Monday, March 16, 2015

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE March 27 – 28, 2015

FRIDAY, MARCH 27

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sarah Thornton

Credibility & Confidence: Behind the Scenes with Artists Today
Francisco-Fernando Granados in conversation with Dr. Sarah Thornton
10:00 - 11:30 AM
Tickets are free with registration: click here
LOCATION: 100 McCaul, Auditorium 190
OCAD University

Keynote Performance: Brendan Fernandes

Encomium - Durational Performance
Opening Reception
6:00-9:00 PM
LOCATION: 230 Richmond St West
The former OnSite Gallery [at] OCAD University
______________________________________________

SATURDAY, MARCH 28

LOCATION: 3rd floor, 205 Richmond St West
OCAD University

8 - 9 AM: Registration
LOCATION: 3rd floor, 205 Richmond St West, OCAD University


Rm 7320
Rm 7301
Rm 7310
9 - 10:30 AM:
Session Group One
PANEL 1
Multiple knowledges: Activating the Gaps between Imagined Totalities
PANEL 2
Performativity
WORKSHOP 1
Doodling in the Margins: Process, Idle Gestures, and Mark-Making
10:30 - 12 Noon: Session Group Two
PANEL 3
Engagement through (re)production & disruption
ROUNDTABLE 1
Places of enunciation: private acts and public gestures
WORKSHOP 2
The Mobile Special Collections and Rare Books Reading Room
12 - 1 PM: LUNCH
1 - 2:30 PM:
Session Group Three
PANEL 4
Glitch Glitch
PANEL 5
(Re)Viewing the Gaze
WORKSHOP 3
Anti-Ekphrasis - Transcribing Images, Picturing Poetry & Rematerializing Art
2:30 - 4 PM:
Session Group Four
ROUNDTABLE 2
Break it down: Sighting/Citing/Siting Performance Art
ROUNDTABLE 3
Service Interruption Due to Interventions

4 - 4:30 PM:
Closing Plenary


PLENARY
Tracing Art’s Edges


SESSION DESCRIPTIONS

9 - 10:30 AM: SESSION GROUP ONE

Rm 7320
PANEL 1
Multiple knowledges: Activating the Gaps between Imagined Totalities
Moderated by Marsya Maharani

Amy Beingessner
Gregory Elgstrand
Soheila Esfahani
Session Description: This panel gathers presentations that seek to destabilize and traverse cultural and disciplinary boundaries from a variety of perspectives. Amy Beingessner points to the construction and reconstruction of the myths of cohesive identities, speaking particularly to question efforts to reproduce notions of authenticity for the making of cultural heritage. Building upon this line of questioning, Soheila Esfahani and Gregory Elgstrand open up the spaces between multiple cultures and disciplines as new sites of knowledge production that are receptive to subjective imagination and improvisation.

Rm 7301
PANEL 2
Performativity
Moderated by Marianne Fenton

Shauna Janssen 
Victoria Mohr-Blakeney
Session Description: This panel considers performativity as a strategy, a method and an outcome through an investigation of specific art and curatorial practices. Shauna Janssen will consider the notion of “performing encounters” through a consideration of her own, situated, curatorial practice.  Victoria Mohr- Blakeney interrogates performance through the medium of dance. Her investigation addresses related concerns of the archive, memory, space and issues around the re-performance of dance.


Rm 7310
WORKSHOP 1
Doodling in the Margins: Process, Idle Gestures, and Mark-Making
FREE with registration: sign-up here

Instructor: Daniel Marrone
Workshop Description: Easily overlooked, the doodle turns up wherever more deliberate marks are made, often finding its home in marginal spaces. It is tempting to classify it as a cousin to the sketch, or a kind of precursor to the cartoon, but the doodle resists comparison to other forms of visual culture, always at the periphery of art, craft and writing.

Combining theory and practice, “Doodling in the Margins” explores the ways in which typically unassuming, marginal, and indistinct marks relate to the well-defined disciplines whose peripheral spaces they often inhabit. A short talk will introduce a series of practical doodling exercises, including:

·         Bad Doodles
·         A Quick Lesson in Simplified Doodling
·         Doodles as Criticism
·         Doodling Toward a Future Project

To contextualize these and other exercises, the workshop will invite participants to consider a wide range of instructive examples, among them: the marginalia in medieval codices, Hokusai’s 1812 manual Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing, Richard Serra’s preparatory doodles, choreographic diagrams from contemporary dance, and the sketchbook work of cartoonist Kate Beaton.

