University of Lethbridge Art Gallery » Various

(art + people) x science = x

admin — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:25:27 +0000

Drawing the Canada-Wide Science Fair

Monday, May 13, 9am – 12pm
Thursday, May 16, 9am – 12pm
Friday, May 17, 9am – 12pm
U of L Centre for Sport and Wellness
Reception: May 16, 4 – 6 pm, Andy’s Place Terrace (AH100), U of L

Drawing the Canada-Wide Science Fair is a collective of fifteen artists who have come together to interpret and play with the spectacle of a national science fair through visual language. By drawing on-site during the Canada-Wide Science Fair, the artists will create and immediately broadcast drawings of selected projects on display. The idea is to expand the notion of drawing around science themes to include the potentials of visual priority, cross-disciplinary work, collaborative drawing, multi-perspectival drawing, non-precious drawing, interactions with people, live tweeting, 5-second-delay blogging, and other unexpected possibilities. #drawingscience #cwsf2013 #ulethimpact

For more information on the project and the participating artists, visit Search & Research.

For more information on the science fair visit Canada-Wide Science Fair.

Participating Artists:

Leila Armstrong
Cindy Baker – (U of L MFA Art Candidate)
Christine Clark – (U of L MFA New Media Candidate)
Kelaine Devine
Leanne Elias – (U of L New Media Instructor)
Mandy Espezel – (U of L MFA Art 2012)
Denton Fredrickson – (U of L, Art Instructor, BFA Multidisciplinary 2001)
David Hoffos – (U of L BFA 1994)
Emily Luce
Glen MacKinnon – (U of L Art instructor)
Petra Mala Miller
Mary-Anne McTrowe – (U of L Art Technician, BFA 1998)
Megan Mormon
Shanell Papp – (U of L BFA 2006)
Rod Sayers
Corinne Thiessen Hepher – (BFA 2009, MFA candidate)

Images of Drawings by participating artists:

Images of Drawings by Visitors from Lethbridge Area Schools:

Complex Social Change

admin — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 20:19:26 +0000

Complex Social Change

Complex Social Change: teaching, performing, exhibiting, designing, mapping is an interdisciplinary research program involving Josephine Mills (Principal Investigator, Art Gallery), Bruce MacKay (Liberal Education), Lisa Doolittle (Theatre & Drama), Tiffany Muller Myrdahl (Women & Gender Studies), Emily Luce (New Media), and Louise Barrett (Psychology). The project brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds with a common interest— a fascination with the beautiful, challenging, confusing evolution of our society. We are a community of change-makers, investigating how change is made. Our goals are to contribute to a contemporary definition of liberal education and to better understand what is involved with creating participation and engagement in activist actions in the current social climate. We will explore theoretical positions and frameworks for effective, sustained activist engagement using examples of past successful actions and theoretical reflections from feminist, anti-racist, disability, and health (especially AIDS) movements as well as exploring current issues around public engagement.

The debates surrounding the recent Occupy movement prompted the discussion which lead to this project. We are more interested in the larger issues raised about what constitutes effective action and whether the current young generation are engaged in social issues. We want to explore whether nascent activist energies can be sustained enough to create change. How can the interests of students who are focused on career training or who approach learning with inactive passivity be expanded and nurtured so that they can act with greater alertness and attention to issues that they face as global citizens? The Occupy movement, no matter how disorganized they may appear to be, suggests that what may be lacking is the theory, knowledge, and skills necessary to sustain active engagement against discursive, political, and economic pressures which encourage passive acceptance. Our research project will explore connections between a liberal education and encouraging activism and social engagement. In this way, the research will both contribute to a contemporary definition of liberal education as well as contribute to understanding the issues involved with putting theory into practice when engaging people through public events.

The project is funded with a generous grant through the Interdisciplinary Research Development Fund from the University of Lethbridge. As well, projects in the UofL Art Gallery are supported with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Running from September 2012 to March 2014, the project includes a series of exhibitions, video programs, public talks and panels, performances, courses, and a website (to be launched in January 2013). Student interns will contribute to the project and we hope that it will continue to grow with further partnerships and connections.

