[-empyre-] Week 4: Wrapping up the Dawn of Aquarius: Art, Intuition and Technology

[Renate Ferro]

 Get ready -empyreans- for a guest filled week.  Thanks to Jennifer Fisher who rallied many of her comrades to join in our discussion for week 4.  Many of these guests are long-time subscribers, but to the new ones who are joining us for the first time, welcome.  

Biographies are below for guests:  Alex Borkowski, Ann Cvetkivich, Erika DeFreitas, Jennifer Fisher, Celina Jeffery, Monika Kim Gagnon, Serena Keshavjee ,Sally McKay, Bev Pike, Ruth Skinner, Cryssane Stathacos

And of course, to our entire list of subscribers who are reading but lurking.  please join us to post this week! 
Happy spring to all from Ithaca where the sun is shining and it is 60 degrees F. 
Best, Renate

Week 4 Biographies
Alex Borkowski is a writer and PhD student in Communication & Culture at York University. She holds a BA in Art History from McGill University and an MA in Aural and Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College, London. Her critical and creative writing has appeared in The Queitus, this is tomorrow, The Happy Hypocrite, KAPSULA, Canadian Art, and Prefix Photo. Her research interests include sound studies, performance studies, feminist theory and STS; and her current project seeks to excavate points of resonance between the disembodiment/reembodiment of voices in 19th c. spiritualism and contemporary female-coded vocal interfaces. 

Ann Cvetkovich is Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University.  She was previously Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and founding Director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  She is the author of Mixed Feelings:  Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings:  Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression:  A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012).  For additional info, see www.anncvetkovich.com.
 
Erika DeFreitas is a Scarborough-based artist whose practice includes the use of performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, works on paper, and writing. Placing an emphasis on process, gesture, the body, documentation, and paranormal phenomena, she works through attempts to understand concepts of loss, post-memory, inheritance, and objecthood.
 
DeFreitas’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at Project Row Houses and the Museum of African American Culture, Houston; Fort Worth Contemporary Arts; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery; Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, Winnipeg; and Gallery 44, Toronto. A recipient of the Toronto Friends of Visual Artist’ 2016 Finalist Artist Prize, the 2016 John Hartman Award, and longlisted for the 2017 Sobey Art Award, she has also been awarded several grants from the Canada Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.

Jennifer Fisher’s research focusses on exhibition, display practices, contemporary art, performance, feminist epistemology, affect theory and the aesthetics of the non-visual senses. Her anthology Technologies of Intuition was published by YYZBOOKS in 2006. She is cofounder and joint editor of the Journal of Curatorial Studies, and has co-edited special issues of PUBLIC: “Civic Spectacle” as well as Senses and Society: “The Senses and Art.” Her writings have been featured in such books as The Ashgate Companion to Paranormal Culture, The Senses in Performance, Caught in the Act and Foodculture; and journals such as Performance Research, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affective Inquiry, Senses & Society, C Magazine and Public. Fisher is a founding member of DisplayCult, a collaborative curatorial framework whose exhibitions include underpressure (2015), NIGHTSENSE (2009), Odor Limits (2008), Do Me! (2006), Linda M. Montano: 14 Years of Living Art (2003), Museopathy (2001), Vital Signs (2000) and CounterPoses (1998). Fisher co-edited two special issues of the Journal of Curatorial Studies: “Museums and Affect” and “Affect and Relationality” (2016) and performed with Linda M. Montano as “orange” – the Svadhisthana chakra – at the New Museum: 40 Years New at the New Museum New York (2017). She is professor of contemporary art and curatorial studies at York University, Toronto. 

Celina Jeffery is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Ottawa. Her curatorial work primarily explores the artistic cultures of climate change and oceanic degradation. Relevant publications include Preternatural (Punctum Books, 2011),Ephemeral Coast, S. Wales (Punctum Books, 2015), The Artist as Curator, (Intellect, 2015); ‘Junk Ocean’ (Drain, A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture (Jan. 2016); and ‘Blue Humanities’ co-edited with Ian Buchanan in Symploke (2019). She is the founder of Ephemeral Coast www.ephemeralcoast.com, a SSHRC funded curatorial research project (2015-2019) which involved curating several international art exhibitions on the subject of coastal climate change.