The hallmark of the doodle is its lack of cultivation, its status as an index of idle gesture and involuntary energy. Though it does not require any training and rarely aspires to art, it is frequently part of an artist’s process. It can be iconic, indexical, symbolic, purely expressive, or some indefinable combination of modes – ultimately, the doodle is an instance of mark-making at its most elemental.

10:30 - 12 Noon: SESSION GROUP TWO

Rm 7320
PANEL 3
Engagement through (re)production & disruption
Moderated by Jenn Snider

Adam Barbu 
Alison Cooley
Anastasia Howe Bukowski
Rebecca Noone
Session Description: The presenters on this panel speak to the questions of process and response when layers and acts of production are engaged. Most especially, they are asking what we do when we encounter whatever it is we encounter when we are in between known practices—when there is an exchange afoot of an indistinguishable quality yet active as an amalgam. A matter of (de)materiality and performance, of objective and reflexive entanglement, of politics and aesthetics, the negotiations are at play with a multiplicity of potentials and the fluid power of interpretability. Of critique, of protocol, of expectation, whether they emerge from institutional settings, ritual, affective response… the analysis of relations of power are inherent to all engagement as a meeting or a blending of forces. To move within a context of autonomy and its implausibility, where co-option is a rule not the exception, to break from power or to at least to disrupt dominance these projects encourage readings and re-readings of a dynamics of differentiation.


Rm 7301
ROUNDTABLE 1
Places of enunciation: private acts and public gestures
Moderated by Marsya Maharani and Melanie Schnidrig

Kendra Ainsworth 
Deborah Margo 
Geneviève Wallen
Session Description: Arriving from various personal and disciplinary perspectives, Kendra Ainsworth, Deborah Margo, and Geneviève Wallen will discuss the roles and responsibilities of participants within and surrounding the contemporary art discourse. Occupying multiple roles that include those of an artist, curator, writer, educator, student, settler, and/or gardener, their interests are centered around the relationship between the identity and positionality of cultural producers and their contribution to the public discourse of art and culture. This open roundtable discussion is aimed at exploring and questioning the place of personal identities within cross-cultural dialogues.


Rm 7310
WORKSHOP 2
The Mobile Special Collections and Rare Books Reading Room
FREE with registration: sign-up here

Instructor: Christian Julien Siroyt
Workshop description:  This workshop presents the Comics History Special Collection and the Donald F. Theall Special Collection as part of Siroyt's project, the Mobile Special Collections and Rare Books Reading Room. The aim of the workshop is to discuss the interplay of disciplines, art forms, and fields of study, using the books in the collection to explore the themes of the conference. The workshop begins with an overview of the scope of the collection, including a display of some of the selected items included in the installation. From the Comics Collection this includes original comic artwork by cartoonists such as Charles Burns, Chris Ware, Seth, Chester Brown, Adrian Tomine, & Marc Bell, and rare & relevant comic books from the Comics History Special Collection, some of which prominently features the town of Strathroy. From the Donald Theall Special Collection this includes Theall's annotated copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and many other relevant titles that demonstrate his devotion to interdisciplinary study. Theall was a professor at University of Toronto, President of Trent University, and a colleague of Marshall McLuhan. His work explored avant-garde media concepts, and he published a book titled “The Virtual Marshall McLuhan” and a book called “James Joyce’s Technopoetics”.

On hand will be cartooning supplies such as pigment liners of varying widths, brush pens, paper, etc. and the workshop will conclude with participants creating comic work under specific parameters responding to the holdings of these collections, pulling images and text from them to generate comic-literary work that demonstrates the themes discussed. This workshop aims to upset the traditional notion of the rare books reading room as a staid space in which the holdings sit dormant. Here it is dynamic and generative, flexible and mobile, and contravenes traditional museum policies by installing a Rare Books and Special Collections Reading Room on-site at the conference.

1 - 2:30 PM: SESSION GROUP THREE

Rm 7320
PANEL 4
Glitch Glitch
Moderated by Sam Strong

Marcin Kedzior
Nick White
Session Description: A glitch disrupts the normal functioning of a code system. Glitch Art embraces the visual style of the glitch for various conceptual and aesthetic reasons. Increasingly, theorists are turning to the analysis of glitch and glitch art as a productive failure that challenges existing systems and strategies of organization in the digital age. This panel, featuring presentations that critique and rework the contemporary study of glitch art, might be thought of as a glitching of glitch. The papers presented here share an interest in rethinking glitch theory and the possibilities that glitch art offer.

