News

  • Exhibition: Permanent Vacation

    Friday, November 10, 2017 | By

    Permanent Vacation

    This exhibition will showcase a select group of recent Brock University Alumni: Katie Mazi, Jenn Judson, Matt Caldwell, Alex Muresan, Jessica Wright and Ben Mosher. As these emerging artists expand ideas and develop new work, they continue to recognize the value of the St. Catharines arts community and the impact it has on their practice. It was here at Brock University that their first investigations began and it was at Rodman Hall (2014/2015 & 2015/2016) that their first professional group exhibitions came to fruition. These artists will exhibit new and exciting work they have been producing as they navigate and emerge into the art communities locally and beyond the region. The exhibition will be curated by Asta McCann Brock alumni (Studies in Arts and Culture).

    Additionally, Alumni music students: Grace Snippe and Kurt Dunn will be performing for the night of the reception.

    Exhibition: Saturday, November 4, 2017 to Friday, December 1, 2017

    regular visiting hours for the Exhibition Space are Tuesday through Saturday from 1-5 p.m
    for additional times see: gallery webpage    gallery facebook page

    see the YourTV Cogeco video

    Opening Reception: Friday, November 10, 2017, 7:00 – 10:00 p.m.

    Location: Visa Gallery, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, Brock University

    A free community event.

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    Categories: Alumni, Events, Exhibitions, News

  • HOT TALKS 2017-2018: Professor Derek Knight speaks at Rodman Hall, November 09

    Thursday, November 09, 2017 | By

    Geoffrey Farmer, “A Way Out of the Mirror”, 2017, Canada Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale. Image courtesy of Derek Knight.

    HOT TALKS

    Artist Talks and Gallery Conversations at the Rodman Hall Art Centre
    Admission by donation ($5 suggested); Members and Students Free
    Sponsored by Partridge Wealth Management/RBC Dominion Securities Inc., St. Catharines

    November 09: Professor Derek Knight,
    Department of Visual Arts, Brock University

    “Art Confidential: Trends and Obsession(s) in Recent Art”

    Thursday, November 9, 7 pm
    2017 saw the confluence of the Whitney Biennial, Münster Sculpture Project, Kassel’s Documenta 14, and the Venice Biennale. Derek Knight, Associate Professor, Visual Arts, Brock University discusses the pros and emerging cons of the international blockbuster exhibition as well as his top picks, from Pierre Huyghe to Phyllida Barlow to Geoffrey Farmer.

    Rodman Hall Art Centre, 109 St Paul Crescent, St Catharines, ON L2S 1M3

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    Categories: Current Students, Events, Faculty & Instructors, News

  • Visa Instructor part of panel discussion at Sur Gallery.

    Monday, November 06, 2017 | By

    Visa Instructor Irene Loughlin will participate in a panel discussion on the work of Guatemalan artist Regina Galindo on Friday, November 17, 7-9PM.  Galindo’s performance Diverting Rivers investigates the impact of Canadian Mining Companies and takes place Thursday, November 16, 7:30-8:30PM. Both events take place at Sur Gallery, 100-39 Queens Quay East, Toronto (East of Yonge Street).

    Categories: Current Students, Faculty & Instructors, News

  • Work of Visual Arts prof featured on Diana Krall tour

    Friday, November 03, 2017 | By

    Brock prof’s art featured on Diana Krall tour

    The artwork of Brock Fine Arts Assistant Professor Amy Friend is being featured on the international tour of renowned Canadian musician Diana Krall.

    (Source: The Brock News, Thursday, November 2, 2017 | By: Maryanne Firth)

    When the e-mail popped into Amy Friend’s inbox, she was certain it couldn’t be real.

    But a feeling inside prompted the Brock Fine Arts assistant professor to respond to the inquiry, which asked about her artwork and whether she’d consider collaborating with renowned Canadian musician Diana Krall.

    It was soon after that Friend found herself on the phone with the Grammy Award winner discussing possibilities for her upcoming tour.

