History of Art & Visual Culture course is happy to announce the launch of a new course this winter term. For more information on this “timely” addition to our course offerings please contact Professor Linda Steer.
The Brock and wider community are warmly welcomed to attend the online presentations by the short list of candidates for this position.
Each will give an hour-long presentation and engage in discussion about their current research interests and focus upon their contributions.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 20TH, 2020
Research Presentation 1:00pm (1:00 – 2:20pm)
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Gustavo Cerquera Benjumea is a Colombian Canadian Toronto-based digital media artist, animator, music video director, and teacher. He specializes in computer animation, video installation, and drawing. His work explores psychedelia, plant biology, and Latin American histories. His work has exhibited internationally including at: Slamdance Film Festival, Glas Animation Festival, Ottawa International Animation Festival, Art Spin Toronto, the Niagara Artist Centre, Summerworks Festival, Nuit Blanche Toronto, among others. He has directed music videos for Lido Pimienta and Chancha Via Circuito. He is the current programming chair at the Toronto Animated Image Society. Gustavo teaches at OCADU and Brock University.
THURSDAY, MAY 21ST, 2020
Research Presentation 1:00pm (1:00 – 2:20pm)
stream.lifesizecloud.com/extension/3327527/6fd67857-4515-484b-9d04-9ea9ea756a71
Troy David Ouellette is an artist/researcher specializing in Assemblage Theory. He received his PhD, in Visual Arts, from York University in 2014 and his M.F.A. from the University of Windsor in 2007. He has taught Design, Sculpture and undergraduate courses, at various universities and colleges, in Southern Ontario. From 1999 until 2005 he was the Sculpture Facilitator at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Ouellette is a founding member of the London Ontario Media Arts Association (LOMAA) and the sound art collective Audio Lodge. His work has been included in several solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Australia and the United States. He resides in Hamilton, Ontario.
FRIDAY, MAY 22ND, 2020
Research Presentation 1:00pm (1:00 – 2:20pm)
stream.lifesizecloud.com/extension/3326867/e156311e-7437-4e53-a009-eada0c2fcfff
Gwen MacGregor is a visual artist and geographer working across the disciplines of installation, video, photography, and geographic scholarship. She has artworks in collections such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Oakville Galleries and the Royal Bank Collection. Recent exhibitions include The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario and Phoenix Projects Athens, Greece. She has exhibited extensively internationally and has also participated in numerous international art residencies including the International Studio Curatorial Program in New York. She is a Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Award holder and is represented by MKG127 in Toronto. MacGregor is a PhD Candidate in Geography at The University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores the constructions and contestations of nationhood in contemporary art practices presented at art biennales.
Assistant Professor in Visual Arts, Candidate Research Presentations, Digital Media and Design, GUSTAVO CERQUERA BENJUMEA, GWEN MACGREGOR, MIWSFPA, presentation, TROY DAVID OUELLETTE
Categories: Announcements, Current Students, Events, Faculty & Instructors, Future Students, In the Media, Media Releases, News, Uncategorised
Amy Friend, associate professor in the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, works hands-on to experiment with both digital and analogue images. She poses beside her piece Our Little Dancing Girl, Evelyn, Age 9 at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre.
(Published TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2020| by The Brock News {Michelle Pressé})
Note: Faculty Focus is a monthly series that highlights faculty whose compelling passions, innovative ideas, and various areas of expertise help weave together the fabric of Brock University’s vibrant community. For more from the series, click here.
It’s not often that Amy Friend goes out and photographs what she calls ‘the real world.’
Instead, the associate professor in the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts works hands-on to interrogate a medium, experimenting with both digital and analogue images.
One of Friend’s signature styles is hand-manipulating vintage photographs in a way that rescues and revives them, exploring what’s visible and what isn’t, such as in her series Dare alla Luce. She likes to think of photography as a material that is alive with possibility.
Her work has been selected three times as one of the top 50 photographs in the juried Critical Mass International Photography Competition, and she’s exhibited in more than a dozen countries, including Spain, Greece, and Korea.