Monika Kim Gagnon is Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia. She has published widely on cultural politics, the visual and experimental media arts since the 1980s. She has also curated numerous exhibitions since the 1990s, most recently À la recherche d’expo 67/In Search of Expo 67 with Lesley Johnstone at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2017) and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha | Immatérial for DHC Art at Centre Phi (2015). Her current research is on cultural memory, creative approaches to archives, expanded cinema and the experimental media arts. She is part of the Archive|Counter-archive network and is currently working on a book entitled, Posthumous Cinema: Unfinished Films in the Archives. 

Serena Keshavjee
Professor of Art History, University of Winnipeg
Serena Keshavjee coordinates the Curatorial Practices stream of the Masters in Cultural Studies while teaching Modern Art and Architectural History at the University of Winnipeg. Her academic publishing focuses on the intersection of art and science in visual culture at the fin-de-siecle. In 2015 she co-edited with Fae Brauer, Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture (Cambridge Scholars Press) for which she was awarded an SSHRC-funded research grant. In 2009 she edited a special issue of Canadian Art Review (RACAR) entitled “Science, Symbolism and Fin-de-Siècle Visual Culture”(no. 34, vol. 1, 2009). Her chapter, “Emile Gallé and Aestheticization of Science,” was published in Symbolist Origins of Modern Art  (eds., Michelle Facos and Thor Mednick; Ashgate Press, 2015). Keshavjee’s current research project, funded by 2019 SSHRC grant, is an anthology and exhibition on photographs of ectoplasm taken by a Canadian medical doctor during the 1920s and 1930s in Canada. The exhibition which will include contemporary artistic responses to the historical photographs is planned for 2023.

Sally McKay is an artist, curator, art writer and educator based in Hamilton, Ontario. Her art and research deal with cognition, consciousness and social justice at the intersections of art and science. She works in performance, installation and digital media. 

Bev Pike is a Winnipeg artist known for gigantic immersive paintings of architectural utopias. Amid climate and pandemic catastrophes, she bases her research on three-hundred year-old subterranean shell grottos.  Pike shows her work in public art galleries across Canada, most recently at the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), Museum London (London), and St. Mary’s University Art Gallery (Halifax).  In addition, she is the recipient of major grants from the Canada Council, Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council.  Pike also creates humorous, provocative and feminist Agony Aunt columns in artist books which are in international special collections such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Modern and others.  She has been a guest speaker from coast to coast.  Finally, as a long-time community activist, Pike writes evidence-based satire for the Winnipeg Free Press, CBC as well as other publications.
https://bevpike.com/

Ruth Skinner works as an arts organizer, researcher, sessional instructor, and publisher in London, Ontario. She is currently manager of the Artlab Gallery at the Department of Visual Arts, Western University, where she is also completing a doctoral degree in Art and Visual Culture. Her research encompasses experimental publishing practices, artists’ books, forensics, and clairvoyance. She is a co-organizer of Support project space and operates the art imprint Edna Press. 

Chrysanne Stathacos is a multidisciplinary artist of Greek, American, and Canadian heritage. Her work is heavily influenced by feminism, Greek mythology, the natural environment, eastern spirituality, and Tibetan Buddhism. Stathacos has exhibited for over 40 years in museums, galleries and public spaces internationally. Her work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions including Gold Rush at Cooper Cole, Toronto (2018) and Pythia, The Breeder, Athens, Greece (2017), as well as the group exhibition AA Bronson’s Garten der Lüste, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2018). Stathacos will participate in the 13th Gwangju Biennale / Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning in 2021. Her website is www.chrysannestathacos.com








Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rferro at cornell.edu