Faculty of Art Sabbatical Presentations
📆 Monday, April 10, 12:00 – 1:30 PM
đź“Ť 230 Richmond St., Room 322
Andrea Fatona
Leaving a Trace
In this presentation, I will discuss the touring exhibition project, Practice as Ritual/Ritual as Practice. Practice as Ritual/Ritual as Practice is a group exhibition featuring the works of 10 Black women artists who participated in the historical 1989 DAWA Collective exhibition, Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter, the first national exhibition to address the exclusion of Black women artists from the visual landscape of Canada. The aim of this current exhibition project is to make visible to new audiences the artworks of an important generation of Black Canadian women artists who in the 1980s laid the foundation for the development of Black women’s art in Canada.
Derek Sullivan
Shifting Shift: Out standing in a field.
The project was structured around a 12-month site study of a field in King City Ontario that is the location of Richard Serra’s 1970 concrete sculpture Shift. I had long been interested in the contextual impacts of large-scale artworks upon their community and environment yet, despite growing up only a dozen kilometers away, I had never made a visit to this work before (perhaps not surprising since my experience growing up gay in the suburbs certainly did orient me towards other places). Walking, both at the Serra but also in the neighborhood where I grew up, was a key method used for the project and over the year of sustained visits I built a personal archive of written notes and snapshots. This research formed the primary support for a new body of work in drawing and printed textile. I used Serra's Shift 1970 as an orienting device for me to consider networks of interconnection encountered in this location (colonial expropriation of land, agricultural impacts, property development, tactics of preservation, trespassing, community use, imported artistry), but it also drew forth my own tangled histories in this region. The project aimed to put Serra in his place, so to speak, whilst better understanding my own. – DS
Image in the poster by Derek Sullivan