The inspiration for her Vestiges series can be traced to being surrounded by family possessions, the outcome of being from an immigrant family who lived through the Great Depression, and threw nothing away.
“The deceased occupied a place in our home and everything had a story,” Friend wrote in her artist statement for Vestiges, a hauntingly beautiful photograph on the fabric of her grandmother’s — to her, nonna’s — nightgown in the Algoma Central Lobby of the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre (PAC).
Friend looks on at Vestiges, which was inspired by a lifetime of being surrounded by precious family possessions.
Her grandfather’s (nonno’s) dreams of becoming a professional dancer never materialized due to life’s circumstances, instead of working in construction to help provide for his family, who left northern Italy for Canada. Her family history and the stories passed among them is a reoccurring source of inspiration.
“The nightgown appears to be dancing, so I found it suitable for the space,” says Friend of Vestiges in the downtown St. Catharines location. “I think of this space as a makerspace of stories. My grandparents danced together; this was a small part of their history, so I touched on that secret history. Theirs is one little story among many in the space.”
She says one of the most fulfilling things about her work is developing pieces for specific locations. A particularly rewarding experience has been Rodman Hall, where she experimented with new materials, including a 40-foot long photograph on silk.
That work became part of the stage design for musician Diana Krall’s world tour.
“Having the intimate setting of Rodman Hall and working with curator Marcie Bronson provided fertile ground for this artwork to develop, which ended up on the world stage,” says Friend. “This creative process in your own community format says something about where seeds start and offers a spotlight to what we are doing as artists here in Niagara.”
Another one of her pieces, Our Little Dancing Girl, Evelyn, Age 9, is the product of collecting photographs on the internet that strangers pawn off for next to nothing. The photograph had “Our little dancing girl, Evelyn, Age 9” scrawled on the back, evoking curiosity about an unknown, individual history.
“Even though I wouldn’t say my images tell a concrete story, they are constantly referencing things we don’t know,” she says. “It’s the unknown aspects of making an image that directly intrigues me.”
Amy Friend poses outside of the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre in downtown St. Catharines.
“In this series, I’m not only interested in making artwork, but making and thinking about what it means to take a photograph, to lose a photograph; an image that belonged to someone else,” says Friend. “It’s a conversation I’m constantly having through photography: making and investigating what it can and cannot express.”
Another thing Friend considers paramount to her work as an artist is teaching.
“I’m engaging with the idea of creative practice and getting students to dig into the act of play,” she says. “It gets us out of what I call the treadmill of production. Some of my best work has come out of completely screwing things up.”
While she loves seeing her students succeed, the most important lesson she hopes they learn is to embrace “epically failing.” Without it, Friend says, we lose the imperative experience of disappointment and working to solve creative problems.
“My experience at Brock has been wonderful,” says Friend. “I’ve had incredible opportunities. We continue to have a vision in what the School could and should be, and the potential is incredible.”
One of the biggest changes with working she’s noticed isn’t just within Brock, but the art of photography itself.
“It’s much more immediate,” says Friend on integrating photography into our everyday lives. “We always have images close by. We scroll through photos on phones and other devices. There is a different type of interaction. It still has a place in our lives.”
One thing that will never change is the human ability to respond to art in a unique way. She was reminded of this in February when taking her young daughter to the PAC for Family Day, which included various activities, such as crafts and therapy dogs.
“I pointed to Vestiges and said, ‘You know, your mama made that,’ and she glanced at it and said, ‘Yeah, okay. Where are the dogs?’ It was humbling and funny, but there was also a sweetness to her response,” says Friend. “Maybe at some point this image will be significant to her and maybe it won’t. We all have reactions to art and each is a unique interaction that tells us something about ourselves and who we are at that moment.”
image: Fischli & Weiss: Equilibres / Quiet Afternoon, 1984.
In response to COVID-19, and the suspension of all face-to-face classes, the Department of Visual arts is busy reinventing one of their very popular Spring and Summer session courses, VISA 2F05 Introduction to Sculpture.
Instructor/artist Donna Akrey will launch the new original online course in sculpture beginning the week of May 04, 2020.
