Thursday, March 12, 2015

Workshops

Participation is FREE. To sign-up for the workshops offered as part of the conference, reserve your spot today. Space is limited. You will receive confirmation on whether you have secured a spot after completing the sign-up sheet, available by clicking here.

WORKSHOP SIGN-UP SHEET

Workshops (full descriptions below):

Doodling in the Margins: Process, Idle Gestures, and Mark-Making | Saturday, March 28, 9:00am-10:30am | 205 Richmond St W, Rm 7310
The Mobile Special Collections and Rare Books Reading Room | Saturday, March 28, 10:40am-12:10pm | 205 Richmond St W, Rm 7310
Anti-Ekphrasis Workshop: Transcribing Images, Picturing Poetry and Rematerializing Art | Saturday, March 28, 1:00am-2:30pm | 205 Richmond St W, Rm 7310

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Doodling in the Margins: Process, Idle Gestures, and Mark-Making 
Saturday, March 28, 9:00am-10:30am 205 Richmond St W, Rm 7310

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.

Instructor: Daniel Marrone Marrone holds a PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies (University of London). In his work on visual culture, he often explores memory, liminal spaces, and the semiotic operation of comics. He lives in Toronto.

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The Mobile Special Collections and Rare Books Reading Room Saturday, March 28, 10:40am-12:10pm 205 Richmond St W, Rm 7310
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.

Instructor: Christian Julien Siroyt
Christian Julien Siroyt is the Exhibits & Programming Coordinator at Museum Strathroy-Caradoc. In 2013 he received his BA from Trinity College in the University of Toronto, where he majored in Book and Media Studies and Literary Studies with German and Cinema Studies.
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Anti-Ekphrasis Workshop: Transcribing Images, Picturing Poetry and Rematerializing Art Saturday, March 28, 1:00am-2:30pm 205 Richmond St W, Rm 7310

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) will facilitate collaboration between visual artists and poets/writers through a series of exercises designed to re-orient the relationship between spectators and art objects.

The workshop takes ekphrasis as a point of departure, embracing its fundamental fusion of writing and art, but also inverting, interrogating and moving beyond familiar modes of description.

Participants are invited to bring existing material, but will also be encouraged to generate new individual and collaborative work through the exercises.

Instructors: Mat Laporte, Sarah Pinder, and Yosefa Raz from the Contemporary Poetry Research Group. Founded in late 2014, CPRG is a loose research collective based in Toronto that is dedicated to creating spaces for engaged dialogue at the intersections of poetry and critical thought.

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