Ali Kazimi
A professor of cinema and media arts at Ontario’s York University, Ali Kazimi is a filmmaker, writer and visual artist whose work deals with race, social justice, migration, history, memory and archive. He was presented with the Governor General’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in Visual and Media Arts in 2019, as well as a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from UBC. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Artist’s talk: Robert Burke
As a residential school survivor of 10 years, Robert knows the power of art. Robert’s art speaks to his life stories that emerge from the various social and political injustices he has experienced throughout his life on systematic, community, and individual levels that have informed Robert’s intricate symbolism. Creating his own elements and symbols, Robert steps out of a defined cultural iconography to construct his own unique style.
Artist’s talk: Skawennati
Skawennati investigates history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her early adoption of cyberspace as both a location and a medium for her practice has produced groundbreaking projects such as CyberPowWow and TimeTraveller™. She creates machinimas—movies made in virtual environments—as well as still images, textiles and sculpture.
Gord Hill
Kwakwaka’wakw author, artist & activist Gord Hill is the 2024 Lehan Lecturer with UVic’s Faculty of Fine Arts. His free public talk ran on Thursday, March 7 in room A110 of UVic’s Turpin building. You can watch his talk in this video: An artist, author, political…
Artist’s talk: Kemi Craig
Kemi Craig is the 3rd Artist in Residence for the City of Victoria. Through her lived experience as a woman of African descent, her artistic practice moves through analogue and digital visual technologies to center futures for people with raced and gendered bodies. She creates multi-sensory, site-specific installations and performances, embedding community and audience engagement.
Anne Dymond
Dr. Anne Dymond, Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art, University of Lethbridge, speaks on “Getting the Keys to the Vault: How feminist, decolonizing and anti-racist work is changing collections.” This Distinguished Women Scholar lecture was presented as part of the “Latent: Critical Conversations about Collections”
Alice Ming Wai Jim
An art historian and curator based in Montreal, Dr Jim is currently Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Curatorial Studies and Decolonizing Art Institutions and founding editor-in-chief of the journal “Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas”. Jim has galvanized a new generation of students and scholars in the study of ethnocultural art histories that extends to curatorial studies and critical race museology.
Distinguished Women Scholar
Distinguished Women Scholar "Critical Conversations About Collections"Critical Conversations About Collections This roundtable discussion was filmed as part of the Distinguished Women Scholar event on Jan 27, 2024. Panelists include Lynda Gammon (Professor Emeritus,...
Artist’s talk: Joel Ong
Joel Ong is a media artist whose works connect scientific and artistic approaches to the environment, particularly with respect to sound and physical space. He is an Associate Professor in Computational Arts and Helen Carswell Chair in Community Engaged Research in the Arts at York University in Toronto.
Artist’s talk: Daniel Laskarin
With a background as a helicopter pilot/engineer, Daniel Laskarin’s experience in the moving dimensionality of flight and in translating the codes of navigational maps into physical space ultimately led to sculptural and multimedia objects and installations investigating the structure of perception mapped as knowledge and consciousness within everyday life.
Pat Bovey
Bovey has lectured and published extensively on western Canadian art over many years, including Western Voices in Canadian Art (2023), Don Proch: Masking and Mapping (2019 Manitoba Book Awards’ finalist) and Pat Martin Bates: Balancing on a Thread (2015 Alberta Book Awards’ recipient).
Artist’s talk: Farheen Haq
Farheen Haq’s multidisciplinary practice, which often employs video, installation and performance, is informed by interiority, relationality, family work, embodiment, ritual and spiritual practice. Haq’s current work focuses on understanding her family history on Turtle Island, caregiving and the body as a continuum of culture and time.
Southam Lecture: Erica Gies
Visiting Southam Lecturer Erica Gies WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2023 UVic's Department of Writing presents their 2023 Southam Lecture featuring Erica Gies, a National Geographic Explorer & award-winning independent journalist. Erica speaks on "Water Always...
ORION Lecture Series: Documentary Filmmaker Velcrow Ripper
Orion Lecture in Fine Arts Documentary Filmmaker Velcrow Ripper FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2023 | 7-9 PM ORION lecture by award-winning documentary filmmaker Velcrow Ripper, giving a lecture entitled “Cinema as a Tool for Transforming Crisis.” This is a recording of the...
Artist’s talk: Michael Doerksen
Michael Doerksen is a Canadian visual artist who has exhibited sporadically since the late 1990s. His practice is based mostly in sculpture with occasional detours in drawing, photography, and video. His figurative group sculpture entitled ‘chatbots’ along with his latest wood carvings based on whimsies are the focus of this talk.
