Art History & Visual Art

Writing on the career of pioneering photographic artist Barbara Astman, curator Georgiana Uhlyarik introduces a new body of work entitled Portraits and Conversations with Empty Vessels / along with a portfolio from Portraits and Conversations with Empty Vessels.

The boundary has always played a crucial role in urbanity-in ancient times when a wall isolated and protected it from outsiders, the city was a clearly defined territory; today those boundaries are much less distinct. The walls have been replaced by city limits-imaginary lines drawn on a piece of paper, usually only marked by inconspicuous signage. These days, we don't need the wall to protect our city from invaders... rule of law and polite society controls the fringes, both from physical transgressions and also from social ones. From the concrete reality of stone, our world now considers the abstract realm of language and sign as an equally powerful divider, and the intangibility of the ways we control borders does not affect the power of segregation and control that they implement; there are still many ways that the city maintains control over outsiders, insiders, higher class, lower class and other fringe social groups. All kinds of people circulate together in the city, and as Urban theorist Louis Wirth noted in his essay "Urbanism as a Way of Life", "[t]he city consequently tends to resemble a mosaic of social worlds…" (93). Often this combination of various classes, races, religions and diverse opinions leads to conflict and anger, separating communities into tightly knit tribal groups. However, within the modern city, we have also learned to value this social mosaic. Through the Enlightenment, Modernism and now Post-modernism, the (Western) world has realized the errors WILMINK 2 of ego-driven practices that discriminate against other viewpoints. More effort is generally made for inclusivity, especially in here in Canada where multiculturalism has become a government appointed mandate and a state of semi-socialism supports at least some of the downtrodden.

University of Regina Masters Thesis, successfully defended in April 2014, which examines three art/cinema case-studies in relation to a selection of cinematic, art historical and cultural theory in order to explore affective and participatory experiences of contemporary art.

An examination and comparison of several historical methodologies in order to determine how other authors have approached the work of indigenous Canadian artist Norval Morrisseau. These comparisons are then applied to broader examinations of knowledge-making around his art as external to the mainstream art world due to his indigenous status.

This dissertation establishes a framework for understanding embodied experience within immersive art environments by examining artworks that deploy interdisciplinary conventions to turn attention towards spectatorship itself. To accomplish this, I apply cross-disciplinary theory from John Dewey, Henri Bergson, Brian O’Doherty, Gilles Deleuze, Laura U. Marks, Peggy Phelan, and others, to close-readings of select case studies. My methodology articulates how memory, duration, material forms, and the relational dynamics between the spectator and artwork all structure the aesthetic encounter. It is my aim to bring together the rich, but isolated, knowledge sets of the art gallery, cinema, and stage to develop a more nuanced understanding of how attentive spectatorial engagement with artwork is produced.

In The Address of the Eye, film scholar Vivian Sobchack famously posits a dialectical experience of cinema where as we gaze at the filmic image, the image seems to look back. Flowing through time, while carrying complex meaning through both the internal image-space and the physical venue, she asserts that film is “…never merely a viewed ‘thing’”. Instead, the cinematic image operates in a “…mutual resilience and resistance… this back-and-forth exchange...” that mimics human intersubjective relations (24). This paper fleshes out this phenomenological understanding of film spectatorship using Henri Bergson’s work on memory and perception, along with Laura Marks’ notion of haptic visuality, and interrogates how this conversation between a spectator and the filmic object plays out in a simultaneously temporal and spatial context.
Although I agree with Sobchack that film viewing has never been as passive as previously claimed, it is perhaps easier to visualize the conversational qualities of spectatorship in works that literally engage viewers’ bodies in time and space. Through interactivity and skin-to-skin contact between the artwork and viewer, it becomes easier to grasp the many ways that the cinematic blurs the lines between the temporal and the physical. As such, this paper will examine a series of different moving image installations from the itinerant Manifesta art biennale from 2012 and 2016.
Situated in different European cities for each iteration, Manifesta necessarily adapts already-existing venues for its unique exhibition needs. With a mandate to embed deeply in its host city, the festival regularly uses non-gallery spaces for a variety of exhibition formats, and emphasizes artwork as a discursive tool, with a large program of educational and audience engagement activities. Of particular interest is their 2016 Pavilion of Reflections—a floating platform on Lake Zurich, which hosted film screenings, performances and lectures, as well as swimming recreation area and bar—and their 2012 take-over of a defunct coal mine in Gent, Belgium. In both these iterations, moving images were deployed as stand-alone artworks, but also as part of a larger conversation around how site and image intertwine with the performance of viewing.

“Myth, like love, is a decision.
What it answers is longing.
What it demands is faith.
What it opens is possibility.”
- Charles Montgomery, The Last Heathen (251).
How do we know the things that we cannot see, touch, taste, hear, or smell? The ability to test—and successfully repeat—the objective nature of the world is the foundation of the sciences that generated the incredible technological tools we are celebrating during this conference. Yet the ontology and mechanics of these tools are out of reach of many of us, as we use devices and materials that we do not understand. They require faith—or suspension of disbelief—that they will work and do things that stretch beyond the boundaries of human perception. This paper will discuss the theoretical underpinnings of my curatorial practice, which emphasizes slippages between visual art and other exhibition contexts as a way to explore multifaceted and embodied knowledge-production. The intervention of visual art into non-art realms, like the Winter Warmer at Sidewalk Labs (2019), Toronto’s CRAM academic research festival (2019), and even city streets (The Situated Cinema Project, 2015 and Urbanity on Film, 2009) have all functioned as gestures of knowledge-creation that bring together the embodied experience of being-with-art and the critical discussion that circulates exhibitions. Art provides a means for thinking-differently about the world, that can exist alongside (and sometimes in paradox) with more traditional academic thought. It is in the tensions or surprising synchronicities between the two seemingly-incompatible forms, where new knowledge becomes embedded in the spectator.
These impulses brings me to the exhibition, “Life, a Sensorium,” where a variety of researchers from York University have all explored the limits and possibilities of intersecting human perception with in-human ones. In this show, computer-generated organisms can interact with viewing bodies, real micro-organisms make abstract paintings, and something that looks like a toy brings a black hole into a building. Artworks like “After Dan Graham” collapse the human experience of time into a single space, and “Shadowpox” corporealizes the invisible threat of a virus as an interactive “game.” Here the physical nature of aesthetic interactions and environments provide embodied access into things that we could not ordinarily perceive. They forge personal encounters between our experience and things that we would normally have to take on faith. In these ways, they reveal some truth about human experience, through the model of stories, and pictures, and play.