    Friend’s experimental photography has since helped Krall to set the scene on stage, acting as her backdrop as she captivates crowds in venues across North America and Europe.

    Brock University Fine Arts Assistant Professor Amy Friend.

    Friend’s work has been featured on the jazz singer’s international tour since June and the partnership is expected to continue through to the summer.

    The project, which includes art pieces from three different bodies of work, has been “particularly fulfilling,” Friend said.

    She has enjoyed the challenge of working with Krall to find pieces that fit the mood and message of individual songs, while also complementing the title of the tour and Krall’s most recent album, Turn Up the Quiet.

    “It’s about trying to respect your own work, while also seeing how you can accommodate a vision that will fit within the repertoire they’re working with,” she said.

    Friend is currently working to select new pieces for Krall’s Canadian tour dates, including a Nov. 24 show at Massey Hall in Toronto that she plans to attend.

    “I’m looking forward to seeing her perform and to seeing my work filling the stage in a concert hall where I have heard musicians like Johnny Cash, Tom Waits and Nick Cave perform,” she said.

    Krall’s latest repertoire will include a cover of Bob Dylan’s Simple Twist of Fate, which Friend is particularly excited to find a piece to accompany.

    “Much of my work revolves around ideas of memory, impermanence, history and time,” said Friend, who has worked at Brock for the past decade. “I am less concerned with capturing a ‘concrete’ reality. Instead, I aim to use photography as a medium that offers the possibility of exploring the relationship between what is visible and non-visible.”

    Work featured on the tour includes hand-manipulated photographs, pieces featuring floating handkerchiefs once belonging to Friend’s grandparents, and artwork inspired by snippets of film from her childhood.

    Over the past few months, Friend and Krall have shared many inspiring conversations about family, creativity and women in the arts.

    “She has been so great to work with, you could almost forget her status in the music world,” Friend said.

    Krall often emphasized the need to respect Friend’s work and always checks in with the artist to ensure she’s pleased with the end results of each tour stop.

    Friend called it “refreshing” to be able to engage with other artists.

    “It exposes you to experiences that have commonalities and, at times, interesting variances,” she said. “It’s also wonderful to see how my work found a place to exist far beyond my initial intentions.”

    The team responsible for the on-stage initiative also included Judy Jacob, a video and visual content director, and Paul Normandale, a lighting designer, who Friend said “took the project to the next level.”

    In addition to her work with the tour, Friend has been busy over the past year with international exhibitions in Spain, Korea, Poland, Portugal and France. She has shows coming up in Boston and Italy and plans to release a new book in the near future.

    Amy Friend's work featured on Diana Krall's tour

    The artwork of Brock Fine Arts Assistant Professor Amy Friend is being featured on the international tour of renowned Canadian musician Diana Krall.

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    Categories: Announcements, Faculty & Instructors, In the Media, News

  • Speaker provides chilling reminder of Canadian slave history

    Sunday, October 29, 2017 | By

    Charmaine Nelson, far right, spoke on Colonial Print Culture and the Limits of Enslaved Resistance on Oct. 19 as part of the Walker Cultural Leader Series. She is pictured here with Department of Visual Arts Professors and event organizers, pictured from left, Keri Cronin, Linda Steer and Amy Friend.

    Charmaine Nelson, far right, spoke on Colonial Print Culture and the Limits of Enslaved Resistance on Oct. 19 as part of the Walker Cultural Leader Series. She is pictured here with Department of Visual Arts Professors and event organizers, pictured from left, Keri Cronin, Linda Steer and Amy Friend.

    (Source: The Brock News, Thursday, October 26, 2017 | by: Alison Innes)

    Charmaine Nelson worked to paint a picture for the audience, one that detailed the experiences of Canadian slaves and the horrors they endured throughout history.

    The renowned scholar, known for her groundbreaking contributions in the fields of black Canadian studies, visual culture of slavery, and race and representation, delivered the first 2017-18 public lecture of Brock’s Walker Cultural Leader Series on Oct. 19.