Donna remarks,“This is hard but a great opportunity to think about how to deliver content this way and to still get students to think and problem solve. I am hopeful about it all.”
Do you have a laptop, phone, computer and consistent use of the internet?
Do you have a table?
Do you have everyday objects like scissors, tape, paper, recycling material?
Are you up for the challenge of working solo and thinking sculpturally?
Are you interested in problem-solving, ingenuity, DIY, working with what you have and collaboration? Come and experiment with us!
For more information about VISA 2F05 Introduction to Sculpture please see the Academic Calendar and the Registration Guide.
covid-19, donna akrey, Sculpture, VISA 2F05
Categories: Current Students, Faculty & Instructors, News, Uncategorised
NOTHING HAPPENS
UNTIL SOMETHING MOVES
Launch: Wednesday April 8 at 7pm
visa3m90.wordpress.com
Join the students of VISA 3M90 Advanced Art Practices for the launch of their final exhibition on Wednesday, April 8 at 7 pm.
This year-end presentation features new work from a multi-disciplinary course where cross-pollination is key. During the academic year the students investigate artistic research and creation from the perspective of project oriented, independent production. They have been mentored by instructor Donna Akrey in the development of artistic practices emphasizing concept through to realization processes.
In this Spring of COVID-19 the students will show their work online: physically distant, but not socially.
The featured artists include:
download the poster
KENDRA BOSSE
TERI LYNN DITZEL
PERI GOODMAN
I.J.IROGBENACHI
GABRIELLA JONES
UGO MADUKA
LAUREN MARCO
JESS MCCLELLAND
AMA OKAFOR
SOPHIA STRACHAN
CHARLOTTE TARR
Signal (Red Star), 2017-2018. oil and synthetic polymer on linen, 82 1/2 x 126 in.
March 12, 2020 at 7:30 p.m.
Robertson Theatre, FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, 250 St. Paul Street, St. Catharines, L2R 3M2 
reception: March 12th, 5 p.m. at the VISA Gallery and Student Exhibition Space, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine & Performing Arts. (This is also the reception for the CrissCross exhibition, above.)
Niagara welcomes one of Canada’s most celebrated painters!
The Moon is the Message: A survey of works traversing over four decades. A revealing personal exploration of creativity, painting and mapping.
Landon Mackenzie is an acclaimed visual artist based in Vancouver. Her international exhibiting and teaching career has been awarded the inaugural Ian Wallace Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Golden Jubilee and Diamond Jubilee Queen Elizabeth II Medals for outstanding contribution to culture in British Columbia and Canada, and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2017), among others.
Blue Star / Red Light, 2018-2019. oil and synthetic polymer on linen, 82 1/2 x 126 in.
This is a free community event. No tickets required. Join us for the reception at the MIWSFPA at 5 p.m. and then walk over to hear Landon talk about her work in the Robertson Theatre of the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre at 7:30 p.m.
For more information about her work visit www.landonmackenzie.com
Landon Mackenzie is an acclaimed visual artist based in Vancouver. The National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and Confederation Centre for the Arts are among the institutions that collect her paintings. As well, her large format works are in several Canadian embassies. Her works have been shown in over 100 exhibitions in Canada and internationally. Recent exhibitions include a 40-year touring survey of her works on paper, “Landon Mackenzie: Parallel Journey, (1975-2015)”, accompanied by a book by Black Dog publishers; “Landon Mackenzie: Nervous Centers” at the Esker Foundation in Calgary; “Emily Carr and Landon Mackenzie: Woodchopper and the Monkey” at the Vancouver Art Gallery; and “Tracing Mobility: Cartography in Networked Space” at HKW, Berlin.
Mackenzie is a passionate educator starting at Concordia University followed by 33 years at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver where she was appointed the university’s first full Professor. She has been a visiting artist at over 75 universities, art departments and galleries in Canada, US, UK, Europe and China. She has served on many juries including the Canada Council for the Arts, VIVA, BMO 1st, and RBC Painting Award. She has been a trustee of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and Joseph Plaskett Foundation. Her work is represented by Art 45 and Nicholas Metivier Gallery.