Visit the Complex Social Change Website

art + people = x

admin — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 20:16:13 +0000

art + people = x

The University of Lethbridge is renowned for its excellent art collection. People on campus and throughout the city take pride in knowing that a wonderfully diverse range of art work is housed here. The high profile of the collection also means that there are many rumours that circulate about it. One of my favourites is that the collection is stored in a vault under the lake. Given that it is important to maintain constant humidity and avoid catastrophic damage, why would we store a collection of art under a body of water? This kind of outlandish story does not concern me because it adds to the interest in the art collection, but I am concerned when I hear that people think the collection is inaccessible and people are not able to see and engage with the works. The truth is quite the opposite: the U of L Art Gallery has a remarkable record of providing access to the collection with our innovative on-line database; supporting class visits and other tours – 2486 participants in 48 different events; 72 works loaned to other galleries in 2011 including to Paris and New York; touring our own exhibitions; and including 103 works from the collection in our exhibitions on campus last year.

There are many ways that the art collection plays an active role for people on campus and in the local community. In order to help make these connections more visible, and to encourage new routes of access, Josephine Mills started the art + people = x series in 2009. An idea that grew from an interest in supporting research by local artists and at the same time creating a project that would allow the broader public to have a sense of the importance that public art collections play in generating ideas and sparking artist’s creative practice.

Archives

2013

(art + people) x science = x “Drawing the Canada-Wide Science Fair 2013″

2012

On Landscape Images by Dr. Josephine Mills, Director/Curator, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, from the Fall 2012 issue of SAM-Southern Alberta Magazine, November 20, 2012

Revising the Canonical Landscape Form by Elizabeth Diggon

The Art of Caring for Collections, from the Spring 2012 issue of SAM-Southern Alberta Magazine, April 23, 2012

2011

The Important Things to Know About Eating and Drinking (In Lethbridge): A Project by Lisa Hirmer and Andrew Hunter as Dodolab, from the Fall 2011 issue of SAM-Southern Alberta Magazine, November 21, 2011

Notebook: A Bowman Arts Centre/University of Lethbridge Art Gallery partnership, workshop, and exhibition

A little history on the prairies: Essay “Home Pain” by Jim Coutts, from the Spring 2011 issue of SAM-Southern Alberta Magazine, March 28, 2011

2010

joy: the x factor by Emily Luce, Faculty, Fine Arts, New Media Department, from the Fall 2010 issue of SAM-Southern Alberta Magazine, October, 28, 2010

Snap, Crackle, Pop, from the Winter 2010 issue of SAM-Southern Alberta Magazine, February 27, 2010

2009

Knowing/Gnawing: Darcy Logan and works from the University of Lethbridge Art Collection

Knowing/Gnawing, from the Fall 2009 issue of SAM-Southern Alberta Magazine, October, 30, 2009

art+people=x (Inaugural Exhibition)

Selected Canadian Aboriginal Video

admin — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 16:21:07 +0000

Selected Canadian Aboriginal Video

Added March, 2012
Project Channel

Curated by Josephine Mills
Video courtesy of Vtape

On March 1, 2012 the U of L Art Gallery launched six Aboriginal works for Native Awareness Week in our Project Channel space. The curated selection provides a range of recent Aboriginal video making in Canada including the dry humour of Keesic Douglas’ “Rezolution” and Zoe Leigh Hopkins’ “Tsi tkahéhtayen (The Garden);” two beautiful, animated works — Jude Norris’ “Red Buffalo Skydive” and Christiana Latham’s “Lady Raven;” Dana Claxton’s abstract, poetic approach to video with “Say It’s OK;” and an example of the strong Inuit video production with Félix Lajeunesse, PaulRaphaël, and Iglookik’s “Tungijuq.”

Rezolution
Keesic Douglas
2008, 9:00

Two people meet in a “Rez” style restaurant as dark secrets are revealed, conflicts arise, and peace is made.

Tsi tkahéhtayen (The Garden)
Zoe Leigh Hopkins
2009, 10:53

A mystical gardener harvests fruits from the earth that defy everyone’s expectations.