    Her address drew more than 150 people who gathered at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre in downtown St. Catharines to listen to her presentation, Colonial Print Culture and the Limits of Enslaved Resistance: Examining the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Fugitive Slave Archive in Canada and Jamaica.

    A professor of Art History at McGill University, Nelson has published seven books and held a number of prestigious research chairs across North America. She is currently the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University for 2017-18.

    As the first and currently only black professor within the discipline of Art History at a Canadian university, Nelson, through her website, is an advocate for the field of Black Canadian Studies.

    Her latest research, which she shared in her talk, attempts to understand the black experience in Canada by examining fugitive slave advertisements for details about the process of creolization in slave minority (temperate) and slave majority (tropical) locations in the British Empire.

    Nelson explained how she reconceptualizes fugitive slave ads — once produced by slave owners seeking to recapture their runaways — as portraits of enslaved people. The ads can provide information on a group of people who often leave no record of their own, she said.

    These portraits, however, are imperfect, since the subject is an unwilling participant and the depiction is written by the white slave owner. In addition, only slaves considered sufficiently valuable were pursued through advertising.

    Fugitive slave ads provided detailed racialized descriptions of enslaved people, including complexion, hairstyle, clothing, language, accents and bodily marks. In some cases, the ads offered rewards for the recapture of a fugitive slave, encouraging white participation in the criminalization of fugitive slaves.

    While the ads provide a portrait of enslaved people, they are also a lop-sided truth, Nelson explained. Some owners maligned fugitives with sweeping generalizations about their character, while others detailed specific crimes the enslaved person was alleged to have committed. Such descriptions helped associate blackness with slavery and criminality.

    Nelson draws on a variety of archival sources in her research to flesh out these portraits, tracing fugitive slave stories through estate ledgers, bills of sale, poll tax records and workhouse and jail ledgers.

    Nelson’s talk also explored the link between print and slave culture. Printed newspaper ads in the 18th and 19th century permitted white slave owners to assert their ownership over long distances.

    Although printers facilitated slavery by asserting rights of white people to own slaves, the abolitionist movement eventually used the same fugitive slave ads, with their references to injuries, scars and branding, to show the horror of slavery.

    As Nelson pointed out, many Canadians are unaware of Canada’s history of enslaving black and indigenous peoples.

    “Slavery is not a black history,” she explained, “but a multi-racial, transatlantic history. Who were the slave owners, the ships’ captains, the printers, the jailers?”

    The narrative of the Underground Railway, which Canadians eagerly embrace, spanned a period of about only 30 years, Nelson explained. She went on to challenge listeners to consider why the preceding two centuries of slavery in Canada have been erased from history.

    In concluding her talk, Nelson encouraged the audience to change the lens through which they see history. The opportunities in the field of Canadian slavery history are immense, she said, while directing her words to students. Since so few people are studying the black Canadian experience, there are many contributions to be made.

    The talk is part of the 2017-18 Walker Cultural Leaders Series, organized by Professors Keri Cronin, Linda Steer and Amy Friend the Department of Visual Arts and funded by the generous legacy of Marilyn I. Walker.

    The author, Alison Innes, has assembled her live tweets about the lecture at Storify.

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    Categories: News

  • Associate Professor Donna Szoke’s work include in publication.

    Tuesday, October 17, 2017 | By

    Image courtesy of Tim Nohe.

    Associate Professor and Visual Arts Department Chair Donna Szoke’s work is discussed in the on-line journal New Media Caucus in an article by Lisa Moren, Professor of Visual Art and Graduate Program Director of Intermedia + Digital Art, MFA Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County [UMBC]. Her interactive video installation and all watched over by machines of loving grace is a humorous intervention in the dystopian reality of contemporary dataveillance and societies of control.

    Image courtesy of Tim Nohe.

    Categories: Alumni, Announcements, Current Students, Faculty & Instructors, In the Media, News

  • Visa Instructor part of two projects in Windsor, Ontario.

