Videos
In Conversation with Tarah Hogue and Leah Taylor
March 2, 2022
We are pleased to share this dynamic online conversation with artist Charlene Vickers, Tarah Hogue and Leah Taylor.
'Big Blue Smudge' presents recent paintings and new large-scale sculptural works by Charlene Vickers, an Anishinaabe artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Vickers’ practice explores memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands. Vickers' work responds to the Coast Salish territory she has resided on for the last 30 years, while simultaneously acknowledging her deep connection to Wauzhushk Onigum in Northwestern Ontario, the place where she is from. For Vickers, territory is a place of existence rather than one of ownership.
In Conversation with Jude Griebel and Leah Taylor
Thursday, July 15, 2021
Join artist Jude Griebel and curator Leah Taylor as they discuss Griebel's current exhibition at the Kenderdine Art Gallery entitled, Illuminated Collapse.
Conversation with The Shadow of the Sun Artists and Curators
Artists Ross Bleckner and Zachari Logan will be in conversation with Shadow of the Sun curators Wayne Baerwaldt, Jennifer McGregorand Leah Taylor around the exhibition themes of loss, memory and ephemerality. The artists will speak with the curators about their work in the exhibition and discuss how they use flowers to represent societal and personal melancholy, as well as reverential beauty. The artists will also reflect on the nature of their collaboration and how their ongoing creative exchange has developed over the years. The talk will be moderated by exhibition co-curator Jennifer McGregor.
Jude Griebel
Artist Jude Griebel takes us on a walking tour of his current exhibition, Illuminated Collapse, in the Kenderdine Art Gallery at the University of Saskatchewan.
Griebel completed a month-long artist residency with the KAG before opening the solo exhibition. Illuminated Collapse is on view from May 28 - August 21, 2021. Viewing available only by appointment.
Elliott Elliott
tofeelclose is a space for individual and collective reflection. The project gathers momentum and shape through every voice. Contributors offer unfolding ideas and inquiries, lay bare obsessions, wade through the mundane, stage a place for an encounter. Look for ways to feel close. Artist commissions will be added biweekly from July to November 2020, thereafter archived.
In collaboration with AKA we presented
Correspondence: a project of University of Saskatchewan Art Galleries and Collection
Curated by jake moore
Episode 6
Episode 5 part 2
Episode 5 part 1
Episode 4
Episode 3
Episode 2
Episode 1
"Beads in the blood," Walking Tour
#AGALive
As part of #AGALive for the Art Gallery of Alberta
On Monday, March 8th, 2021 at 4 pm MST another enlightening #GGArts conversation between 2020 Governor General’s award recipient Ruth Cuthand and intermedia artist and gallery director, jake moore.
They will address Cuthand’s practice as “story work” and the role materials play in their construction, threading through the objects and actions in her current survey exhibition, “Beads in the Blood” curated by Felicia Gay.
In Conversation: Manar Moursi and Nadia Kurd
Manar Moursi discusses their exhibition 'the loudspeaker and the tower' with Nadia Kurd and Leah Taylor. The exhibition runs from September 18 to December 19, 2020 at the University of Saskatchewan College Art Galleries and is co-curated by Emily Fitzpatrick and Toleen Touq, with an exhibition essay by Nadia Kurd.
Manar Moursi is an architect and artist. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Moursi also holds a dual Masters degree in Architecture and Urban Policy from Princeton University. In 2011 she founded Studio Meem: an interdisciplinary research studio.
In Conversation: Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill
Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill discusses their solo exhibition 'four effigies for the end of property' with curator Leah Taylor. The exhibition runs from September 18 to December 19, 2020 at the University of Saskatchewan College Art Galleries.
L'Hirondelle Hill is a Metis artist and writer who lives and works on the unceded lands of Skwxwu7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
Voice of Hearing
YOU- HOUR 7 (18-19 GMT) (13-14 EST) (11-12 CST) (10-11 PST)
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN ART GALLERIES AND SQUINT PRESS PRESENTS the launch of Vivian Darroch-Lozowski’s book Voice of Hearing with the author, jake moore, Daniela Cascella, Christof Migone, Ann West
Originally published in 1984, Voice of Hearing was found in a used book shop in London, Ontario by Christof Migone. Its titular provocation led to this re-presentation complete with a generative introductory essay by Migone, a newly crafted postface from Vivian, and re-packaging with eloquent cover art by Dominique Pétrin.
