(Re)Activating Objects is a 3 day interdisciplinary conference that investigates the ways material culture provides a lens to examine socio-cultural-economic worlds.

Graduate students at the M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. levels are invited to submit abstracts for presentations of twenty minutes. We encourage papers from a variety of disciplines and approaches, addressing the fundamental and theoretical questions about social constructions, social politics, and social ethics. [more info...]

Download a pdf of the call for full details

reactivatingobjects.wordpress.com

Prototypes, experiments and carefully-considered observations
Dave Kemp
PhD Prospectus Exhibition October 11 -17 | Opening Reception: Thursday, October 11th 6-8PM
at the Artlab Gallery

MFA/PhD 2nd Year Student Exhibition
September 20 – October 4
Opening Reception: Thursday, Sept. 20th > 6-8PM
at the Artlab Gallery

Susan Schuppli - Forensic Media: Material as Witness
Artist Talk

In 2011 I began work as a Senior Research Fellow on Forensic Architecture: The Space of Law in War, a European Research Council project hosted at Goldsmiths University of London. This project brings different modes of technical perception and analysis to bear upon violations of human rights as they are expressed by and within complex configurations of spatialised matter. Whether these violations are architecturally transmitted by urban infrastructure damage, border regimes, and trajectories of exile over land and sea, or disclosed by the geophysics of a site such as a mass grave returned to vegetation or the charred remnants of a concentration camp interned below ground, spaces and objects in our project are understood as offering up corroborating and at times even direct evidence of significant human rights abuses and war crimes. Driven by specific questions in relationship to the development of a legal file, we synthesis data gathered from a wide range of sources including remote sensing technologies, GPS coordinates, ground penetrating radar, mobile phone videos, CCTV footage, maps, and eyewitness reports in order to map and model a sequence of events in relationship to a crime. Once this data is compiled and cross-referenced it is further composited to produce various reports and schematics that make legible the multiple forces at play within the constitutive spaces of violence. Through these kinds of technical and aesthetic intercessions, spatial products are literally transformed into material witnesses capable of entering into the forums of international law and addressing the tribunals of history.

Kim Neudorf: Call and Response and Neil Klassen: Sometimes the Sun is Black

August 17-31, 2012
Closing Reception Thursday, August 30, 6-8 pm
at the Artlab Gallery

Neil Klassen’s work draws from a fundamental interest in human beings and the conditions that determine and influence a sense of self and place on earth. Sometimes the Sun is Black explores points of intersection, such as the hole as a site of potential, and the idea of the ruin where reason and mishap, and past and present settle tensions of difference.

Neil Klassen is from Port Rowan, Ontario and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from OCAD U. Working in sculpture and photography, Neil is interested in environmental philosophy and seeks to convey tensions between vulnerability and aggression, innocence and seduction, and life and death. He has worked as a guest artist and teacher at institutions across Canada. Neil has exhibited at the Board of
Directors Gallery in Toronto, the Lighthouse Theatre Artist Gallery in Port Dover, the Lynnewood Arts Centre in Simcoe, the SOVA Gallery in Windsor, the WKP Kennedy Gallery in North Bay, and the Whippersnapper
Gallery in Toronto.

Kim Neudorf is concerned with how a painting might provoke a tactic of mimicry and invention wherein the subject positions of artist, art work, and viewer are caught up in each other. Her paintings attempt to
lay out a lexicon – a call and response – where painterly events act as an invitation for viewers to extend this lexicon - socially, affectively, in criticism and in conversation.

Kim Neudorf is from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Alberta College of Art and Design. In Kim’s painting practice she explores how painting can continually
articulate and mimic encounters with other bodies and other objects through gestures that risk their own daily exposure. Kim attended the Optic Nerve Thematic Residency at the Banff Centre in 2005 and was a semi-finalist in the 2011 RBC Canadian Painting Competition. She has exhibited widely in Alberta, and most recently at Art Mûr Gallery in Montreal, and Skew Gallery in Calgary. Kim has been published in akimbo, FFWD, shotgun-review.ca, Prairie Artsters, Hamilton Arts& Letters, and has written for Stride Gallery and Truck Gallery in Calgary.

ward off clothes, tight lip" Medium: oil on canvas Date: 2012 Dimensions: 48 x 48 inches Photo: photography by
Dave Kemp

Brad Isaacs: Hiding Place

August 16 – September 22, 2012 Closing reception: September 14, 2012
at The McIntosh Gallery

For the past two years, Brad Isaacs has photographed animal hides and dioramas at various natural history museums in North America, including the Royal Ontario Museum, the Canadian Museum of Nature, the Field Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History.

