Queen’s University Presents:
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Context and Meaning XV: Sensing Matters(s) ______
Papers in Visual and Material Culture and Art Conservation
January 29th – January 30th, 2016 Agnes Etherington Art Centre Kingston, Ontario
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About the Conference ______
The GVCA’s annual graduate student conference, Context and Meaning, is in its fifteenth year. The primary focus of the conference has been the consideration of how art and context come together to produce meaning. For the past three years, the decision was made to introduce a more defined theme, beginning with “Making and Breaking Identity,” “Contact,” and last year’s “Ideolog(ies).” These themes allowed for a focused yet inclusive forum that facilitated discussion while encompassing a range of topics. We hope to achieve the same success this year with “Sensing Matter(s).”
This conference is intended to have a wide reach. It is open to both historical and contemporary topics, both discussions of “fine art” objects and those encountered every day. This year, we encouraged submissions from a range of disciplines that deal with the study of visual and material culture. We believe that we have achieved our goal and look forward to engaging discussions that reveal commonalities between seemingly disparate subjects.
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About the GVCA ______
The Graduate Visual Culture Association (GVCA) was formed in 2003 to enhance the quality of graduate student life in the Department of Art at Queen’s University. The GVCA has flourished through the active participation of new and returning graduate students and through social events and regular academic activities in the Department of Art. One of the primary functions of the GVCA is to organize our annual graduate student conference. This year, the conference is organized by Lauren Bird, Nicole Ensing, Molly-Claire Gillett, and Isabel Luce.
If you would like more information or to get involved, please contact us at: [email protected].
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Schedule ______
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Friday, January 30, 2015 ______
8:30am – 8:45am Registration/Coffee and Refreshments
8:45am – 9:00am Opening Remarks, Dr. Una D’Elia
SESSION ONE 9:00am – 10:30am Mimesis, Surrogacy, and Evocative Objects Chair: Dr. Una D’Elia, Department of Art History and Art Conservation
Challenging Expectations: The Display of Medieval Manuscripts in Museums Ruth Mullet, Cornell University
Ron Mueck’s Hyperrealist Sculpture and the Abject Siobhan Locke, Queen’s University
Savoury Sanpuru: The Lure of Japan’s Mitate Food Culture Michelle Smith, Queen’s University
10:30am – 10:45am Break with Refreshments
SESSION TWO 10:45am – 12:15pm Mysterious and Miraculous: Sensing Religiosity Chair: Dr. Matthew Reeve, Department of Art History and Art Conservation
Visual Verses: From the Form of Spirit to the Spirit of Form Rawa’a Bakhsh, Queen’s University
(Com)Passion: Experiencing Sympathy and Empathy at the Italian Sacri Monti Kennis Forte, Queen’s University
Morality in Stone: Considering Oral Tradition in the Market and Grape Stealing Capitals at Wells Cathedral Ashley Paolozzi, Queen’s University
12:15pm – 1:30pm Lunch (not provided)
SESSION THREE 1:30pm – 3:00pm Techniques and Technologies of the New Museum Chair: Jan Allen, Director, Agnes Etherington Art Centre
Harley Parker’s Multi-Sensorial Museum Adam Lauder, University of Toronto
Disseminating Possession: 3D Printing, the Individual and the De- centralized Museum Keely-Jayne McCavitt, Western University
#NeverForget: Social Media, Visuality, and Affectual Engagement at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Meghan Lundrigan, Carleton University
3:00pm – 3:15pm Break with Refreshments
SESSION FOUR 3:15pm – 4:45pm Immersion and Subversion Chair: Dr. Jennifer Kennedy, Department of Art History and Art Conservation
The Composer as a Curator: Following John Cage’s Composition for Museum Liora Belford, University of Toronto
Always Shadows: Digital and Multimedia Approaches to the Archive Carling Spinney, Western University
Affecting Activist Art: Inside Killjoy Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House Genevieve Flavelle, Western University
4:45pm – 5:00pm Break
5:00pm – 6:00pm Keynote Address
Off the Wall: Haptic Presence, Queer Resistance, and Interior Design Dr. John Potvin, Concordia University
6:00pm – 8:00pm Evening Reception, Agnes Etherington House
8:00pm – 10:30pm Informal Reception: Trivia at the Grad Club
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Saturday, January 31, 2015 ______
8:30am – 8:45am Coffee and Refreshments
8:45am – 9:00am Opening Remarks, Dr. Joan Schwartz
SESSION FIVE 9:00am – 10:30am Absence and Presence Chair: Dr. Joan Schwartz, Department of Art History and Art Conservation
“In Time but not of Time:” Jessica Eaton Evolves the Situation of Photography Ruth Skinner, Western University
The Missing Merzbauten, the Wandering Merzbauten Gabriel Cheung, Queen’s University
Double Negative/Proof Positive: The Allure of Spirit Photography Felicity Hamer, Concordia University
10:30am – 10:45am Break with Refreshments
SESSION SIX 10:45am – 12:15pm Disruption and Disjuncture: Bodies in the Institution Chair: Sunny Kerr, Curator of Contemporary Art, Agnes Etherington Art Centre
Applying Techniques of Dance Anthropology to Museum Education Carolyne Clare, Simon Fraser University
“I Have Only Been a Lover in English:” Documenting the Refugee Body in the Performance Art of Francisco-Fernandos Granados Julia McMillan, Dalhousie University
Beyond Plinths and Pedestals: Brendan Fernandes and Lost Bodies Carina Magazzeni, MA, Queen’s University
12:15pm – 1:30pm Lunch, Agnes Etherington Art Centre Atrium.
SESSION SEVEN 1:30pm – 3:00pm Conserving and Preserving Chair: Rosaleen Hill, Department of Art History and Art Conservation
Categorizing Visual Material: Tactile Visual Culture and the History of Herbaria Mieke Rodenburg, Queen’s University
The Material History of Iron Gall Ink Through the Lens of the Agnes Etherington Art Collection Emily Cloutier, Queen’s University
Those in the Netherworld Sing: Considering the Intangible in Conserving Dissociated Ancient Object Megan Doxsey-Whitfield, Daniel Doyle, Anne-Marie Guerin, Lisa Imamura, Gyllian Porteous, Carolyn Savage, Sophia Zweifel, Queen’s University
3:00pm – 3:15pm Closing Remarks
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Presentation Abstracts and Speaker Biographies Organized in scheduled sequence ______
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Ruth Mullet ______
Ruth Mullet is a PhD candidate in Medieval Studies at Cornell University. Her dissertation project investigates how the late thirteenth-century collection of saints' lives known as the South English Legendary, understood within its paleographic and codicological situation, changed according to its social context over time. Her research interests extend to include the cultural history of the senses, museum studies, Old and Middle English hagiography, digital cataloguing techniques, and manuscript fragmentology.