How art seeds change, and seeds change art: Carey Newman
Indigenous artist, visionary, and creator of the powerful art installation ‘The Witness Blanket,’ Carey Newman guides us through some of his inspirational art pieces to teach us how art can be the key to enabling ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
Kelly Richardson discusses her work with Metallica on CBC As It Happens
In this interview, artist Kelly Richardson discusses her work with Metallica on CBC As It Happens. The opportunity began when director Tim Saccenti and artist/curator Dina Chang reached out about using some of Richardson’s art in a music video. “There’s a primal unease to her pieces that cuts to your core.”
Dr. Heather Igloliorte: Illavut/ Our Relatives: Transforming Relations Between Inuit and Institutions Through Care, Mentorship, and Collaboration.
In this presentation, Dr. Igloliorte discusses how she and other Inuit scholars, curators, artists and museum professionals are currently reshaping how circumpolar Inuit art is written about, exhibited and collected within Canada and around the world.
Paul Walde in conversation with KAG curator Charo Neville
Professor Paul Walde discusses his solo exhibition Glacial Resonance (from 2023) with Kamloops Art Gallery curator Charo Neville. Glacial Resonance shares the artist’s enduring concern about environmental crises, channelled through sound and video with the largest exhibition of his work to date.
Southam Lecture: David Beers on “The War on Journalists”
Visiting Southam Lecturer David Beers WEDNESDAY, Feb 12, 2023 When veteran journalist David Beers founded The Tyee two decades ago as one of Canada’s very first independent online-only news sites, he intended an “experiment to see if the nascent internet would allow...
Puppets Forsaken presents – The Noisebau
Puppets Forsaken presents THE NOISEBAU SUNDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2022 | 7:30 PMPhillip T. Young Recital Hall, MacLaurin Building, University of Victoria Puppets Forsaken (David Gifford & Natali Leduc)With work by Mowry BadenAnd a performance by Christopher Butterfield...
Dr. Chen Shen
Dr. Chen Shen Vice President of Art & Culture at Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)Museum and Object Being the Agency in Transforming Peoples’ Lives. Dr. Chen Shen serves as the Vice President of Art & Culture at Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), responsible for research...
Michèle Moss
Michèle Moss Dancer, choreographer, researcher Description As well as being co-founder of Calgary’s concert jazz dance company and community school DJD (Decidedly Jazz Danceworks), Michèle Moss is an associate professor with the University of Calgary’s Faculty of...
Creative Futures: “Documenting the Climate Crisis”
Fine Arts Dean's Speaker Series presents Creative Futures: "Documenting the Climate Crisis" Published JULY 6, 2022 How can the arts help people better understand the impact of the climate crisis? Discover how artists & scholars in the Faculty of Fine Arts are...
From a Ragged Edge, Daniel Laskarin explores possible futures
Continuing Studies at UVic presents A Ragged Edge, Daniel Laskarin explores possible futures Published JULY 5, 2022 An artist and a professor with the Department of Visual Arts, Daniel Laskarin’s practice is object based, materially and philosophically rooted; it...
Counter Mapping and Sinixt Resurgence
Marilyn James is a Smum iem Matriarch appointed by her Sinixt elders to uphold Sinixt protocols and laws in the Sinixt təmxʷúlaʔxʷ (homeland) under the laws of whuplak’n and smum iem. Her work has included the repatriation of 64 ancestral remains from museums and...
Living Lightly on the Earth
Visiting Scholar: Steve Mannell The Orion Series in Fine Arts proudly welcomes guest Steve Mannell, who will give an online lecture entitled, “Living Lightly on the Earth.” Built in 1976 by Solsearch Architects and the New Alchemy Institute as an “early...
Strength in Spirit
Strength in spirit Living with COVID-19 Artists work This last year has been a particularly challenging one for the art world. COVID-19 spread across the world like a wildfire, forcing us into a public lock-down. Confined physically, Indigenous artists have had to...
Blue and White
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria Dr. Heng Wu AGGV Curator of Asian Art Adjunct Assistant Professor, Art History and Visual Studies University of Victoria Marcus Milwright Department Chair, Professor Art History and Visual Studies
Islamic Tiles in Museums: Past, Present & Future
Visiting Scholar: Richard McClary Islamic tiles are always a challenge to present, as individually they are but one small part of a larger decorative programme. This talk offers a way to contextualise the objects and tell their stories more fully by examining the...
Artist’s talk: Kelly Richardson
This talk was offered in support of her exhibition, Halcyon Fog, curated by Charo Neville for Kamloops Art Gallery (2022). Using digital technologies, Kelly Richardson creates hyper-real, sublime, and spectacular landscapes that communicate underlying unsettling narratives. Her work asks us to consider what we truly value and where we might go from here.