Hiding Place consists of digital photographs of these research collections along with an array of complementary images that reveal much about human/animal relationships, especially hunting, the natural sciences and the construction of masculinity. His photographs and videos examine the way that technologies used to look at nature alter our understanding and interpretation of it. The relationship between photography and taxidermy is currently his primary focus. He is interested in how they both reduce nature to an image, and how such images alter our understanding of nature.

Collectively, the works point to the underlying ideologies that inform scientific animal research, while opening up the possibility for other ways of approaching the often fraught relationship between humans and animals.

[ more... ]

Liza Eurich: THE WORK OF IT

August 16 – September 22, 2012 Closing reception: September 14, 2012
at The McIntosh Gallery

Liza Eurich’s art practice is rooted in the slowness of studio production. Her experimentation with an array of materials has led to unexpected and divergent directions in her recent work. For Eurich, it is not pre-conceived ideas that lead to anticipated results. Instead, it is the process itself that leads to new and unexpected concepts. Such an approach contrasts with the linear and goal-oriented production prevalent in much of today’s cultural activity.

Eurich carefully positions each of her subtle drawings and sculptures in relation to one another within the gallery. The unassuming nature of these works, combined with the constellational structure of their arrangement, make them resistant to immediate and direct interpretation, thus inviting the viewer to discover new possibilities and connections among the works themselves and beyond the exhibition.

[more...]

Sky Glabush: The Kingdom of Names

August 3 – September 9, 2012 Closing reception: Friday, September 7, 2012 7pm
at the Thames Art Gallery

Anthea Black: How We Do It

Anthea Black's art practice sets a stage for collaborative encounters and inserts intimate gestures into public and natural spaces. Each work in How We Do It is a proposal for making a queer world in a mobile or temporary site. These proposals begin with traditional craft processes that she uses to transform scavenged black walnuts, invasive ivy vines, or worn-out bed sheets into handmade quilts, baskets, hankies, and garments. Black uses these objects as "orientation devices," to direct queer bodies towards collective activity. A series of videos trace the life of these objects as they become saturated in the excessive pleasure of queer belonging.

The videos also document the routes by which we arrive in a place and come to know its local phenomena: heavy snowfalls, swollen riverbanks, cruising in gardens and forests. As a group, these works claim craft and collaboration as spatial and political orientations that bring us closer together and lead the way towards geographies of queer utopian feeling, however fleeting or fantastical they may be.

Anthea Black is a Canadian cultural worker. She has presented projects and exhibitions at The McIntosh Gallery, London, Ontario, Neutral Ground, Regina, The New Gallery and Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary, The National Queer Arts Festival, San Francisco and The Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland. Her writing has been included in numerous publications, including The Craft Reader and Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (with Nicole Burisch). She is a contributing editor for FUSE Magazine.

Kevin Rodgers: OUT OF ORDER

July 19 to August 11, 2012 | Opening reception: Thursday, July 19 at 7:30pm
at the Mcintosh Gallery

Kevin Rodgers' exhibition OUT OF ORDER includes sculptures and wall works made from electoral signs, modified furniture and fragments of philosophical texts. With this new body of work, Rodgers explores the abstraction of politics and representation. While much of the exhibition indirectly refers to political and cultural events of the past 40 years (Watergate, the election of Brian Mulroney, Quebec Student Protests) the artist questions conventional notions of chronological time. In this sense the exhibition can be seen as “untimely”, where things are both no longer and not yet, and are thus “out of order”.

This project is the culmination of the artist's doctoral research at Western’s Department of Visual. A publication designed by the artist accompanies the exhibition. [more...]

Some Things Last a Long Time - Curated by Matthew Ryan Smith

July 19 to August 11, 2012
Opening reception: Thursday, July 19 at 7:30pm

: this must be the place

July 21 to August 11 - Opening Saturday July 21, 2 - 5pm
at the The Katzman Kamen Gallery

The Katzman Kamen Gallery is pleased to present : this must be the place, a collaborative project by MA and MFA graduates from the Department of Visual Arts at Western University. The exhibit runs from July 21 to August 11, 2012. An official opening will be held on Saturday, July 21 from 2 to 5p with the collaborators present. A limited edition colour catalogue of the exhibition will be available for purchase.