This online event is hosted by jake moore, Director of the University of Saskatchewan Art Galleries and Collections. The hour will feature an excerpted conversation between Vivian Darroch-Lozowski, author and professor emerita of the University of Toronto, currently based in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan; the original editor of the book, Ann J. West; the writer, researcher, lecturer and editor, Daniela Cascella; and Christof Migone artist, curator, and writer and the editor at the audio-centric Squint Press responsible for this re-publication. The conversation will be interspersed with readings from the text by Vivian and excerpts of Migone’s introductory essay.
Contemplative, intricate, here the philosopher Vivian Darroch-Lozowski develops a phenomenology of hearing. Where theorizing is a present-tense action. Where a landscape teaches waiting. Where to be in a body is to gesture to another. Where subjectivity is the transformation of language. Where attention releases nascent energy. Where to hear is also to transform. Where myth is a gate. A close attending to this text, which is also a unicorn, will delicately open the reader’s time-sense.
—Lisa Robertson, author of Cinema of the Present, The Weather, Nilling, and The Baudelaire Fractal
“What is on these pages is what I am which is what I have never been”: Vivian Darroch-Lozowski’s meditation on coming into being through the act of writing is at once familiar scenario —a narrating of the process of creation— and distinctive unswerving unscrolling improvisation. Its visionary sensibility and self-exegesis and sheer blizzardy accumulation of word, image, observation, and insight attunes to the play of sound in ways that make radical modes of hearing fundamental to its ethos.
—David Grubbs, author of The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape
Critical Conversations
Hosted by the University Art Galleries and Collections at the University of Saskatchewan, this annual series brings into the room critical thinkers that are working in parallel to our mandate to make public historical and contemporary art and creative practices that confront the urgent and critical matters of our time, whether they be social, political, aesthetic, intellectual, environmental or cultural in nature.
2021
This year we begin our inaugural series with Natalie Loveless whose 2019 book, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, seemingly presaged the pandemic. Her call though, was to acknowledge the radically shifting terrains of making and knowledge production and how they intertwine and co-constitute. As she articulates in the book, “New hybrid forms demand new, expanded categories if they are to be accountably dealt with.”
Our series will centre relationality and accountability as our guests query current pedagogical, knowledge sharing, as well as exhibition and collection structures and institutions with propositions for re-figurations towards a more equitable future.
Please join us for these three conversations.
NATALIE LOVELESS
How to Make Art at the End of the World: Revisited
February 11, 2021, 7pm
As an intervention into normative scholarly practice, research-creation has gained increasing visibility and validity over the past decade within the academy. Often mobilizing interdisciplinary and collaborative methods, with one foot - always - firmly grounded in artistic literacies, research-creation asks us to attend, with detail, to the methods we mobilize as well as our modes of output and publication at the level of constitutive form. This talk will return to some of the key provocations laid out in the Loveless' 2019 book, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, and consider what has shifted in the tumultuous years since its publication.
Natalie Loveless is an artist, theorist, curator. She is Associate Professor of contemporary art and theory in the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta, located in ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan) on Treaty Six territory (Canada), where she also directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory, co-leads the Faculty of Arts’ Signature Area in Research-Creation. Her recent books, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Duke Univerity Press, 2019) and Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation (Univerity of Alberta Press, 2019) examine debates surrounding research-creation and its institutionalization, paying particular attention to what it means – and why it matters – to make and teach art research-creationally in the North American university today. She is also co-editor of Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem (Intellect Press, 2020). In 2020 Loveless was elected to the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.
DYLAN ROBINSON
thá:ytset: shxwelí li te shxwelítemelh xíts'etáwtxw / Reparative Aesthetics: The Museum’s Incarceration of Indigenous Life
March 5, 2021, 2pm - 3:30pm
Across the globe, museums filled with glass and plexiglass vitrines display collections of Indigenous belongings. These cases render the life they contain into objects of display, things to be seen but not touched. Alongside the life of ancestors who take material form, thousands of Indigenous songs collected by ethnographers on wax cylinder recordings, reel-to-reel tape and electronic formats are similarly confined in museums. These songs also hold life, but of different kinds to that of their material cousins. For Indigenous people, experiencing these systems of display and storage are often traumatic because of the ways in which they maintain the separation of kinship at the heart of settler colonialism. To re-assess the role of the museum as a place that confines life is to put into question the museum’s relationship to incarceration. If the museum is a carceral space, how then might we define repatriation in relation to practices of “re-entry” and the reconnection of kinship? In what ways might the context of prison abolition apply to the museum? These questions, among others, are increasingly been focalized through the reparative aesthetics of Indigenous artists.
Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist and writer, and the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. He is the author of Hungry Listening (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) on Indigenous and settler colonial forms of listening. His current research focuses on the material and sonic life of Indigenous ancestors held by museums, and reparative artistic practices that address these ancestors incarceration in museums.
DYLAN ROBINSON: thá:ytset: shxwelí li te shxwelítemelh xíts'etáwtxw
SKAWENNATI : Mohawks in Jetpacks
Skawennati will present some of her art projects from this millenium, in which she imagines Indigenous people in the future.
March 25, 2021, 1pm – 2:30pm
Skawennati makes art that addresses history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her work has been widely presented in both group exhibitions and solo shows and is included in public and private collections, such as the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. She was honoured to receive the 2019 Salt Spring National Art Prize Jurors’ Choice Award, a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and a Visiting Artist Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. She’s represented by ELLEPHANT.
Born in Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati holds a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, where she resides. She is Co-Director of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research-creation network. Their projects include the Skins workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Digital Media as well as the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF).
Re-Mapping the Terrain
a reemergence assembly
KEYNOTE PRESENTATIONS
Friday, April 8, 2022
6:30pm - 8pm
Murray 299 (Lecture Hall above the Snelgrove)
in person, and online
Join Zoom Meeting: https://usask-ca.zoom.us/j/97545110512
Alyssa Fearon (Director/Curator, Dunlop Art Gallery)
Tarin Dehod (Executive Director, AKA Artist Run)
Crystal Mowry (Director of Programs, MacKenzie Art Gallery)
in conversation with
Leah Taylor,
(Curator, University of Saskatchewan Art Galleries and Collections)
Each of the invited speakers are active in their restructuring and rethinking of organizational governance and/or are proposing new ways in which institutions present work, the roles that they play in building community and how to foster and develop truly sustainable practices.
While this is taken directly from Fearon’s bio, each of them has committed to practices that 'prioritize the voices of historically underrepresented groups'. Dehod in her context has been working to understand the role of the artist-run centre in joint ownership with communities, as a space that is created and given meaning through the actions of its users. In response to assuming her position at the MacKenzie, Mowry stated, “While an institution can hold only so much of what makes its respective communities who they are, I am honoured to be learning alongside colleagues who share a commitment to making our work more porous, more experimental, and ultimately, more human.
We are hoping for this assembly to afford exactly these actions!
BIOS
ALYSSA FEARON currently holds the position of Director/Curator at Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan. Integral to Fearon’s curatorial practice is a community-based approach that seeks to foster connections with groups that have been historically and systemically excluded from the gallery milieu. In 2018, Fearon was the inaugural Curator of Nuit Blanche Toronto’s Scarborough zone. The interdisciplinary exhibition, titled STYLL, featured the work of more than 30 artists, authors, and performers. Fearon was also Curator at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba (2018-2020). She has held lecturer positions at York University, University of Toronto Scarborough, and Brandon University. Raised in Scarborough, Ont., Fearon is now based on Treaty 4 territory in Regina, Sask. She holds an MBA from the Schulich School of Business and an MA in Art History from York University. Fearon is also a Salzburg Global Fellow.
TARIN DEHOD Tarin Dehod was born on unceded Mi’kmaq and Wabanaki Confederacy land originally known as Epekwitk and now lives and works on Treaty 6 Land that encompasses the traditional homeland of numerous First Nations, including Cree, Dene, Plains Cree, Nakota, Saulteaux, and Ojibwe, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. Since 2014, Tarin has served as the Executive Director of AKA, working to understand the role of the artist-run centre in joint ownership with communities, as a space that is created and given meaning through the actions of its users.