Mackenzie holds a BFA from NSCAD and an MFA from Concordia University. Her work has been extensively written about and she has received many awards including the inaugural Ian Wallace Award for Excellence in Teaching, both the Golden and Diamond Jubilee Queen Elizabeth II Medals for outstanding contribution to culture in British Columbia and Canada and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2017).
EDITOR’S NOTE: This exhibition is unavailable for viewing until further notice. It is closed as part of Brock University’s ongoing efforts to protect the health and safety of students, faculty, staff and the community in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Please check here again.
March 5 – 28
opening reception: March 12th, 5 p.m.
(This is also the reception for the Artist Talk by the Walker Cultural Leader, Landon Mackenzie.)
VISA Gallery and Student Exhibition Space, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine & Performing Arts, 15 Artists’ Common, St. Catharines, L2R 0B5.
The gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday, 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
An exhibition by students from the Studies in Arts and Culture and Visual Arts programs. Our hybrid assemblages celebrate incongruity and unfettered associations. Whether abstract or figurative, paintings, or texts, they are intended to trigger reactions, prompt comparisons, and challenge the usual. Beyond the immediate effect of surprise, they provoke, their apparent disparateness nevertheless generates, on closer view, a semblance of overall coherence.
Feb. 6 to 29, 2020
Opening reception: Feb. 12, 2020 — 5 to 8 p.m.
VISA Art Gallery and Student Exhibition Space, MIWSFPA
15 Artists’ Common, St. Catharines
The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m.
With a focus on mental health, an exhibition about understanding emotional vulnerability and self-reflection, while unpacking the human need for comfort. Featuring Visual Arts students Kaitlyn Roberts and Chardon Trimble-Kirk.
see the review in The Sound by Bart Gazzola.
Sacred Spaces – Artist Statement
Kaitlyn Roberts and Chardon Trimble-Kirk
Mental illnesses often destroy from the inside out. It is a sickness that is hidden through the action of covering oneself from the world, in fear of discovery. Doctors will prescribe medication in an attempt to cure mental illness; medication that comes with dizziness, fatigue, loss of appetite, bruising, sexual dysfunction, and countless other side effects. All of which to shut out the voices from inside one’s mind. Voices that proclaim that you are not good enough, you do not deserve to be happy, you do not deserve to eat. I would much rather stay in bed. If I stay in bed, the medication isn’t necessary. The demons and monsters can be let out and no one will ever know.
When living with mental illness, it is living a double life. One must hide behind a mask, only finding true relief in the intimate space of the bedroom, amongst the comfort of bedding. Only within these spaces is one truly allowed to express the realities of mental illnesses, whilst finding safety in the sacred spaces of the bed.
Each work represents the safety and intimacy found within these spaces, whilst offering a juxtaposition between the covering and uncovering realities of the illnesses. The uncovering comes from personal texts written across these spaces, as well as the exposure of the body, and curiously the covering of the eyes in each figurative work. The text which is a direct thought, and nude figures which are an indirect representation of vulnerability, invite viewers into the sacred spaces of one’s true thoughts. The vague figures and various text will resonate with viewers, bringing awareness to mental illness, its prevalence, and its resonance within many.
The works aim to de-stigmatize some of the most serious and misunderstood mental illnesses, all within the sacred spaces of our beds.
download poster
Kaitlyn Roberts is currently in her fourth and final year at Brock University, achieving an Honours Bachelor of Arts with a major in Studio Art. Her artistic education birthed an attraction to explore autoethnography. Roberts’ studio practice, specifically, surveys the complexity of mental illness translated through visual art while highlighting how it affects both the artist and the viewer.
Roberts is currently using her practice to investigate the relationship between the mind and the body, through the artistic process of ‘mapping’. This includes research into the connections between mental illnesses and the physical sicknesses that follow, including trauma.
Roberts has shown her work in juried shows around Ontario including, St. Catharines City Hall’s Transformations, Niagara Artist Centre’s Fortune Favours, and the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington’s The VAC 39th Annual Juried Show where she was the only student, and youngest person to be accepted. Roberts has also shown her work in exhibitions including; Niagara Artist Centre’s Small Feats, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine, and Performing Arts’ Art Block: BAC
on the Block, as well as many exhibitions hosted by Mahtay Café.