Challenging Expectations: The Display of Medieval Manuscripts in Museums
Artistic representations of Books of Hours and Psalters creep into museum galleries sometimes more frequently than the codices themselves. They lurk in the painted altarpieces and illustrations of the later Middle Ages, silent in the laps of penitents or hanging from the belt buckles of monastics. While the frequency with which these books appear in art is certainly indicative of the centrality of devotional books in the spiritual lives of the medieval religious, the manuscripts themselves are rarely given a dedicated space in museums. Those manuscripts that do appear are usually elaborately decorated Book of Hours or Psalters. For the museum visitor, medieval manuscripts are usually experienced as visual materials, their focus is rarely drawn to the text, the nature of the everyday object, or sensory experience it invoked.
In this paper I present an intervention that I curated at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY in May 2014. The intervention comprised three manuscript fragments, all with vernacular components, dating from the thirteenth- to the fifteenth-century. I brought three medieval manuscript fragments together in order to challenge perspectives on medieval devotion: two undecorated manuscript fragments with vernacular prayers and a woodcut from a printed book were placed alongside, and equal to, the ornate objects already on display. Furthermore, the intervention aimed to embrace the sensory capacity of the book in ways that are related to their original devotional purpose. The visitor was encouraged to listen to, and to read along with, the contents of the manuscript leaves through audio recordings and transcriptions. In this paper, I will explore the curatorial approaches I employed in order highlight the performative, sensory nature of the objects on display. ______
Siobhan Locke ______
Siobhan Locke is a first year MA student in the Art History program at Queen’s University. Her MA research focuses on Art Nouveau prints and posters. An earlier version of this paper was published in the University of Ottawa’s undergraduate art history journal, Millefeuilles, in 2014.
Ron Mueck’s Hyperrealist Sculpture and the Abject
This presentation focuses on the hyperrealist sculpture of Australian artist, Ron Mueck. Ron Mueck exhibited with the Young British Artists of the 1980s and 1990s in the exhibition Sensation of 1997, although unlike many of his contemporaries, Mueck did not create ready-made sculptures and did not employ a workshop of artists to aid him in creating his deeply personal works. Mueck’s sculptures of everyday people are mostly in the round, often placed in gallery spaces without pedestals or platforms, and often allow the viewer to walk around the work, interacting with it at eye level. Mueck’s dramatic use of scale has a tendency to amplify the vulnerability of his subjects, resulting in an increased sense of self-awareness in the viewer. Much of the previous scholarship on Mueck focuses on the verisimilitude of his work and its ability to evoke the desire to touch in order to understand, as well as the emotional depth achieved through this expressive portrayal of the human form (Cranny-Francis 2012, Hurlston 2011, Trumble 2011, Baldissera 2011, Chambers 2011, Long 2011, Greeves 2007, Amy 2007, Rosenblum 2005). My research will focus on the application of theories of abjection developed by Julia Kristeva and Hal Foster to Mueck’s hyperrealism by exploring four poignant sculptures (A girl, 2006, In bed, 2005, Old woman in bed, 2002, and Dead dad, 1996-97) that address the sensitive subjects of birth, existential despair, illness, and death. Mueck shows the vulnerability and fragility of human life, a vulnerability that threatens a physical and psychological sense of wholeness characterized in theories of abjection. Using startlingly accurate flesh tones and textures, tactile, touchable hair, a disorienting scale, and a highly accessible placement on the gallery floor, Mueck’s sculptures confront the viewer with an intense and unsettling sensory experience. ______
Michelle Smith ______
Presently Michelle Smith is a third year PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University. Her thesis, The Monstrous North: A Teratological Study of Stop-Motion Animation in Canada, explores how Canada distinctly represents monsters and monstrosity through works of stop motion animation. She received her MA from the Department of Art at the University of Toronto, where she specialized in the study of Asian Art and Material Culture. She has also worked as a cultural interpreter at the Royal Ontario Museum, has spoken extensively at previous conferences about how to engage students with cannibalism and glitter in the classroom, and is a TA in the Queen’s Film Department.
Savoury Sanpuru: The Lure of Japan’s Mitate Food Culture
Mitate is a fundamental concept in Japanese culture. Similar to Baudrillard’s idea of simulacra, the term describes an encounter with an object resembling another subject. The intended subject merges with the ordinary object imbuing it with the rich power of the original’s mythological, classical and historical past. This encounter, between subject and object, provides the viewer with an enchanting experience and lures them into engaging more closely with it. One such object that embodies this concept are sanpuru. Sanpuru, simply translated to sample or model, are commonly found in glass display cases outside of restaurants in Japan. These cases advertise the wares of the kitchen and serve as a sample presented to the public linking the fares of the kitchen to that of the display. The samples contain a certain photographic realism which lure in customers into engaging with them and aid in their choice of restaurant as they travel along from window to window judging which sample looks the most appetizing. Sanpuru, therefore, are Japan’s way of rendering a restaurant’s menu into a three-dimensional form.
This form merges edible food with its plastic copy, and through this merger, it gains meaning. The original commodity held no artistic value; however, once removed from the regular flow of life and given autonomy through display, it is able to become a model of simulacrum to be appreciated as an object of art. Therefore, this paper explores the history, role and importance of sanpuru in the everyday material culture of Japan. The purpose of this study is to elucidate further questions regarding the nature of these craft masterpieces as being more than just a form of advertisement. The paper approaches the topic by examining issues of mimesis, simulacra, mitate and the nature of models. The paper concludes by establishing the affecting presence these everyday objects have upon the lives and senses of those who encounter them. ______
Rawa’a Bakhsh ______
Rawa’a Bakhsh (Saudi Arabia - Canada) graduated from Jeddah- Saudi Arabia with bachelors in Graphic Design and an MFA from OCAD University in Toronto, Canada, After moving to Toronto she started creating mixed media artworks, photos and installations. By focusing on techniques and materials, Bakhsh tries to grasp both the Arabian culture and language. Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. At that moment, lots of cultural phenomena and topics, which are inherent to the artwork, come to the surface. By investigating language on a meta-level, she seduces the viewer into a world of ongoing equilibrium and the interval that articulates the stream of daily events. Her mixed media artworks are characterized by the use of cultural events in an atmosphere of a Middle Eastern and Arabian mentality in which recognition plays an important role. By taking cultural artifacts as a subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of religion values, she tries to approach a wide scale of subjects in a multi-layered way, she also likes to involve the viewer in a way that is sometimes physical and believes in the idea of form following spirituality in a work. Bakhsh is now a full time PhD student at Queen's University - Cultural Studies.