CRYSTAL MOWRY (she/her) is the Director of Programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. She previously held the position of Senior Curator at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery where she oversaw the gallery’s exhibitions, collections, and publishing activities for over a decade. Her work often explores the tension between perceived authenticity and troubled forms of representation. As a curator operating primarily within the context of a public art museum, she treats her role as equal parts co-conspirator and translator, often seeking ways to support artists in the development of new projects. Her solo projects with Ontario-based artists Maggie Groat and Ernest Daetwyler have received Exhibition of the Year Awards from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries (now Galleries Ontario Galeries) and in 2020 she was a recipient of a Waterloo Region Arts Award. She has written curatorial and experimental texts for various artist-focused publications on the work of Brendan Fernandes, Shary Boyle, Mark Clintberg, and Deanna Bowen. She regularly participates on advisory panels and industry juries, most recently the Scotiabank Photography Award (2021).
LEAH TAYLOR
Re-Mapping the Terrain: a re-emergence assembly: DAY 2
CONVOCATION HALL : Peter McKinnon Building, room 120
NB In response to ongoing health concerns coupled with the desire to create increased communication, the Saturday event will have a limited attendance of 35 people; keynote speakers, invited participants, MFA Candidates and the organizing committee.
all others, please join us online!
Drawing responsively from the dialogue from the evening before and the prompts of response-ability and sustainability, members of the cultural ecology of Sasaktoon will engage in a public conversation.
This process in many ways reflects on what was begun by USASK galleries in concert with David La Riviere of PAVED at the beginning of the pandemic, with a small series of Saskatoon based community programming meetings as a way to check in on one another, but also to help bolster our individual capacities by knowing where and what people were doing within the ecology. This led to a sharing of many things including participation of several centres in the AKA hosted project, tofeelclose.
We need to take up again new methods of connection and care, articulate the spaces and places of contact and intersection, and are very grateful for your participation here.
Session one: Response-ability
11-12:30pm
https://usask-ca.zoom.us/j/96507787504?pwd=RkZ0N2o2dFVORXpNUm53UXRkUjB1dz09
Participants will be invited to consider both their responsibilities (to audiences, communities and each other), and what abilities one has to deliver on those commitments. What in your professional positionality informs the capacity to respond and what might need to shift to increase one’s ability to respond better or more responsibly? Can we collectively identify our ecology’s needs at this moment through better understanding of one another’s specific response-ability? Could this understanding lead to a redistribution of labours, concerns, and practices?
Session two: 1:30-3pm : Sustainability
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://usask-ca.zoom.us/j/96394930934?pwd=TzFud3lkTE43bmVRTUNuYWREUWV5Zz09
Each of us is part of a project or space that has endured through the pandemic when others have not, likely due to our response-ability. What do you now imagine to be requisite for building sustainable practices and approaches to ensure a viable cultural ecology?
Our provincial growth plan does not include us in depth and defines us collectively as ‘culture industries’. What are the necessary supports and tactics required to sustain and deepen our practices both alongside this capitalist and extractivist governing drive, and otherwise? What is needed to sustain wellbeing and longevity within this community? What relationships must we foster?
Queering Scopophilia: Disrupting the Cisgender Gaze in Contemporary Art
What? Art photographers and filmmakers are increasingly turning their lenses on trans subjects. However, some cisgender media artists are prioritizing their artistic visions and their cisgender gaze over participants’ agency. Consequently, such media art projects, regardless of intent, have caused harm to some trans people. How can media artists ensure that trans subjects and proposed collaborators have agency within the creative process? What new opportunities for representation and visibility does a T4T lens allow? Join Common Weal Community Arts and the University of Saskatchewan's University Art Galleries for a rich discussion on this topic. This event will include presentations by panelists Jacq Brasseur, Cat Haines, and Evie Ruddy, followed by a discussion moderated by Common Weal Community Arts Executive Director, Risa Payant, and University Art Galleries and Collection at the University of Saskatchewan Director, jake moore.
When? Saturday, April 17 from 4:00 to 6:00pm.
Where? Please register for the discussion by emailing: hello@commonweal.ca
About the Panelists:
Jacq Brasseur (they/them) is a white non-binary, trans masculine community organizer and non-profit leader who currently works as a consultant in Regina, SK. Having worked as an Executive Director for multiple 2SLGBTQ+ organizations over the past decade, Jacq focuses their time on exploring how to ‘queer’ the non-profit sector and how to support queer and trans people in developing leadership, entrepreneurship and civic engagement skills. A registered social worker, Jacq is currently finishing up a Masters of Education in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Regina. Jacq is currently the Interim Chair of TransSask, the Chair of Briarpatch Magazine and the National Director for Fierté Canada Pride, the national association of Canadian Pride organizations. Jacq is excited to bring their perspective, not as an artist, but as a former leader of a community organization that works with queer and trans artists and participants. Jacq will offer their ideas about how to meaningfully, purposefully and actively protect trans people as participants and co-collaborators in community projects.
