Gateway to art

Faculty of Fine Arts

Talking About Art

Art History & Visual Studies

Artist’s talk: Sonja Ahlers

Artist’s talk: Sonja Ahlers

Sonja Ahlers is a visual artist and writer from the unceded territories of the (Lekwungen) speaking peoples, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations (Victoria, BC, Canada).

Her books are challenging to classify and can be found in several different sections of the library. 1994’s A Wandering Eye was the first of many self-published books that circulated mainly through the underground “penpal” network of DIY punk rock and Riot Grrrl zines. Ahlers attracted national attention with Temper, Temper, published by Insomniac Press in 1998, followed by Fatal Distraction in 2004. In 2010, Drawn & Quarterly published The Selves, and in 2021, Conundrum Press published Swan Song.

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Artist’s talk: Justin Seiji Waddell

Artist’s talk: Justin Seiji Waddell

Justin Seiji Waddell is an artist and Associate Professor in the School of Visual Art at the Alberta University of the Arts in Mohkinstsis (Calgary), Alberta. He is currently the Vice President of CARFAC National, Board member of Peripheral
Review, C the Visual Art Foundation, the New Media Caucus, the Immigrant Council for Arts Innovation, and the Arts,
Culture, and Education Committee (ACE) of the National Association of Japanese Canadians. He has worked in various
capacities at several artist-run centers, festivals, galleries, and magazines in Canada, including Prefix Photo, Trinity Square Video, Lola Magazine, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the New Gallery, Emmedia, and Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival. He has served as the Director at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, the Director of the Stride Art Gallery Association, and as a founding member with the every-age art and music venue, Local Library in Calgary, Alberta.

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Michael Reed

Michael Reed

Welcome to The Inspired Podcast, a podcast hosted by UVic inspire program, which focuses on STEM for social impact. This season, we’re stepping beyond the syllabus and engaging in conversations with some of your favourite professors. Today we have Doctor Michael Reed, whose research focuses on early medieval Western Europe and who has won a number of excellence in teaching awards.

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Artist’s talk: Debra Yepa-Pappan

Artist’s talk: Debra Yepa-Pappan

Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez Pueblo/Korean) is a visual artist and the co-founding director of exhibitions and programs at the Center for Native Futures, a contemporary art space located in the heart of Downtown Chicago that is dedicated to Native artists. She previously served as the Community Engagement Coordinator at the Field Museum, where her work was crucial in developing the current Native Truths exhibition.

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Artist’s talk: Julie Edel Hardenberg

Artist’s talk: Julie Edel Hardenberg

Julie Edel Hardenberg (b. 1971) was born and raised in Nuuk, Kalaallit
Nunaat/Greenland. She studied art in Finland, Norway, and England before gaining her MA in Art theory and Communication at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She lives and works in Copenhagen where she has acquired the Novo Nordisk Foundation – Mads Øvlisen PhD scholarship in her practice-based artistic research: “Between power and powerlessness – the de/colonized mind “. She is affiliated to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and University of Copenhagen, beside her Associate Professor II position at Bergen Art Academy.

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Artist’s talk: Jessica Stockholder

Artist’s talk: Jessica Stockholder

Jessica Stockholder’s often sprawling constructions have played a crucial role in expanding the dialogue between sculpture and painting. The artist merges seemingly disparate, everyday objects, such as – lampposts, car parts, hoses, containers, extension cords, lumber, car parts, carpets and furniture. Drawing attention to these ordinary everyday materials, Stockholder engages the sensuality and pleasure evoked by color and formal …

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Ali Kazimi

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.

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Artist’s talk: Robert Burke

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.

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Artist’s talk: Skawennati

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.

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Gord Hill

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…

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Artist’s talk: Kemi Craig

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.

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Anne Dymond

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”

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Alice Ming Wai Jim

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.

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Artist’s talk: Joel Ong

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.

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Artist’s talk: Daniel Laskarin

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.

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Pat Bovey

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).

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Artist’s talk: Farheen Haq

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.

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Artist’s talk: Michael Doerksen

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.

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Dr. Chen Shen

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...

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Michèle Moss

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...

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Strength in Spirit

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...

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Blue and White

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

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Artist’s talk: Kelly Richardson

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.

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Pop goes the art!

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...

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JB MacKinnon on “The Day The World Stops Shopping”

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.

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