Red Buffalo Skydive
Jude Norris
2000, 3:30

Red Buffalo Skydive is a 3 minute video featuring a repeating 6 second clip of an animated running buffalo combined with dialogue of the artist repeating a story told to her by a paraplegic man who picked her up hitchhiking. Initially, the imagery and the dialogue do not appear to be related, but as the piece progresses, the viewer may begin to make associations, and even synchronistic connections, between the two stories.

Lady Raven
Christiana Latham
2008, 1:30

Using animation, music, and narrative, a depiction of an Aleut’s Native legend is created. The legend of how the woman and the raven became one.

Say It’s OK
Dana Claxton
2006, 2:11

A young aboriginal boy ponders the representation of self in the context of survival and shapeshifting.

Tungijuq

Félix Lajeunesse & Paul Raphaë & Igloolik
2009, 7:10
A though-prvoking meditation on the seal-hunt and what it means to the traditional way of life for the Inuit.

Talk To Me

admin — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 16:05:57 +0000

Talk To Me

Added February, 2012
Project Channel

Curated by Josephine Mills
Video courtesy of Vtape

Talk to Me is the inaugural set of videos for the U of L Art Gallery’s Project Channel satellite space for video. Featuring work by Canadian and international artists, all of the video works in this curated selection address identity and self-representation as well as connect to the DIY and viral possibilities of recent technology that have lead to an explosion of personal stories and images being widely available through YouTube and social media.

With the video works in Talk to Me, some explore the performative aspects of the goofy and banal antics that are posted to the internet, such as Heather Keung’s acrobatics in “Bending over Backwards” and “Upside Down – Downside Up” or Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay’s “Subtitled.” Deirdre Logue takes these small, everyday moments to a new level of absurdity in the compilation “Why Always Instead of Just Sometimes.” Alison M. Kobayashi’s brilliant “Lose Yourself” captures the play with gender and sexuality involved in re-staging a popular video, “From Alex to Alex,” based on a found love note, creates the excruciating discomfort of encountering details about other people’s lives that should be kept private.

Other works in Talk to Me are serious explorations of identity in relation to social and political concerns such as Kevin Lee Burton’s personal narrative in “Meskanahk (My Path)” about finding his way in life as a young man of both Cree and non-Aboriginal heritage. Lesley Loksi Chan’s deceptively simple “Curse Cures” and “Dear Sister” use the most basic video techniques to create powerful, poetic reflections on her family history and sense of self.

Martha Wilson’s “Selected Works by Martha Wilson,” a collection of her work from the early 1970s and Suzy Lake’s “The Natural Way to Draw” provide historical context for the contemporary works and give a sense of the kinds of imagery and techniques used to explore similar ideas when video was first developed as an art form.

Bending Over Backwards
Heather Keung
2008, 2:40

Bending Over Backwards is part of a series of performance art videos whereby the artist submits herself to several physical endurance challenges. These challenges are reminiscient of child play and competition, and yet are more torturous than playful. Despite her will to maintain acts of balance, grace and strength, she inevitably succumbs to the body’s physical weakness.

Upside Down – Downside Up
Heather Keung
2008, 7:20

Upside Down – Downside Up is part of a series of performance art videos whereby the artist submits herself to several physical endurance challenges. These challenges are reminiscient of child play and competition, and yet are more torturous than playful. Despite her will to maintain acts of balance, grace and strength, she inevitably succumbs to the body’s physical weakness.

Subtitled
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
2004, 2:00

I just can’t get you out of my head, boy, your lovin’ is all I think about.

Why Always Instead of Just Sometimes
Deirdre Logue2005, 32:05

Why Always Instead of Just Sometimes is a selection of 12 short works that record accomplishments without impact, small feats of moderate strength and moments of mild impudence. They are reflections on aging, breaking down and reparation. They are works that describe our need for intimacy and our fears of exposure. They are always, when we really wish they were just sometimes.

Lose Yourself
Alison S. M. Kobayashi
2008, 5:26

A silent film actor performs literal interpretations of the lyrics from the rap, Lose Yourself by Eminem.

