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; P.S. 1, NYC; Andrew Kreps Gallery, Le Centre pour l’image Contemporaine Saint Gervais, Geneva, Switzerland, Maison Populaire, Paris and Galerie Edward Mitterrand, Geneva, Switzerland. His forthcoming project, In The Kaleidoscope Room, takes its title from a book by Elizabeth Stone about the mega-exhibition San San International, a result of the merger of several kinds of trade fairs, contemporary art exhibitions, technology displays and performance festivals into one behemoth event. Freeman lives and works in New York City.
AMELIA JONES
Amelia Jones is an art historian and visual culture theorist specializing in feminism, performance, body art, video, and Dada. She is the author of Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (1994), and Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998), as well as the primary survey essay in the Phaidon book on The Artist’s Body (2000). She has also edited several books: Contemporary Art, 1945-2003 (2005), Feminism and Visual Culture (2003); Performing the Body/Performing the Text (with Andrew Stephenson, 1999); and Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ in Feminist Art History (1996). In her 2004 book Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, Jones rethinks theories of avant-gardism central to the discussion of modern and contemporary (or postmodern) art by writing an alternative history of the New York Dada movement. Her new book Self-Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (2006) expands on her work on body art, exploring the experience and understanding of the self in relation to performances of the body via technologies of representation from analogue photography to the Internet. Jones studied at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow in 2000 and currently holds the Pilkington Chair in Art History at the University of Manchester, UK. Jones lives and works in Manchester.
KEN LUM
Ken Lum’s art is concerned with issues of identity, especially as they relate to image production in contemporary urban society. Working across multiple media, Lum’s art aims to challenge our fixed ideas about who we are when faced with the processes and pressures of cultural and political assimilation. Since his first solo exhibition in New York in 1982, Lum has developed a complex body of work that includes Furniture-Sculptures, Portrait-Logos, Language Paintings, Photo-Mirrors and Shopkeeper series works. All of his work involves the dialectics of private and public constructions of identity, space and politics. Lum has participated in many prestigious international art exhibitions including Istanbul Biennial, Documenta XI, Shanghai Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Carnegie International, the Sáo Paulo Bienal, and the Johannesburg Biennale. He is an active writer and has published in many leading art journals and magazines including, Art & Text, Art Margins, Nka: The Journal of Contemporary African Art and Art & Collections. He is also Founding Editor of Yishu: The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. He was curator of the 2004 NorthWest Annual exhibition held at Center of Contemporary Art in Seattle, Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945 for the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, and co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 7, held in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. More recently, Lum has been working on a number of public art commissions, including ones for the cities of Vancouver, Stockholm, Zurich and Leiden. These new works are more involving of a language of critical urban politics. Lum lives in Vancouver and travels internationally.
BENNY NEMEROFSKY RAMSAY
Nemerofsky Ramsay is an artist, diarist and aspiring bon-vivant. Since 2000 his work has involved performance, video and print works as vehicles for examining the singing voice and the history of song, the rendering of love and emotion into words, and the impact of popular culture on identity. His work has been exhibited in festivals and galleries across Canada, Europe and East Asia and has won numerous prizes at film and media art festivals in Canada, Germany, Poland and Portugal. His work is held in both private collections as well as the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Recent solo and group shows include Radio Killed the Video Star at the Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba; Lyric at the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, Austria; Queering the Archive at Nikolai Church, Købnhavn, Denmark; You Can’t Get There From Here at the York Quay Gallery, Toronto; and Reverberations at the Yuangong Art Museum, Shanghai, China. Nemerofsky Ramsay lives in Montréal and travels internationally.
JANE WILDGOOSE
Jane Wildgoose is an artist, writer, broadcaster, and NESTA Fellow, with a background in design for stage and film. Since 2003 Wildgoose has been Keeper of the Wildgoose Memorial Library where she oversees a collection of found and made objects that function as a forum for collaboration on memory and mortality, providing subject matter for her photographic still lifes and a backdrop for her photographic portraits. Working with American radio artist and producer Gregory Whitehead, and British producer Neil McCarthy, Jane has incorporated her practice at The Wildgoose Memorial Library into radio programmes for the BBC, including A Tale of Two Skulls(BBC Radio 3, 2008) and On One Lost Hair (BBC Radio 4, 2004). She regularly collaborates with Museums and is currently developing a project with the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven CT, where she is working with the curators and collections at the Peabody Museum of Natural History and Yale University Art Gallery to produce a site-specific installation to accompany the exhibition Mrs Delany & Her Circle opening at YCBA in September 2009 and traveling to Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, in 2010. Wildgoose lives and works in London, UK.