Cat Haines (she/her) is a genderqueer trans woman, dyke, and academic/artist weirdo based on Treaty 4 Territory. Cat recently defended her Master’s thesis in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Regina, which examined the abjection and exclusion of trans women and their bodies from feminist and lesbian theory, media, and pornography. Cat is also the current resident of Ender Gallery, an artist residency set in the videogame Minecraft, where she is exploring her bodily and embodied history at the intersections of her identities as a white trans woman, and dyke. Cat will engage with her background in critical feminisms, and gender theory to develop a theoretical framework through which we can examine the cisgender gaze and how it is often deployed in contemporary artistic works, as well as how we might conceptualize a more compassionate and expansive T4T gaze.
Evie Ruddy (they/them) is a socially engaged, interdisciplinary artist, and PhD student in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University. As a PhD Fellow with Carleton’s Transgender Media Lab, Evie is helping to develop an online database of audiovisual works made by transgender, non-binary, Two Spirit, intersex, and gender non-conforming filmmakers. In 2019, Evie partnered with UR Pride Centre for Sexuality and Gender Diversity to lead Stories That Move You, a portrait and digital storytelling project by and for transgender and non-binary people in Saskatchewan. As a PhD student, Evie is researching the ethics of documenting trans bodies. They are particularly interested in the role of improvisatory practices for fostering productive spaces for trans sitters and co-creators to exercise agency over how they are represented. Evie will share their experience as a “model” in cisgender photographer Blake Little’s FLUID, reflect on their role as a photographer in Stories That Move You, and draw on their scholarly work to discuss the importance of prioritizing trans sitters as collaborators rather than centring the gaze of a presumed cisgender audience.
About the Moderators:
jake moore (she/her) is an artist that works at the intersections of material, text, and vocality, a PhD candidate in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill and Assistant Professor/Director of University Art Galleries and Collection at the University of Saskatchewan. moore considers her primary medium to be space; this idea expands the understanding of her artistic practice to include administrative projects, academic engagement, writing, and other acts of building capacity as a sculptural method – one that changes the form and volume of public spaces in active endeavor towards resonance. Her large scale and materially loaded site exhibitions are sensorially driven architectures, often using scent and sound, or its absence, as primary materials. She has exhibited throughout the lands presently known as Canada. Born on Treaty One Territory, moore currently lives and works between Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal located on the unceded territory of the Haudenosaunee and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan on Treaty 6.
Risa Payant (she/her) is a cis queer arts professional from Treaty 4 territory, dedicated to connecting artists to broader community building efforts in meaningful and mutually beneficial ways. She is the current Executive Director of Common Weal Community Arts, Saskatchewan’s only arts organization devoted solely to socially-engaged practice. She also maintains a freelance consultancy focused on supporting peers in making active change in their organizations and communities. Risa became involved in the cultural community as a student at the University of British Columbia, where she immersed herself in roles at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and ArtsStarts in Schools. Since settling in Regina, she has contributed to Saskatchewan’s vibrant arts sector through positions at SK Arts, Regina Folk Festival, and MacKenzie Art Gallery.
Beadin' 2021
"Students, faculty, staff, and alumni are invited to join guests from the Indigenous arts community to share in conversation, creativity, and virtual collaboration. Drop-in beading sessions will be held throughout Indigenous Achievement Week. Experienced, aspiring, and brand-new beaders will be encouraged to share digital images of their works-in-progress, which will be added to a mosaic digitally quilted together over the course of the week and shared back as a reflection of community."
Left to right: Vanessa Hyggen (2), Ryanne Torrence, Jenni Delowski, Michayla van de Velde, Cree Longjohn, Sandy Bonny, Erica Bird, Jennifer Sedgewick, Emily Koob, Michayla van de Velde, Sandy Bonny (3), Jacqueline Germin
You can share your images for Beadin' 2021 here.
anohc kipasikônaw/ we rise /niipawi
You can read more about anohc kipasikônaw/ we rise /niipawi here.