Visual Verses: From the Form of Spirit to the Spirit of Form
Visual Verses: From the Form of Spirit to the Spirit of Form, is a personal spiritual journey that re-envisioned the studio as a sacred space, and art making as a spiritual practice, during a process of cultural adaptation from a religious context (Saudi Arabia) to a secular one (Canada). The project used a number of methodologies that integrate elements of Ta’wil, sound visualization, and art making as worship within the theoretical framework of Sufism and Sufi practice. The investigation culminated in the visual representation of Islamic holy scripts in new ways, beyond the traditional methods of calligraphy; the work is thus situated between a strongly religious background and contemporary art practice. This visual exploration was an attempt to combine the spiritual path and studio practice of a Sufi artist, and thereby highlight the author’s spiritual journey as a form of self-exploration and cultural adaptation. ______
Kennis Forte ______
Kennis Forte is in the first year of her PhD at Queen's University. Under the supervision of Dr. Gauvin Bailey, she intends to examine the relationship between devotional texts and sculpted angels in Italy during the Counter Reformation. Kennis earned her Master’s degree from Queen's in 2015 and her Bachelor’s degree from The College of William and Mary in 2013.
(Com)Passion: Experiencing Sympathy and Empathy at the Italian Sacri Monti
The Sacri Monti at Varallo and Varese, two of thirteen 'Holy Mountains' in northern Italy, allow pilgrims to experience the story of Christ's Passion by visiting life-sized diorama of biblical narratives. The Crucifixion chapels at these sites provide clear evidence of an ideological shift. At Varallo (ca. 1515 – 1523) Gaudenzio Ferrari encourages the viewer to empathize with Christ, to walk among the sculpted figures, and become another character in the scene. One hundred years later, when Varese was being constructed (c. 1623-1668), this kind of completely immersive experience was thought be morally and spiritually dangerous. Here Dionigi Bussola and Antonio Busca inspire sympathy rather than empathy, allowing the visitor to feel powerful compassion for Christ's suffering while simultaneously using formal barriers to enforce a measure of physical and emotional distance. At Varallo, Ferrari uses a combination of static, icon-like, imagery and a balanced composition to imply the present and perpetual reality of Christ's death. Furthermore, the chapels at Varallo were strategically placed to resemble Jerusalem's holy sites, transporting the viewer in time and place to the historical moment of the Christological narrative. At Varese, the visitor's experience is more structured and supervised, since the artist's priority was creating an ideal, instead of authentic, pilgrimage. The linear progression between chapels and the metal grilles that bar physical entry into the Passion scenes show a new desire to assert the Church's power as God's representative on earth and to bring Church doctrine, dramatically, to life. My paper will compare the formal elements of these two Crucifixion Chapels to explore how the artists worked to evoke different emotions in their viewers. At Varallo physical access encouraged a more visceral response, empathy, while the barriers imposed at Varese restricted the worshippers to sympathy through constructing a more contemplative, internal, and a-temporal spiritual encounter. ______
Ashley Paolozzi ______
Ashley Paolozzi is a second year Master’s student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and received her undergraduate degree in History of Art and Visual Culture at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Her Master’s thesis is titled “The Sculptural Programme at Wells Cathedral, c. 1184-1210” and her research interests include depictions of hybridity/monstrosity, beast fables, and labour in medieval cathedral sculpture in England.
Morality in Stone: Considering Oral Tradition in the Market and Grape Stealing Capitals at Wells Cathedral
The early gothic cathedral of Wells in Somerset, England boasts 64 bizarre and largely unexplained sculptures adorning the capitals along the nave and transepts. Peering through the sculpted foliage, the stone monsters, labourers, and animals at Wells decorate the cathedral interior like a living stone menagerie with their twisting bodies and wide eyes. Among the sculpted images from c. 1184-1210 are two capitals depicting visual narratives that appear to have no iconographic source or parallel in medieval visual culture from this period. The first capital shows a market, complete with a slaughtered cow and a lamb alongside various figures proceeding eastward. The second is a series of four capitals wrapping around a single pier forming a narrative dubbed the “Grape Stealers Capitals” and shows a scene of theft and punishment in a vineyard. In keeping with anti- or post-iconographical approaches, I propose that finding meaning in these sculpted capitals requires an approach that relies on oral tradition and not simply textual sources.
This paper will look beyond strictly visual and textual sources and consider oral traditions such as medieval sermons, some of which remain from other locations through written records, and how these two sets of capitals could have been consumed through senses outside of purely sight. I will discuss the consumption of these images within the cathedral and how their context in this space begs for a moral reading of their imagery. This reading would have been conducted through oral influence originating from clerical texts that are unfortunately lost today. I will also consider the transition of textual narratives, such as the Parables, and how their inclusion within a sermon could be projected onto the sculpture at Wells, potentially reinterpreting the generic narrative placed on the “Grape Stealing Capitals” as one with a Biblical source. ______
Adam Lauder ______
Adam Lauder is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto. His current research focuses on Canadian artists’ representations of “information” during both halves of the twentieth century. Lauder has contributed articles to scholarly journals including Amodern, Art Documentation, Canadian Journal of Communication, Future Anterior, Imaginations, Journal of Canadian Studies, Technoetic Arts, The Journal of Canadian Art History, TOPIA and Visual Resources as well as features to magazines including Art Handler, Border Crossings, C, Canadian Art, Hunter and Cook and Millions.
Harley Parker’s Multi-Sensorial Museum
Harley Parker (1915-1992), who served as Head of Design and Installations at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) from 1957 to 1967, re-conceptualized exhibition design—until then, a field over determined by scholarly norms of display—to meet the transformed priorities of an emergent information society. In dialogue with renowned media analyst Marshall McLuhan, with whom he also collaborated on two book projects, Parker devised multi-sensorial strategies to re- engage museum audiences increasingly desensitized to the materiality of artifacts under the impact of “dematerialized” communications media. This paper reassesses Parker’s innovations through a close reading of his most ambitious ROM installation, the 1967 Hall of Fossil Invertebrates. Deploying three-dimensional facsimiles intended to elicit tactile exploration, in addition to “light controls, ozone smells, and a sea-shell-implanted ramp,” the synesthetic contours of Parker’s Hall attempted to activate the “five sense sensorium” described by McLuhan, in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, as an enfleshed cognition, or “common sense”. Parker’s visionary proposals emerge from this re-examination as striking antecedents of the contemporary “sensory turn” in curatorial discourse and praxis that simultaneously anticipate the broader concerns of new materialism. In addition to his contributions to subsequent trends in exhibition design, notably via the probable influence exerted by his descriptions of the museum of the near future as a “communication system” on the era-defining 1970 MoMA INFORMATION show, Parker also left his imprint on contemporary art in Canada. Canadian artists including Intermedia’s Victor Doray looked to Parker’s graphic designs and installations as inspiring embodiments of the synesthetic qualities attributed to “information” by McLuhan. A 1976 exhibition at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre guest-curated by the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., “Celebration of the Body,” will be analyzed as an indirect application of Parker’s multi-sensory innovations to a museum-centered artist’s project. ______
Keely-Jayne McCavitt ______
Keely-Jayne McCavitt is a first year Masters student at the University of Western Ontario. Her research currently explores museum practices, and the impact of new technologies on collecting culture.