Rm 7301
PANEL 5
(Re)Viewing the Gaze
Moderated by Brittany Higgens

Frances Dorenbaum
Julia Havard
Jamie Ranger
Session Description: From the notion of the Lacanian ‘gaze’, this panel aims to explore contemporary mechanisms of reviewing, returning, and subverting this ‘gaze’ in art practice. Frances Dorenbaum, Julia Havard and Jamie Ranger will speak to acts of witnessing and the ethics of spectatorship as audiences are confronted with the marginalized body in contemporary photography and performance art. Their presentations will enable discussion of how artists invite, control, combat, or reflect awareness of the gaze, be it male, colonial, and/or sexualized encounter. 

Rm 7310
WORKSHOP 3
Anti-Ekphrasis - Transcribing Images, Picturing Poetry & Rematerializing Art
FREE with registration: sign-up here

Instructors: Mat Laporte, Sarah Pinder, and Yosefa Raz from the Contemporary Poetry Research Group.
Workshop description: Is there an ekphrastic impulse at the heart of criticism and aesthetic theory, a desire to describe objects of interest and rematerialize art? The Contemporary Poetry Research Group (CPRG) seeks to explore this question in a workshop designed to break down or permeate the relationship between spectators and art objects. In doing so, the project suggests ways that writing might intervene and transform art objects into critical feedback mechanisms. The workshop embraces ekphrasis’ fundamental fusion of writing and art, but also inverts, interrogates and moves beyond this traditional descriptive relationship between art object and textual mediation. Following an introduction of the potential for ekphrasis as a critical mode of engaging with art, the workshop will present a series of practical exercises designed to facilitate collaboration between visual artists and poets/writers. Participants are invited to bring existing material, but will also be encouraged to generate new individual and collaborative work through the exercises.

2:30 - 4 PM: SESSION GROUP FOUR

Rm 7320
ROUNDTABLE 2
Break it down: Sighting/Citing/Siting Performance Art
Moderated by Marianne Fenton and Jenn Snider

with Brendan Fernandes, Keynote Performance presenter and a nationally and internationally recognised Canadian artist of Kenyan and Indian descent.

Alison Cooley
Shauna Janssen
Victoria Mohr-Blakeney 
Session Description: Brendan Fernandes’ interdisciplinary practice considers identity as in-process and transitional.  His more recent works (of which Encomium is an example) continues this investigation, but through the medium of dance. In Encomium, multiple disciplinary practices intersect in the gallery space as text, linguistic devices (morse code), space, dance, performance, and the body all work towards a queering that is activated through a practice of art’s edges. Translation and embodiment as queering methodologies become a part of both the investigative tools and outcomes.  Our three participants will use his work as an anchor from which they will consider the productive overlapping, situating angles of sight and the sensorial, citation and the referential, and the site in space, place, and time as expressed through the medium of performance art.

Rm 7301
ROUNDTABLE 3
Service Interruption Due to Interventions
Moderated by Melanie Girdwood and Sam Strong
Session Description: The panel will open up questions and discussion about the adoption of the unintended, the out-of-place, and the easily overlooked as viable methodological processes for meaningful, productive and perfectly imperfect boundary making. These processes represent interventions into established academic institutions and, often through experimentation and play, disrupt existing conceptions of what it means to do intellectual work.

4 - 4:30 PM: CLOSING PLENARY followed by a Closing Reception (4:30-7pm)

Rm 7310
PLENARY
Tracing Art’s Edges
Moderated by Brittany Higgens and Melanie Schnidrig

Andrea Fatona
Johanna Householder
Vladimir Spicanovic
Session Description: As the final session of Multiple Li(v)es of Art/ists &... we invite all conference participants and attendees to join us for a roundtable plenary. This roundtable will consist of scholars selected from OCAD University’s esteemed Graduate Studies faculty. Faculty members have been chosen for their respective expertise in disciplines including art history, curating, design, performance and new media studies. The roundtable members will respond to the day’s discussions, facilitated by questions and comments collected in a ballot boxes throughout the conference proceedings. This session will act as a concluding discussion on pertinent threads and concerns surrounding “art’s edges” as foregrounded by conference participants and attendees.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks a lot for sharing this conference schedule! Well, I know that I am quite late to reply here but I had attended this conference in March. You know after this meeting, I arranged my annual meeting at the same meeting rooms where your conference had been held.

    ReplyDelete

About Me

My photo
Jenn Snider, Co.Project Manager
Marsya Maharani, Co.Project Manager
Marianne Fenton
Melanie Girdwood
Brittany Higgens
Melanie Schnidrig
Sam Strong
Theresa Slater, Volunteer Coordinator