Roberts will be showing her thesis work titled, Dear Euodia, in April 2020 at Rodman Hall in St. Catharines, Ontario alongside co-artists Chardon Trimble-Kirk, Brianne Casey, Rachel McCartney, Zach White, Kira Pretty, Curt Richard, and Jess McClelland. Opening reception is Friday, April 3rd at 7 pm.
Roberts is planning on pursuing a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts once she graduates from Brock University.
Chardon Trimble-Kirk is a Canadian painter based in St. Catharines. Through the use of figuration and pattern making, themes of femininity and gender roles are explored within her work. In addition to this, Trimble-Kirk is interested in the themes of sexuality, vulnerability, repetition and mental health, and their intersections within femininity. Thematic and aesthetic contrasts are often included within the work, allowing viewers to interpret the work individually while also thinking critically about the concepts presented.
download the poster
Rodman Hall Art Centre
109 St. Paul Crescent, St. Catharines, ON
Responding to the explorations of urban architecture and its materials in Teresa Carlesimo and Michael DiRisio: more light than heat (on exhibition at the Rodman Hall Art Centre), Imagined Urban Gardens also reflects on today’s global warming and how we could live in the future.
We dream of green spaces and pleasantly warm cities.
Students in Visual Arts and Studies in Arts and Culture envision in text and image what could be in a livable world.
See the YourTV Niagara video spotlight about this exhibition, featuring interviews with the artists and curators.
Read the article by Bart Gazzola in The Sound STC.
On 21 January, the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture welcomes artist Donna Szőke, Chair of the Department of Visual Arts and a member of the recently created Research Centre in Interdisciplinary Arts and Creative Culture, as a Walker Cultural leader for 2020.
Szőke will present an artists’ talk “On Invisibility” at 7:00 pm at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts of Brock University (MIWSFPA). This is a free community event and everyone is welcome to attend.
Invisibility is this year’s theme at The Small Walker Press, a small press valuing interdisciplinary cooperation and the exploration of image and text, homed in the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture (STAC) at the MIWSFPA.
Szőke creates expanded animation, media art, video, drawing, and collaborations. She investigates immanence, embodied perception, and the fluidity of lived experience.
In her artist’s talk, she will present her work and her current book project The Dark Redacted in cooperation with author Gary Barwin, to be published in April 2020 by the Small Walker Press.
In an excerpt from the forthcoming volume, editors Catherine Parayre and Derek Knight write:
Donna Szőke thoughtfully investigates the fluidity of meaning and presence. Rather than elucidating a concept or an experience, she proposes a semi-abstract perusal of collective or intimate issues. Offering a reflection on the evocative instability of the biographical and the personal, and opting for an approach close to autofiction, her work constellates subtle possibilities and its scope defies the limitations of certainty. The artist is a compelling storyteller for whom the quest for meaning and the vagrancies of that search are more significant than plain facts. For The Dark Redacted Szőke proposes traces of a fragile story and never-faltering endurance. Her sequence of images alternates beautifully detailed natural life – a buffalo, intricate vegetation – and minimally sketched-out human presence and personal objects. As a result, her work addresses the viewers’ intuition and sensitivity to the environment.
The event is presented by the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture for the Walker Cultural Leader Series, generously founded by Marilyn I. Walker. The Walker Cultural Leader series brings leading artists, performers, practitioners and academics to the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts at Brock University. Engaging, lively and erudite, these sessions celebrate professional achievement, artistic endeavour and the indelible role of culture in our society.
Join us on January 21, 2020 at 7-8:30 pm. The presentation takes place in the Art & Val Fleming Smart Classroom (MWS 156), located on the lower level of the MIWSFPA. Limited parking is available at the MIWSFPA, with additional parking nearby at the Garden Park/Carlisle Street Parking garage and adjacent lots.
Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture: Walker Cultural Leader Artist’s talk
‘On Invisibility’, with Donna Szőke
21 January 2020, 7-8:30 pm, MWS 156