    Monday, October 16, 2017 | By

    Visa Instructor Donna Akrey is part of two collectives with projects being mounted in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Windsor this fall:

    Downtown/s: Urban Renewals Today for Tomorrow, The 2017 Windsor-Essex Triennial of Contemporary Art.
    Art Gallery of Windsor
    October 21 to January 28, 2018

    (F)NOR
    (L)Herbes Other Rivers
    October 20, 7pm

    In/Terminus Research Colective & the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (Lee Rodney, Michael Daroch, Taien Ng-Chan & Donna Akrey)
    Reconnaissance, Heart + Soul: the Windsor Armouries
    October 20, 7pm

     

    Categories: Announcements, Current Students, Faculty & Instructors, In the Media, News

  • Celebrated scholar Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson visits Brock University

    Tuesday, September 26, 2017 | By

    Colonial Print Culture by Dr. Charmaine Nelson

    Walker Cultural Leader Series and Canada 150 present:

    Colonial Print Culture and the Limits of Enslaved Resistance: Examining the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Fugitive Slave Archive in Canada and Jamaica, 

    a public lecture, reception and book signing by Dr. Charmaine Nelson

    Dr. Charmaine Nelson is a Professor of Art History at McGill University. Her current research project juxtaposes fugitive slave advertisements, portraiture, and genre studies from Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Jamaica, to examine differences in the visual dimensions of creolization between slave minority and slave majority sites of the British Atlantic world. In 2016, she was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. Most recently, Nelson has been appointed the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University for the 2017 – 2018 academic year. Dr. Nelson will present her research in a public lecture as a part of Visual Arts’ Walker Cultural Leader Series programming.

    The lecture abstract and presenter’s bio is available at Eventbrite.

    See the article in the Brock News.

    Thursday October 19, 2017

    Lecture Time: 7:00 pm.

    Note: The lecture will be followed by a reception and book signing at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts.

    Location: The FilmHouse, FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, 250 St. Paul Street, St. Catharines

    This is a free community event. Reserve your seat with tickets available at Eventbrite.

    Groups are welcome! Contact Professor Linda Steer lsteer@brocku.ca for orders of more than 10 tickets.

    —

    The event is presented by the Department of Visual Arts 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. Please join us. This education program is generously founded by Marilyn I. Walker.

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    Categories: Announcements, Events, News

  • Exhibition: La Magaria

    Tuesday, September 26, 2017 | By

    Exhibition: La Magaria

    La Magaria #1

    Brock Visual Arts student Lisette Costanzo presents an exhibition consisting of paintings, drawings, and installations that were inspired by La Magaria (Italian for witchcraft), metaphysics, and the divine. This is the first student art exhibition in the Visual Arts Exhibition Space for the 2017-18 season at the MIWSFPA.

    Exhibition: Wednesday October 11, 2017 to Tuesday October 31, 2017

    Regular visiting hours for the Exhibition Space are Tuesday through Saturday from 1-5 pm
    For additional times see: the Gallery webpage or the Gallery Facebook page

    Closing Reception: Tuesday October 31, 2017
    Time: 5:00 – 10:00 pm

    Location: Visual Arts Exhibition Space, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, Brock University

    A free community event.

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    Categories: Announcements, Current Students, Events, Exhibitions, News

  • Visa Alumni mounting local exhibition.

    Thursday, September 21, 2017 | By

    Recent Brock Alumni, Katie Mazi & Jenn Judson are mounting an exhibition of their new collaborative photo series, ‘Cooler Than Cool.’ Join the artists at their opening reception this upcoming Saturday Sept. 23 from 7-10PM at the Niagara Artists Centre. There will be good food, drinks, prizes, surprises and prints for sale.

    Reception is September 23rd and the show is on from Sept. 23 – Oct. 13th at NAC.

    Categories: Alumni, Announcements, Current Students, Faculty & Instructors, News

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