Disseminating Possession: 3-D Printing, the individual, and the De- centralized Museum
In 2013 the Smithsonian introduced a project called “3DX”: a digital archive of items from their collection translated by 3D scanner to cyberspace where they could be examined online. Other Initiatives such as the Google Arts Project have also given the public unprecedented access to art objects and artefacts. This access, however, is all purely visual and virtual. The illusion of real physical proximity is only made more obvious to the user as they examine objects from impossible angles, distances, and perspectives.
What is missing in this system is tactile understanding. This, however, is changing. With the advancement and precision of 3D printing technologies nearly identical copies of artworks could conceivably be manufactured in the comfort of one’s home. In fact, Google and Microsoft have started including 3D scanning technology in their hardware: a clear sign of what is to come. 3D scanning in the not-so-distant future may become as easy as taking a photograph on our smartphones today. This would allow for the possibility of an intimate tactile knowledge of cultural objects outside of their traditional contextual containers. In a world where very soon “seeing “ an artifact may translate into physically “owning” it, one cannot help but wonder what the fate of the museum will be.
Will the proliferation of replicas encourage greater appreciation for the original objects? Will it dissipate the power of the museum as an institution? It is crucial to consider the ramifications of these technologies. Today patrons make pilgrimages to the pillars of visual culture in institutional settings: yet it will soon be possible for one to physically interact using 3D printing technology off site. De-centralizing the possession and ownership of culture will radically change our relationships with culturally significant objects and provide more complex understandings of them in new and varied locational contexts. ______
Meghan Lundrigan ______
Meghan Lundrigan is a third-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Carleton University. She is interested in the ways in which the public navigates the past and its meaning, and is especially interested in the use of digital platforms in an exploration and presentation of history. Her PhD research evaluates the ways in which members of the public make use of image-sharing social media platforms such as Instagram, Flickr, and Tumblr to contribute to an online visual space for dialogue about contemporary Holocaust memory.
#NeverForget: Social Media, Visuality, and Affectual Engagement at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
This work explores the use of Instagram as a medium for historical consciousness and affect in the permanent exhibit space at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. I am particularly interested in drawing connections between the USHMM’s well-known material artifacts, the visitor’s experience, and the communicative interplay between image and text as the image is shared online. This paper identifies particular artifacts that have affectual pull, and connects the materiality of the aforementioned artifacts to the experience of the visitor, considering how visitor photography contributes to the visual and historical memory-making process of the Holocaust. Through Instagram, the visitor actively pulls the visuality of the Holocaust and the museum off of the walls and into the digital realm, allowing for an assessment of how diverse audiences grapple and engage with painful histories in a global space. The USHMM is one of the most well-known museums in the world, and serves a dual-function as both educational didactic space and built memorial landscape. How can visitor photography be connected to new patterns of visitor engagement within the museum space? Why are visitors drawn to photographing the segment of the Warsaw Ghetto wall or the unused canisters of Zyklon B gas? Many cultural critics encourage museum visitors to refrain from capturing their experiences and feelings in the vague interest of “remaining present” and “reflective;” In this paper I argue that the use of photography cements the visitor’s present-ness within the physical space of the memorial, thus actively engaging with the history of the Holocaust and its continued memory. The sharing of photos on Instagram allows the visitor to contribute to an online visual dialogue about the forms that Holocaust memory can take in the twenty-first century, off of and beyond the walls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. ______
Liora Belford ______
Liora Belford is a PhD Candidate from the Department of Art, University of Toronto. As a sound artist, scholar, and curator who has had the opportunity to organize numerous exhibitions in both public and private institutions, Belford's practice spans the experimental sonic realm. In her ongoing research, she investigates the relationship between sound and space and her doctoral thesis surrounds the American experimental composer John Cage and his composition for a museum - Rolywholyover A Circus (1989-95).
The Composer as a Curator: Following John Cage’s Composition for Museum
In 1989, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MoCA) invited the American composer and artist John Cage to create a new artwork. The result was a chance-derived four movement composition for museum entitled Rolywholyover A Circus. The composition, as conceptualized by Cage, was executed after his death in 1992 by MoCA's curator Julie Lazar and travelled between 1993-95 from Los Angeles to Houston, Philadelphia, New York and Mito, Japan.
While many other artists have experimented with the form of an art exhibition, Cage’s project constituted something new: he constructed his exhibition in a manner akin to his musical composition. For example, one of the composition's four movements, the Main Circus, was an ongoing performative event. Hundreds of artworks, objects, and pieces of ephemera were subjected to a chance-derived computerized score, in which the displayed artworks were referred to only by number, allowing visitors to see in front of them a computer printing out generated changes which in turn were translated to works being hung on the walls and taken down. In another movement, the museumcircle, Cage composed a sculptural space which was informed by Erratum Musicale (1913), the first musical work of the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp. Through his engagement with the art exhibition, Cage formed a new field of research – the composer as a curator – where the exhibition space adopts sound composition principles, and thereby, alters the concept of exhibition-making. ______
Carling Spinney ______
Carling Spinney is a Visual Arts Master’s student at Western University. Her research focuses on curatorial practices and exhibition strategies in relation to contemporary art. Most recently, she co-curated the exhibition Pressed for Time at Concourse Gallery, which was a photographic and floral-based exhibition exploring London’s Eldon House through an archival lens.