: this must be the place is curated by and includes visual and textual works of 11 Masters degree candidates from Western University's Department of Visual Arts. The collaborators include: Stephanie Anderson, Anthea Black, Liza Eurich, Jordana Franklin, Brad Isaacs, Stefani Klaric, Neil Klassen, Kim Neudorf, Daniel O'Connor, Laura Ritchie, and Melissa Ruhloff.

[more...]

McIntosh Gallery presents Kyla Brown: Lines of Desire

July 18 to 25, 2012 Opening reception: Wednesday, July 18 from 5:00 to 7:00 P.M.
London Co-op Store, 621 Princess Avenue, London, Ontario

McIntosh Gallery, in collaboration with Western's Department of Visual Arts and London Co-op Store, is pleased to present Kyla Brown: Lines of Desire: Community Mapping in Woodfield. As McIntosh's 2012 Artist in the Community, Brown, a graduate student at Western's Department of Visual Arts who recently moved to London from Toronto, poses the question: What are the places and routes that make London unique to the people who live here?

Kyla Brown: Lines of Desire: Community Mapping in Woodfield is on display from July 18th to 25th at the London Co-op Store, a non-profit, member-owned health food store located at 621 Princess Avenue.

[more...]

Somehow Connected
A collaborative exhibition organized by Beal Art and Artlab Gallery, Western

10-18 May, 2012

Opening Thursday May 10 >7-9pm
Remarks: 7:30pm

What unites all of the artists in this exhibition is the fact that all of them, at one time or another, have studied at Beal Arts and then gone on to either garner a degree, take a course, teach, work, or guest lecture here in the Visual Arts Department, Western.

Works in this exhibition include artists Greg Curnoe, Tom Benner, Doug Mitchell, James Kirkpatrick, Patrick Howlett , Jessica Desparois , Peter Thompson, Rene Vandenbrink, Wyn Geleynse, project organizer Greg Ludlow and many others.         

Negotiation within the Frame: textual and pictoral connections in art

at McIntosh Gallery from 11 April to 14 December, 2012

Negotiation within the Frame: textual and pictorial connections in art presents works of art that combine text and image. The topic is particularly relevant today, given the array of visual material that combine text and images encountered in daily life. Typically found in advertisements, such image-text combinations also appear regularly in the context of social media, for example, with Facebook “memes”. Selected from McIntosh Gallery’s collection, the works in the exhibition depart from the sort of bombardment typically associated with advertising to reveal ways in which combining texts and images can result in more subtle associations that create unexpected tensions, oscillations and harmonies.
Negotiation within the Frame is organized by McIntosh Gallery. It includes work by Margot Ariss, Ron Benner, Robert Frank, Pierre Raymond Gaudard, Arthur Handy, Antje Laidler, Ian MacEachern, Paddy Gunn O’Brien, Aidan Urquhart and Joyce Wieland. It is curated by McIntosh interns Samantha Angove and Stefani Klaric, who are Visual Arts Department graduate students at Western University.
For more information, contact Catherine Elliot Shaw at celliots@uwo.ca or 519 661-3181 ext. 84601.

Image: Robert Frank Sick of Goodbye's 1978, McIntosh Gallery Collection, Western University, Purchase, McIntosh Fund, 1979

Bon à Tirer 2012 launch - 30 March 2012

Bon à Tirer is a student-run academic publication committed to showcasing excellent undergraduate work on art history and visual culture. This year, students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds have contributed insightful commentaries on a wide array of exciting topics. From the Neo-Baroquain discussion of Alexander McQueen's fashion practices to the examination of Andy Warhol's impact on the political image of China's Mao Tse-Tung, the papers presented in our fifth annual issue represent some of the most engaging conversations about art today.

No. 21: (OVER)

Homemade breads baked by Bonnie Jarvis Goodden, Katrina Farrow Jones, Parker Branch, Jamie Q, and Jessie Roder, with a sculpture  from 1977 by David Merritt.
OPENS  THURS MAY 3, from 6-9 pm. Show runs month of May.
Open by appointment.
PARKER BRANCH
99 1/2 STANLEY STREET
LONDON ON CANADA

Parker Branch is an independent micro-museum focusing on collections, artifacts, and ephemera brought together through associative logic and incidental attractions.

Co-directors: Anna Madelska & Jason Hallows

Exhibition curated by faculty members Sarah Bassnett and Patrick Mahon

The exhibition, Picturing Immigrants in the Ward: How photography shaped ideas about Central and Eastern European immigrants in early 20th-century Toronto, is on display at the City of Toronto Archives Gallery from June 22, 2012 to the end of May 2013.