Ongoing:
- Along with the 13 Slate Steps, the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery will host a temporary installation of the painting, Poundmaker Intercedes, by Kent Monkman 7-10. Its exhibition is made possible through the generosity of the Chief Poundmaker Museum and Gallery, specifically though the kind assistance of curator, Floyd Favel and Milton Tootoosis.
- Historical Portraits plus: Beginning with Annie Maude “Nan” McKay (BA1915), we will present portraits of Indigenous graduates of USask to surround current students and members of the university community with their predecessors and make evident the long line of Indigenous presence and success within the institution and highlight the formative role Indigenous Knowledges have played in building the contemporary institution. This is an active building and an ongoing process, something we are doing now. To mark this becoming, we will have a portrait studio set up to photograph current students and participants in the process.
Friday Jan. 10, 2020
- 12:00 Lunch and Learn: jake moore, Director of Campus Galleries and Collection will share a talk titled: “Storied Matter and teaching a stone to talk inverted: Mattered story and learning how to listen”.
Thursday Jan. 9, 2020
- 12:00 Lunch and Learn: Sandy Bonny, team lead for ISAP in the College of Arts and Science, is a non-Indigenous member of Saskatoon’s Treaty 6 community with an interdisciplinary background in Earth science and the literary arts – she’s excited to talk about rocks as generative materials for both art and ‘scientific storytelling’.
Wednesday Jan. 8, 2020
- 12:30 pm Lunch and Learn: Randy Morin is a storyteller and language keeper from Big River First Nation, and a faculty member in Indigenous Studies – this term, among other classes, he is teaching Cree 110: nehiyawetan, Let Us Speak Cree! with Indigenous Student Achievement Pathways (ISAP).
Tuesday Jan. 7, 2020
- 12:30 pm Lunch and Learn: Lyndon Tootoosis, Nêhiyawak, "Battle River” Cree, member of the Poundmaker First Nation. Lyndon is a carver, storyteller, and interpreter of petroglyphs and is joining our campus community as the newest Indigenous Artist in Residence with Campus Art Galleries and Collection.
Monday, Jan. 6, 2020
- 10:30 am Smudge and blessing, opening remarks followed by a small reception.
- 1:00 pm Blanket Exercise
anohc kipasikonaw/ we rise /niipawi
anohc kipasikônaw/ we rise / niipawi
This project has developed from a concept proposed by Vanessa Hyggen and Sandy Bonny (Office of the Vice Dean Indigenous, College of Arts & Science) and begins with reclaimed materials: 13 Cambrian slate stairs that were removed from the Thorvaldson Building, having been worn and reshaped by 100 years of student and faculty footsteps. 2020 Indigenous Artist in Residence, Lyndon Tootoosis working with Hyggen, Bonny, and members of the campus community, carved the names of the 13 moons of the lunar calendar that guides indigenous chronologies. While the project began in the Snelgrove Gallery in January of 2020, the carvings were completed during the plague year offsite. We wanted to collectively animate their installation into the foyer of the Snelgrove Gallery in the Murray Building, to find a way to reach out to the students and community we would ordinarily host, as one of the key sites of intersection between the university and its multiple publics.
On the day of each full moon, we have gathered to send a message online to Indigenous students, faculty, and allies. We begin each lunar event with ceremony performed by the Elders who have been with us since inception, Evelyn Linklater and Florence Highway. This is not broadcast, but allows the new ‘moon’ to enter into the space in a good way. They then bring a message to the audience in Nehiyawan and English to introduce the teaching of the moon. As Evelyn and Florence are from Pelican Narrows further north of Saskatoon, they often share a different name for the moon, for not only is the name different in dialects, it is named to reflect what is happening within the natural world at that time and reflective of that location. After this orientation by our Elders, a special guest brings Indigenous knowledge specific to their own arena of expertise or practice.
Vanessa Hyggen brought forward the name for the project, anohc kipasikônaw, with translation provided by her mother. Hyggen, Bonny, Tootoosis and jake moore, curator of the project, agreed on the rough English equivalent, we rise knowing that the anohc as a sense of now, today, or immediacy was not overt in the English as so much is implicit in this language, and the Michif niipawi, or ‘stand up’ according to Norman Fleury’s 2013 dictionary produced by the Gabriel Dumont Institute. The three languages together created a poem that recognized their distinctions but showed how they could operate together:
Now we rise up, we rise, stand up.