Always Shadows: Digital and Multimedia Approaches to the Archive
Institutions of visual culture, spaces such as the art gallery, the museum and the archive, are almost solely conditioned for visual contemplation over any other senses. The archive is of particular note here. Hal Foster’s 2004 essay, “An Archival Impulse” directly addresses the recent archive fever by examining contemporary artists. These archive-based practices usually involve the artist’s immersion in the various documents, objects and photographs that make up an archive. Conducting research in the archive is a deeply sensory experience: rifling through papers, the smell of old books, holding objects and photographs. And yet even archival art practice is confined to the visual. Researchers are almost always required to wear gloves when handling fragile materials. And, further, the final artistic output, usually an installation or exhibition, is housed in a gallery where rules such as no touching, no eating and no talking above a whisper are strictly enforced. Everyday human behaviour is prohibited. What does this mean for archival art exhibitions? By giving priority to the visual, are we losing out on the potential experience of other senses? Or, instead, is there a larger affective experience triggered by these archival installations that outweighs the seeming dominance of visuality? Perhaps we are not necessarily “losing” something. Considering works by artists such as Fiona Tan, Tammy Rae Carland and Zoe Leonard, I argue that all five senses are interconnected by memory and past experiences. For example, the sight of a creased document in a larger archival exhibition is more than just a visual impression—it is a memory of a creased paper, a prior experience of holding such a paper. In this way, it is possible to feel, or sense, something even if only “limited” to visuality. Making sense matters more than engaging the senses.
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Genevieve Flavelle ______
Genevieve Flavelle is currently a pursuing a MA in Art History at Western University. She completed my BA in Art History at NSCAD University in 2014. Her research interests include; queer theory, feminist theory, curation, queer/ing art histories, collaboration, activist art, and contemporary art. Dr. Kirsty Robertson is supporting her independent research at Western, and, as part of her research she recently travelled to Los Angeles to participate in artist Allyson Mitchell’s extraordinary immersive installation Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House.
Affecting Activist Art: Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House
This paper examines Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House, a collaborative installation and performance art experience produced by artists Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue. Killjoy’s Kastle was first installed in Toronto in the fall of 2013 and installed and performed for second time in October 2015 in Los Angeles. Hundreds of pounds of handcrafted costumes, props, and creatures were brought to life by over fifty performers a night to create an engaging and visceral art experience. Drawing on evangelical Christian Hell Houses various scenes of sin intended to guide viewers toward the path of Christianity, Killjoy’s Kastle tours its viewers through a reanimation of lesbian feminist herstory intended to “pervert, not convert”. At once utopic and distopic Killjoy’s Kastle is a space in which “dead” theories, ideas, movements, and stereotypes are brought to back to life as riot ghouls, paranormal consciousness raiser, zombie folk singers, and ball busting dykes. Embodying Mitchell’s Deep Lez philosophy and maximalist art ethos, the haunted house is an immersive experience that bursts at the seams with craft, humour, camp, wit, theory, activism, affect, and praxis. Using my first hand experience as both a spectator and a performer in the LA iteration, this paper will explore how Killjoy’s Kastle utilizes direct audience engagement, affect, and queer strategies of performance such as camp to create complex dialogue about art, history, theory, and politics. ______
Dr. John Potvin ______
Dr John Potvin is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal, where he teaches on the intersections of art, design and fashion. His research focuses, in particular, on the ways the male body, competing masculinities and dissident sexualities are performed, represented, memorialized and perceived through modern design and visual cultures since the late 19th century. He has published several essays in books and journals including The Journal of Design History, Senses and Society, Genders, Home Cultures, Visual Culture in Britain and Fashion Theory. He is the author of Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding (2008), Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (2013) and, more recently, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (2014) winner of the Historians of British Art Book Prize. In addition to being editor of The Places and Spaces of Fashion (2009) and Oriental Interiors: Design, Identity, Space (2015) he is also co-editor of both Material Cultures, 1740- 1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting (2009) and Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity (2010). He serves on the editorial boards of several international peer-reviewed journals and was book review editor for Interiors: Interiors, Design and Architecture. His current project, Deco Dandy: Designing Modernism, Nationalism and Masculinity in 1920s Paris is the result of a three-year SSHRC grant and explores the fashion, painting, performance and design cultures of the much-neglected interwar dandy.
Off the Wall: Haptic Presence, Queer Resistance, and Interior Design
The exploration of the relationship between sexuality and public lavatories as locations of sexual encounter has become an important focal point of the investigation of the ways homosexual men, in particular, have appropriated certain types of public spaces. This recent scholarship builds on a long tradition that has seen an olfactory connection made between male homosexuality (as a type) and lavatories (as a space). Since at least the nineteenth century homosexual men have been associated with lavatories and the detritus of the space. As early as 1908, for example, Xavier Mayne wrote of men around the world engaging in ‘depraved’ same-sex sex acts in public baths and toilets. My ambition here is to claim a different – equally queer – usage of bathrooms through the men I explore. Their bathrooms were spaces decorated in such a way that they revealed acts of creative expression and alternative forms of community that have long been denied, occluded and ignored. The aim, then, is to explore and expose a distinct and compelling interpolation of the queer subject into the history of modern design made possible through a decorative form of resistance, community formation and legacy. ______
Ruth Skinner ______
Ruth Skinner is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University, and her research interests center on photography, hypermedia, and theories of representation and viewership. Her presentation uses formal and philosophical frameworks to consider the affective impact and historical relevance of Jessica Eaton’s ongoing cfaal series of photographs.
“In Time but not of Time:” Jessica Eaton Evolves the Situation of Photography
Curator Rose Bouthillier recently positioned the photograph as an “agent of reality formation.” Theorist Daniel Rubinstein extends this, insisting that our present photography represents “the visual figuration of a new layer of consciousness—in which new relationships to space and time, and therefore new categories of thought, play, art and agency are emerging.” Our immersion in hypermedia is stimulating new forms of perceptual engagement that upend traditional notions of viewership. While theorists like Jonathan Crary predict a techno landscape of passivity and isolation, artists are using the potential of this new viewership to shift visual representation toward multi-temporal and affective complexes of sensual experience, memory, and imagination. Jessica Eaton cites familiar visual tropes and analog techniques not as nostalgic gesture or pantomime but as re-exploration and re-activation of the pre-digital from a post-digital vantage. This paper considers Eaton as working with the rupture of the digital event, amending specific pasts in visual culture to open up the present and possible futures of image making and viewership. In 1999 Geoffrey Batchen held digital photography significant for being “in time but not of time.” Eaton’s analog photographs unexpectedly amend this (a)temporal categorization, making it no longer a strictly digital quality but an evolution in how we come to experience the photographic. Eaton addresses photography’s capacity to effect sensations of time, space, movement and memory, eliciting a new mode of perceptual experience: a slower kind of looking that both confronts and complicates our compulsion to mediate the world through images. This paper incorporates a series of paradoxically generative pairings: photography and painting; viewer and object; composition and non-composition; looking and seeing They emphasize the paradoxical position of Eaton herself: an analog photographer who apends our notion of representation and challenges our conception of how we see (and do not see) the world. ______
Gabriel Cheung ______
Gabriel Cheung is an artist and Art History doctoral student at Queen’s University. His tangled artistic and scholarly interests flit from the “excessive” qualities of architecture—its capacity to be more/other than a shelter—to mythologizing and the mediation of memory for the (im)migrant individual. As part of artist collective NO AND NO (with Katharine Vingoe-Cram), he has exhibited “It’s Not Working,” a show about the falsely-remembered end of a friendship-cum-working-relationship, at the Union Gallery and is currently completing a commissioned drawing installation for Queen’s New Medical Building about negotiating collegiality through reminiscence. In his independent practice he is thinking, non-exhaustively, about: Maya Lin, Faye Wong, Rei Kawakubo, and his mother; packaging, tsutsumi, and “portable immigration kits.”