From Alex To Alex
Alison S. M. Kobayashi
2006, 6:11

In the fall of 2003 Kobayashi found a letter on the Winston Churchill Blvd QEW overpass. It was labeled From: Alex To: Alex. This is a film based on the contents of that letter.

Nikamowin
Kevin Lee Burton
2007, 11:15

A linguistic soundscape comprised of the deconstruction and reconstruction of Cree narration dances with various manipulated landscapes. This audio-visual experiment begs questions of how languages exist, emerge, and survive.

Curse Cures
Lesley Loksi Chan
2009, 10:43

The arrival of a new worker to a jeans factory causes changes to the rhythms of the workplace. This mysterious narrative integrates personal and collective history with fiction.

Dear Sister
Lesley Loksi Chan
2005, 8:47

The story of Sally and Suzie, two sisters who live very different lives. Sally is a world traveler and Suzie is a homebody. When Sally becomes stuck at home, it’s Suzie’s turn to tell her about the world.

Selected Works by Martha Wilson
Martha Wilson
1972-1974, 37:10

Features 8 videos by groundbreaking American artist Martha Wilson: “Premiere,” “Routine Performance,” “Arts Sucks,” “Appearance as Value,” “Method Art,” “Psychology of Camera Presence,” “Cauterization,” and “Deformation.”

The Natural Way to Draw
Suzy Lake
1975, 14:00

The Natural Way to Draw is a performance taking its title from the traditional drawing textbook by Nicolaides. The performer literally draws her self-portrait upon her own face, following instructions read to her from the text. The 3 dimensional drawing on a 3 dimensional form becomes exaggerated with the representaion. The schism of the simulation to the figure becomes a mask – a device to hide behind, or to selectively reveal.

the process of making consistent
Guillermina Buzio
2009, 5:55

In Argentina it is not unusual to come across popular altars devoted to people who have tragically died because of accidents or social injustices. If you travel along Argentinean roads you will encounter a Gauchito Gil altar, and in the streets of Buenos Aires is an altar from Crogmagnon, among others. Constantly in flux, these altars act as ephemeral interventions into public space.

Love & Numbers
Thirza Cuthand
2004, 9:00

A Two Spirited woman surrounded by spy signals and psychiatric walls attempts to make sense of love, global paranoia, and her place in the history of colonialism. Spliced in between her monologues are the binary codes of all the psychiatric drugs she has taken.

Sick Fun La!
Clark Nikolai
2006, 4:23

Vancouver is one of the best places in the world to eat. The Cantonese phrase “sik fan la” means “have you eaten?” or “let’s eat”. Two guys do lunch everyday and talk about things both trivial and slightly less trivial.

Revising the Canonical Landscape Form

admin — Thu, 24 May 2012 22:09:21 +0000

Revising the Canonical Landscape Form

In taking advantage of the opportunity to peruse the University of Lethbridge’s impressive art collection, I was drawn to Isabelle Hayeur’s Refuge and Allyson Clay’s A Constant Longing because both works speak to issues of landscape and identity – broad concepts which I, and many other students of Canadian visual culture, am compelled to confront. Beyond simply throwing a traditionally “Canadian” pastoral landscape out the proverbial window, both works raise more questions about the relationships between landscape, familiarity and identity than they answer. Each work evokes a landscape that is simultaneously stunning yet hostile, thus raising questions about the validity of a perceived connection to space, while suggesting a more pluralistic definition of an “ideal” or “familiar” landscape.

A deep attachment to landscape has long been considered a fundamental tenet of Canadian nationalism. The canonical reinforcement of painters such as the Group of Seven has played a significant role in encouraging this intersection between identity and place as a means of a broader articulation of an idealized national identity. As Anne Whitelaw asserts in “Whiffs of Balsam, Pine and Spruce,” “it is this legacy of the Group of Seven, their preoccupation with the landscape as artistic subject matter and as a philosophy of Canadian distinctness, that has provided coherent material around which a narrative of national identity has been articulated.”[1] However, as Josephine Mills suggests in Land Matters, by the later decades of the twentieth century, a variety of artists began to critique and revise this traditional nationalist fiction.[2] In Souvenirs of the Self, for example, through situating herself as a tourist in the iconic Banff landscape, Jin-Me Yoon deftly questions the validity of a nationalistic attachment to landscape and its implications on her own identity. Isabelle Hayeur’s and Allyson Clay’s works, albeit through highly disparate means, transcend this initial critique by shifting notions of the landscape “ideal,” while simultaneously questioning the validity of a human connection to landscape by implicating us in its transience and decay.