Unmasking Meaning: Culture, Collection and Family
Description Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the University of Victoria is pleased to present: Monika ZessnikCurator North American Collections, Ethnologisches Museum Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Presented by UVic’s Department of Art History...
Megan Dickie in conversation with Kimberly Phillips
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria presents Megan Dickie in converation with Kimberly Phillips Published NOVEMBER 22, 2021 Professor Megan Dickie discusses her solo exhibition and publication Blue Skies at the AGGV with Kimberly Phillips. The AGGV is thrilled to launch...
UVic Writing’s 2021 Southam Lecture: Andrew Nikiforuk
Description As an author, journalist and contributing editor for The Tyee, Andrew Nikiforuk has written about the use—and abuse—of natural resources and wild landscapes in Canada for more than 30 years. Now, the Department of Writing is proud to have him as their...
Creative Futures: Sustainability & the Arts
Description Discover how Fine Arts scholars & researchers are responding to today’s defining issues in this new biannual Dean's Speaker Series. The climate crisis is one of the most urgent problems of our time, and the arts can play a vital role in helping people...
Pop goes the art!
Legacy Art Galleries exhibit unites two alumni through art Absurdist leopard-print paintings may not pop immediately to mind when you think of Victoria’s artistic legacy. But that’s an oversight a new Legacy Maltwood exhibit will address with Eric Metcalfe: Pop...
JB MacKinnon on “The Day The World Stops Shopping”
We can’t stop shopping. And yet we must. This is the consumer dilemma that noted author J.B. MacKinnon is addressing in this special Department of Writing Orion Lecture. The author of five books of nonfiction, MacKinnon is also an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic and Atlantic, as well as the Best American Science and Nature Writing.
Curator’s talk: Eden Grove AIR
Visual Arts Visiting Speaker series presents Eden Grove Artist in Residence Recorded SEPTEMBER 15, 2021 The Eden Grove Artist in Residence program (March to June 2021) offered artists the opportunity to be immersed in ancient temperate rainforest ecosystems while...
The Choice To Be Creative with Lindsay Delaronde
Heart Seed Creatives presents The Choice To Be Creative with Lindsay Delaronde Published SEPTEMBER 6, 2021 Chantal Solomon interviews Lindsay Delaronde about staying true to her chosen path as an Indigenous Artist while navigating modern notions of artistry. She...
Carey Newman: Hearts and Hands
Visual Arts Visiting Speaker series presents Carey Newman: Hearts and Hands Recorded June 22, 2021 Carey Newman, whose traditional name is Hayalthkin’geme, is a multi-disciplinary Indigenous artist, master carver, filmmaker, author and public speaker. Through his...
Dr Fahmida Suleman
Since the late 19th century, museums have devoted attention to Islamic art and craft, encompassing objects dating from the seventh century to the present. Ideas about how the diverse and fascinating visual and material cultures of the Islamic world should be displayed have changed significantly over time, reflecting the broader trends in museum practice.
Life Stories
Life Stories Exhibition brings to light a provocative array of visual and material culture from the University of Victoria Art Collections that engages with life stages and related rituals. The exhibition runs December 2, 2020 - April 3, 2021 at the Legacy Art Gallery...
Jennifer Baichwal
Discover the life story of the planet Join Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal in conversation with local writer, filmmaker and TV producer Barbara Todd Hager for this lively Orion Series discussion, which is part of the public programming for the exhibition Life...
Nonfiction Podcast
Nonfiction Podcast with David Leach & Deborah Campbell A conversation between UVic writing professors David Leach and Deborah Campbell (plus guest authors and experts) about the art, craft and ethics of researching, writing and revising creative nonfiction,...
Artist’s talk: Katie Bethune-Leamen
Visual Arts Visiting Speaker series presents Katie Bethune-Leamen Recorded OCTOBER 21, 2020 Katie Bethune-Leamen is a visual artist who works in sculpture and installation. Recent solo exhibitions include: La douche écossaise (Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto), Tom...
A glazed Stonepaste Bowl
What is stonepaste, and why was this material so important in the development of glazed pottery across the Islamic world? This talk considers a Medieval glazed stonepaste bowl from the Tushingham collection and looks at the ways in which the form and decoration were...
Handmade Pottery from Medieval Jordan
Why would anyone choose to form a ceramic vessel by hand when it is easier and quicker to make it on a potter’s wheel? This talk looks at two handmade pottery vessels from medieval Jordan and considers what the technological and visual characteristics might tell us...
A Painting from Hama
What unusual substance was used to make this painting? This talk considers a monochrome painting on paper made in 2005, and discusses the cultural significance of the substance used in the paint.Figure 1.Painting on paper by Sameer Tanbur. Hama, 2005. Private...