The Missing Merzbauten, the Wandering Merzbauten
Between 1923 and 1936, Kurt Schwitters was immersed in his Merzbau, a work that metastasized throughout his home in Hannover. The construction developed from several assemblages into a collision of plaster planes that merged with the surrounding architecture. Mnemonically significant souvenirs—photos, bodily traces, found and stolen materials—were enshrined in the structure’s cavities, most eventually swallowed by the growing installation. In 1937, Schwitters left an increasingly hostile German artistic milieu for Norway, and later England; his exile facilitated the proliferation of two additional Merzbauten. The Merzbauten are difficult objects of study because of their complexity—many of its components were hidden from sight—but also because so little remains of them: the first was destroyed in a bombing raid, the second in a fire, and all three left unfinished. Information about these works is scarce, pieced together from scant photographs and testimonials. These conditions constitute the Merzbauten’s methodological challenge—how can “missing” objects be examined and written about with sparing reliance on sensory observation? This project takes up the task of thinking how the lack of sensory information can be compensated for or otherwise made productive. Drawing from intersecting scholarship on memory and diaspora, my research situates the Merzbauten in a context of itinerancy, positing them as “wandering” repositories of memory supports significant in the negotiation of a migrant identity. In this way, the Merzbauten differ from other ephemeral objects in that the conditions of their production parallel those of their study. Taking my cue from Paul Gilroy’s assertion that diasporic memory is not an objective recollection of the past but contingent on present reprocessing, I re-member the Merzbauten, not through sensory observation but memory exercises similar to the reprocessing, by displaced individuals, of what has been lost or left behind. Whereas existing scholarship has tried to elucidate the Merzbauten’s physical details, this project eschews the impulse to fill in the sensory gaps, seeking instead to exploit these lacunae as opportunities to speculate boldly and remember creatively. ______
Felicity Hamer ______
Felicity Hamer is a Montreal-born musician, mother and student with a background in photography. In October of 2015 the completion of her MA in Art History dovetailed with the embarking on a PhD in Communication Studies also at Concordia University. Her fascination with the emotional and therapeutic capacity of images has led her in recent years to focus much of her attention to the phenomenon of nineteenth century spirit photography, commemorative photographic objects and other forms of photography associated with death ritual.
Double Negative/Proof Positive: The Allure of Spirit Photography
Photographic portraits, so effective in their roles as place markers for the absent, unnaturally extend our relationships and potentially, the grieving process. My research demonstrates that late 19th century Victorian Spirit photography addressed this problem by reanimating the image of the dearly departed in an evocative and undirected manner. The spirit photograph was a joint portrait achieved posthumously, without use of the corpse, in which the bereaved were visually reunited with the deceased. This faint likeness, the extra that appeared alongside the client, was believed to be enabled by individuals who claimed mediumistic qualities. Paired with the desire of the client, these images had the ability to circumvent the temporal and representational limitations of photography by alleging to mediate the ‘spiritual’ reappearance of the deceased.
Photography is an ideal means through which to procure surrogates for the absent as it has the capacity to create “artificial bodies that cannot die”, (Belting 2011). Photographs show us the shadow of what has been and therefore cannot be present. Re-animated as it were – and as they contain the imprint of that which is not in fact visible in the room at the time of exposure – spirit photographs defy criticism of photography as inherent indicator of absence. No longer locked in the past, these images suggest a moment in time beyond death and therefore the possibility of future moments shared. These mementoes appealed to users on an intuitive level as they contained both an ‘iconic’ representation of the individual as well as an inherent ‘indexical’ connection to them – akin to a lock of hair – light having to literally touch them before bouncing back to be captured in the photographic emulsion. Although often dismissed as an embarrassing blemish on the history of photography, a closer look at the phenomenon of spirit photography has the potential to enhance current understanding of our relationship to photographic portraits, and in particular, the function of these images in the mourning process. ______
Carolyne Clare ______
Carolyne started her doctoral studies in the English department at Simon Fraser University in September 2015. She is the recipient of SFU’s C.D. Nelson Memorial Scholarship and the Provost Prize of Distinction. Her articles on dance history and archiving were recently accepted for publication by Routledge, Wilfrid Laurier Press, and Taylor & Francis. Carolyne has been fortunate to work as an archival assistant at Dance Collection Danse, and as an archival intern at La Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts. Carolyne was trained in collection management at the University of Toronto, where she completed a Masters in Museum Studies in 2010. Her interest in archiving dance grew out of her performance experience. Carolyne continues to perform; she enjoyed her 2015 performances as “rat” in the National Ballet of Canada’s The Nutcracker. The research Carolyne is presenting at Queen’s University Context and Meaning XV: Sensing Matter(s) extends from her Master’s research that she conducted in collaboration with La Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault. Carolyne helped the foundation determine how to best protect Perreault’s choreographic legacy by studying current best practices in dance archiving, and by drawing upon Perreault’s archive to reconstruct three of Perreault’s dances with students from l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Carolyne presented part of her Master’s research as a plenary speaker at the Theatre Library Association’s annual conference in 2010.
Applying Techniques of Dance Anthropology to Museum Education
In my presentation, I will consider how dance archiving might inform the practices in museum education. Recent museum theorists (Bennett 2013, Greenhill 2008, Classen and Howes 2006, Gregory and Witcomb 2007) have called upon the use of theatre, movement or dance as a way of helping museum visitors learn and create more meaningful relationships with museum objects. I will suggest that techniques used in dance anthropology, particularly as presented by Deirdre Sklar, could help museum educators contextualize and present sensorial and affective information across cultural or national differences. To illustrate my investigation, I will present my research on reconstructing Jean-Pierre Perreault’s choreography, and focus on how dance anthropology advices us to systematically present artifacts in order to effectively translate affective information across embodied difference. ______
Julia McMillan ______
Julia Fleur McMillan is pursuing an MA in English Literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her research operates at the intersection of literary studies, Canadian studies, and art history. She is currently interested in examining Canadian citizenship and immigration policies in relation to contemporary literature and visual art. She is also working on a thesis about the artistic protests to the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia. She completed her BA in English and Art History at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.