Allyson Clay’s A Constant Longing is a relatively small, rectangular light-box. Translucent red panels frame a main panel featuring a horizontally stretched photograph of a desolate urban area. The small size and three dimensionality of A Constant Longing forces the viewer to sidle around the work, craning his or her neck and back to view all of the panels – creating discomfort but also a sense of intimacy. This feeling of intimacy is amplified by the glow emanating from within the light-box – the work itself is undeniably stunning. The centre panel’s photograph depicts a street lined with concrete apartment blocks, stark street lights and cars. The urban scene is devoid of any signifiers or implications of geographic specificity – this could be a street in anyone’s hometown, and it is likely far closer to the experiences of many living in Canada than a painting of Georgian Bay by the likes of Tom Thomson or A.Y. Jackson. However despite this sense of familiarity, the urban landscape depicted in the centre panel simultaneously imparts a feeling of discomfort. The horizontal distortion of the image skews the perspective and creates a sense of movement, provoking an almost physical unease. The buildings, cars and lone individual dotting the image, however familiar, are unfriendly – a discomfort that exists in contradiction with the sense of contemplative intimacy fostered by the smallness of the work itself and the warmth from the light within.

Through highly disparate means, Isabelle Hayeur’s Refuge provokes a similarly conflicted experience. A massive photographic print, Refuge also depicts a beautiful yet decaying urban landscape. An overcast but luminescent sky initially draws the viewer’s eye to a pseudo-pastoral city greenbelt which is foregrounded by a decaying brick and steel archway. Bricks, garbage and other debris litter the immediate centre-front of the image. Despite being part of the same environment, the greenbelt and the decaying structure seem at once harmonious and at odds – as if one is decaying to allow space for the other. Interestingly, much of Hayeur’s other work involves the fusing of two disparate images to create composite images that are both seamless and unsettling. While Refuge is not one of these composites, Jan Allen’s analysis of their impact is highly apt: “Despite the visual harmonies within these compositions, the elision of seams is experienced as a form of interference. Hayeur sets up a situation in which she, like Robert Smithson, raises the fundamental question of how we experience and occupy the land.”[3] The deteriorating brick structure, punctuated by a discarded fast food cup in the lower left corner, highlights the transience of human presence on the landscape and in doing so questions what it means, or whether it is even possible, to inhabit or truly connect and identify with a place. But as is the case with Clay’s A Constant Longing, Hayeur’s Refuge is aesthetically beautiful and stunningly composed. And as the work’s title suggests, the brick and steel structure feels oddly comforting and familial as it envelopes the viewer’s outward sight lines.

Both Isabelle Hayeur’s Refuge and Allyson Clay’s A Constant Longing foster a paradoxical viewing experience. The works are simultaneously familiar and hostile, expressing ambivalence towards an occupation of, or identification with, a particular landscape and they remove us distinctly and evocatively from the canonical landscape form.

- Elizabeth Diggon

Works Cited:

Allen, Jan. “Self-Destroying Postcard Worlds: The Synthetic Landscapes of Isabelle Hayeur.” Prefix Photo 12 (2005): 16-24.

Mills, Josephine. “Land Matters.” In Land Matters, 9-12. Lethbridge: University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2008.

Whitelaw, Anne. “Whiffs of Balsam, Pine and Spruce.” In Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art, edited by John O’Brian and Peter White, 175-179. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.

[1] Anne Whitelaw, “Whiffs of Balsam, Pine and Spruce,” in Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art, ed. John O’Brian, Peter White (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 176

[2] Josephine Mills, “Land Matters,” in Land Matters, ed. Josephine Mills (Lethbridge: University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2008), 9

[3] Jan Allen, “Self-Destroying Postcard Worlds: The Synthetic Landscapes of Isabelle Hayeur,” Prefix Photo 12 6.2 (2005), 20