“I Have Only Been a Lover in English”: Documenting the Refugee Body in the Performance Art of Francisco-Fernandos Granados
In 2012, Canada introduced a series of changes to the refugee determination system that made it increasingly difficult for undocumented asylum seekers to obtain refuge in Canada. These changes abolished the narrative component of the refugee’s claim, and introduced a significantly decreased time frame for filing a written claim. In enacting these changes, the Canadian government severely limited opportunities for undocumented claimants to narrativize their own experiences, therefore cultivating a political climate that values physical documentation over individual voices. Given the urgency to challenge these barriers to Canadian asylum in the wake of the global refugee crisis, the performance art of Guatemalan-Canadian refugee Francisco-Fernandos Granados offers alternative ways to consider the documentation of refugee identities in Canada. Building on Carrie Dawson’s article “The Refugee’s Body of Knowledge: Storytelling and Silence in the work of Francisco-Fernando Granados,” this paper examines the ways in which his 2011 performance I have only ever been a lover in English uses the gallery setting as an alternative text upon which to map, record, and archive the refugee body. In this performance, Granados traces his movements around the gallery by licking the wall, leaving a trail of saliva in his wake. Using this performance as a point of entry, this paper draws on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to show how Granados’ work challenges current Canadian refugee policies and the growing tendency to record immigrant and refugee bodies through the impersonal use biometric technologies. Ultimately, this paper argues that by using a sensory experience to record his physical presence on the gallery wall, Granados designates the gallery as a site of alternative documentation that acknowledges the refugee body as more than just a piece of paper or a trace of DNA data. ______
Carina Magazzeni ______
Carina Magazzeni is a Master’s candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University whose research interests are centred on settler-colonial imaginings of natural history and taxidermic display strategies. She will be curating an exhibition of Brad Isaacs’ most recent photographic and video work at the Centre for Indigenous Research Creation at Queen’s University in March 2016, as a method of revealing and disputing fraught human-animal relations within the politicized space of natural history museums. She holds a BA Honours in History of Art and Visual Culture with a Concentration in Curatorial Studies from Brock University.
Beyond Plinths and Pedestals: Brendan Fernandes and Lost Bodies
The Justin and Elisabeth Lang Collection of African Art was donated to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in 1984, and has been a source of contention ever since. It is one of Canada’s most extensive collections of African art, with over 500 objects produced primarily by West and Central African peoples. Concerns regarding the permanent collection’s “authenticity,” the method through which the collection was originally established by the Langs, and the current lack of a specialized Africanist to work with the collection have all led the Agnes to ponder: What is our role as a Western research-intensive art museum to investigate the ways that we present African art? In what new, interesting, and enriching ways can a contemporary artist engage with the collection? The result of these questions can be found within the exhibition, Brendan Fernandes: Lost Bodies (9 January – 16 April 2016), curated by Sunny Kerr. Fernandes’ cultural background as a Kenyan-Indian-Canadian has interwoven itself into his artistic practice where he confronts notions of authenticity and the hybridity of identity. The exhibition involves Fernandes re-presenting selected masks, headdresses, and everyday objects from the Lang collection, along with blankets and body wraps from the Textile Museum of Canada. In this re-presentation, Fernandes is not only disrupting these art objects’ typical curatorial placements on static plinths or enclosed in display cases, but also, dismantling the museum-goer’s predetermined concepts of African art. Lost Bodies also incorporates new works that create an interdisciplinary conversation, utilizing the artist’s talents as a dancer, choreographer, printmaker, filmmaker, and performer. This presentation will outline the ways by which the Agnes’ exhibition of Brendan Fernandes: Lost Bodies came to be, and how this exhibition reveals tensions that emerge upon the disruption of traditional Western curatorial approaches towards African art.
*A part of this presentation will take place in the gallery currently featuring the exhibition Lost Bodies at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. As the gallery has a visitor limit, a sign-up sheet for the gallery portion of the talk will be available as of Friday morning. ______
Mieke Rodenburg ______
Mieke Rodenburg is a first year Master's candidate at Queen's University. Her research interests include botanical illustration, England in the long eighteenth century and women's craft production. She is currently in the beginning stages of her research on A Curious Herbal, an illustrated herbal published between 1737 - 1739 by Elizabeth Blackwell.
Categorizing Visual Material: Tactile Visual Culture and the History of Herbaria
The Fowler Herbarium of the Queen’s University Botany department was established in 1860 and today boasts over 140,000 dried and catalogued plant specimens, or herbaria, of both local and foreign origin. However, the Western practice of collecting, drying, pasting, labeling, and organizing plant matter began as an individual pursuit in sixteenth-century Europe. The first herbariums were collected into volumes or stored in personal boxes. The practice was later initiated as a more official academic method of studying flora when the scientific field of botany emerged in the eighteenth century. Herbaria became valuable tools for plant study as the process retained some of the physical characteristics of the specimen useful for identification. Although, this only preserved a portion of its visual components and not its other sensory properties. This method was often used when live plants or cuttings were not able to travel without being destroyed. Herbaria are tactile visual products, not only through the tangible process of creating them but also through the culture of exchange and display that informs their development.
Unlike other tools for botanic study, such as illustration, the herbarium is usually discussed as a scientific entity and is rarely studied as an aesthetic phenomenon or as a product of visual culture. In what way does herbaria fulfill aesthetic purposes in addition to functioning as scientific evidence and how does its empirical value inform its aesthetic value? How does the act of collecting visual data reflect cultural hierarchies of value? I will trace the history of herbaria as material culture in an effort to analyze the relationship between scientific specimen and aesthetic object. I will utilize scholarship dealing with the history of European botanical study and collection theory to situate my discussion. My investigation will interrogate the boundaries between scientific thought and visual culture and explore how the creation of herbariums was not only a scientific practice but also a social one. ______
Emily Cloutier ______
Emily Cloutier is in her second year of master degree in Art Conservation with a concentration in paper at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She completed her undergraduate degree in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University and went on to work in an art gallery and artist’s studio in Montreal before redirecting her studies towards art conservation.
The Material History of Iron Gall Ink Through the Lens of the Agnes Etherington Art Collection
Amongst the many treasures held in the Agnes Etherington’s European art collection there are a number of 14th to 19th century pen and ink drawings. Given the time period of their creation, it is likely that the medium used includes iron gall ink. Iron gall ink is notorious amongst art conservators for its instability, even more so considering the ink’s longstanding use in both writing and artistic endeavors from the 5th to the 19th century. Despite being known for its unusual deterioration rate, it was favoured across Europe over other historic brown and black inks, significantly so by the end of the 15th century. Historical documents discuss the ink’s superior physical qualities, both in its use as well as in its ease of manufacture. From its over 1300 year history, there exists textual records of roughly 250 recipes for the making of iron gall ink, not including the innumerable amount never committed to paper. Each of those recipes represents a specific geographic and socio-economic situation in combination with a specific material requirement or preference of both the ink creator and user. For conservators, each recipes also represents its own conservation challenge.
This project surveys a selection of drawings from the historic European art collection at the Agnes to positively identify the presence of iron gall ink, characterize the ink recipes, assess the current condition of the drawings and provide long-term conservation recommendations. Methods of analysis will involve ultra-violet photography, X-ray fluorescence (XRF), microchemical testing and Raman spectroscopy in order to identify component metals and organic materials. Material analysis links the contemporary researcher to the physical experiences of the drawing creator and gives context to how the drawings physically came to be. ______
Megan Doxsey-Whitfield, Daniel Doyle, Anne-Marie Guerin, Lisa Imamura, Gyllian Porteous, Carolyn Savage, Sophia Zweifel ______
Those in the Netherworld Sing: Considering the Intangible in Conserving Dissociated Ancient Objects
The Queen’s University Master of Art Conservation Program study collection contains a number of Egyptian coffin lid fragments believed to date to the Third Intermediate Period (1069--663 BCE). The pieces formerly belonged to the Stanford Art Museum. During a period of deaccessioning in the 1990s, a set of coffin lid fragments from the collection was divided between the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum in Berkeley, and the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) in Ottawa, for research and education. In 2014, CCI donated ten of its fragments to Queen’s. The ten fragments represent a small fraction of multiple coffin lids. Eight fragments are painted with images associated with the afterlife and hieroglyphs of traditional offering formulae. In Ancient Egyptian cultures, recitation of the coffin texts was essential to provide for the departed in the afterlife. With this in mind, students from the graduating classes of 2015 and 2016 chose to focus not on the physical integrity but instead on the intangible value of the fragments. The field of conservation has evolved to recognize many facets of value. This includes understanding the relationship of an object with its source community as inherent and vital. Most work in this area has been done in partnership with living communities; how might conservators approach the conservation of ancient artifacts for which no living source community can be consulted? Interdisciplinary collaboration informed the decision to pursue digital reconstruction of the fragments followed by the proposed creation of an audio recording of the reunited texts. While Ancient Egyptian is an extinct language, Coptic is considered as an appropriate substitute for the continued, albeit imperfect, reading of the texts.
Megan Doxsey-Whitfield is a 2015 graduate from the object's stream of the Queen's University Master of Art Conservation program. She has worked at The Field Museum in Chicago where she treated a collection of bronze sculptures by artist Malvina Hoffman. Megan is currently at the Canadian Conservation Institute where she works on skins, bone, wood, and metals from archaeological sites in the Canadian arctic. Megan has a B.A. in Art History from the University of British Columbia. While in Vancouver, she worked as a pre-program intern at the Museum of Anthropology, and the Museum of Vancouver.
Daniel Doyle holds undergraduate degrees in Egyptology and Celtic Studies from the University of Toronto and a master's degree in Art Conservation from Queen's University. Danny has worked previously in the sacred necropolis of Abydos, Egypt, conserving two Middle Kingdom human burials (c. 2000BCE) as well as the burial chamber of a previously unknown Second Intermediate Period pharaoh (c.1650BCE).
Daniel works for Parks Canada as an archaeological conservator, helping to care for the nation’s 30 million artefacts and over 160 national historic sites. Danny is knowledgeable in Egyptian hieroglyphs and is fluent in Irish Gaelic.
Anne-Marie Guérin is a graduate student specializing in the conservation of artifacts in the Master’s of Art Conservation Program at Queen’s University. Her interests include the conservation of archaeological and painted objects. Her current research consists in the analysis of materials used in the making of a 12th and 13th century Byzantine wall painting. She will be ending her studies this summer with an internship on an Etruscan archaeological excavation in Italy.
Lisa Imamura is currently a student in the Queen's University Master of Art Conservation program, focusing on the preservation of three-dimensional art and material culture. Prior to studying at Queen's, Lisa completed a degree in geological sciences at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY, and worked at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, AK. Most recently, she completed a summer internship in the Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador Archaeological Conservation Laboratory in St. John's, NL.
Gyllian Porteous, B.A.S. in Chemistry and Classical Studies, will be completing her Master's degree in Art Conservation at Queen's University in 2016. Specializing in artifact conservation, Gyllian has pursued her interest in Greek and Roman Art History through internships at the Institute for Aegean Prehistory in East Crete and the Caere Excavation Project in Cerveteri, Italy. Most recently, she held an internship at the Art Gallery of Ontario focusing on the conservation of modern, plaster and bronze sculpture.
Carolyn Savage is an assistant objects conservator with Conservation Solutions Inc. Ottawa ON. Her experience includes the National Gallery of Canada, completing a comprehensive treatment of an Italian equestrian bronze sculpture, furniture and decorative art conservation at the Canadian Museum of History, the MacLachlin woodworking museum, and archaeological field conservation at Caere, Italy. She is a graduate of the Master of Art Conservation program at Queen’s University.
Sophia Zweifel (MAC 2015) holds a BA and MA in Art History from the University of British Columbia and University College London (UCL). Sophia has recently completed the Master of Art Conservation program at Queen’s University, specializing in the conservation of artifacts. She has performed pre-program and curriculum internships at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the UCL Special Collections Library, the Canadian Museum of History, and the Canadian Conservation Institute. Since graduating, Sophia has worked conservation contracts at the McCord museum in Montreal, and with Conservation of Sculpture, Monuments and Objects (CSMO). She is now embarking on a one-year fellowship in Textile Conservation at the Canadian Conservation Institute. ______
Notes ______
Poster designed by Lauren Bird
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Acknowledgements ______
The GVCA Conference Committee would like to thank the following people for their generous assistance, support, and encouragement in making Context and Meaning XV: Sensing Matter(s) possible:
Dr. Joan Schwartz (Head of Art History & Art Conservation) Dr. Una D’Elia (Graduate Chair, Department of Art) Dr. John Potvin (Concordia University) Dawn Lloyd (Graduate Programme Assistant) Diane Platt (Administrative Assistant) Emily Harmsen (IT/VRU Assistant)
Department of Art History and Art Conservation Department of Religion Dean of Graduate Studies: Student Initiatives Fund Office of the Principal School of Graduate Studies Society of Graduate and Professional Students Queen’s Quarterly
Agnes Etherington Art Centre (AEAC) Barry Fagan (Financial Coordinator)
Pan Chancho and Card’s Bakery (Caterers)
Members of the Jury Panel
Session Chairs