Each event is broadcast live and documented to share online. The video documentation of this project was made possible with the support of a SK ARTS Special Initiatives Fund and the kind collaboration of PAVED ARTS, Kyle Zurevinski, ISAP, Clint Neufeld, and the office of the Vice Dean Indigenous.
Friday, October 2, 2020 – pimihâwipîsim / ᐱᒥᐦᐋᐏᐲᓯᒼ / Migrating Moon
Sunday, November 1, 2020 – ihkopîwipîsim / ᐃᐦᑯᐲᐏᐲᓯᒼ / Frost Moon
Tuesday, December 1, 2020 – opâwahcikanasîsipîsim / ᐅᐹᐘᐦᒋᑲᓇᓰᓯᐲᓯᒼ / Frost Exploding Moon
Wednesday, December 30, 2020 – kisîpîsim / ᑭᓰᐲᓯᒼ / Great Moon
Friday, January 29, 2021 – mikisiwipîsim / ᒥᑭᓯᐏᐲᓯᒼ / Eagle Moon
Sunday, February 28, 2021 – niskipîsim / ᓂᐢᑭᐲᓯᒼ / Goose Moon
Monday, March 29, 2021 – ayîkipîsim / ᐊᔩᑭᐲᓯᒼ / Frog Moon
Wednesday, April 28, 2021 – sâkipakâwipîsim / ᓵᑭᐸᑳᐏᐲᓯᒼ / Leaf-budding Moon
Thursday, May 27, 2021 – pâskâwihowipîsim / ᐹᐢᑳᐏᐦᐅᐏᐲᓯᒼ / Egg-laying Moon
Friday, June 25, 2021 – paskowipîsim / ᐸᐢᑯᐏᐲᓯᒼ / Moulting Moon
Saturday, July 24, 2021 – ohpahowipîsim / ᐅᐦᐸᐦᐅᐏᐲᓯᒼ / Flying Up Moon
Monday, August 23, 2021 – takwâkipîsim / ᑕᑳᑭᐲᓯᒼ / Autumn Moon
Wednesday, September 21, 2021 – nôcihitowipîsim / ᓅᒋᐦᐃᑐᐏᐲᓯᒼ / Rutting Moon
MFA Artist Talks
2023
Fragments
Sahar Soheilisadigh
March 1, at 12:30pm
IN PERSON at the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
ONLINE via Zoom
I am an interdisciplinary Iranian artist based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. I hold an MA and BA in Visual Communication Design and am currently an MFA candidate at the University of Saskatchewan. I work primarily in photography and Digital Arts.
Fascinated with the mysteries of human perception, I consider them as a source of inspiration for my artistic research and practices. In my research into perception, I became particularly interested in a rare sensory perception called synesthesia, which is a neurological phenomenon with different forms. The type that I consider a source of inspiration, however, is coloured hearing, which involves perceiving auditory stimuli through sight, and seeing sound in the form of shapes, colours or movements. Such a perceptual phenomenon has long inspired many artists, with the luckiest experiencing it literally. Nevertheless, although not many people experience such a perception, it seems to be possible for everyone to make synesthetic associations due to the multisensory feature of perception.
The focus of my artistic practice is the examination of the relationships between sound and images as objects of perception in time-based art. In my work, I employ combinations of aural and visual elements in an iconic, symbolic and metaphoric way to create synesthetic experiences for my audience. I explore surrounding themes of alienation, displacement, anticipation, and solitude.
Becoming The Nature That I Already Am
Shelby Lund
March 1, at 6:30pm
IN PERSON at the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
ONLINE via Zoom
Shelby Lund is an emerging Canadian visual artist whose practice is an ongoing exploration of her own physicality in relationship to the planetary system that we live within. With a continual yearning to know the mysteries of Earth, her subject matter is most often informed by spaces that pulsate – with life, and death, and infinite potential. Being immersed in her environment to physically explore in unstructured and playful ways is central to her practice. Shelby’s focus is not limited to any one place or point of origin, so instead reflects both her changing geographical locations as well as the interconnectedness of all living and non-living forms.
In Shelby’s artistic practice, painting, photography, and sculpture become visual experiments, recording personal moments of curiosity, intuitive decision-making, and a persistent desire to surrender to uncertainty. Through both historical and current photographic processes, sculptural gestures, and representational and abstract paintings, her ever-evolving relationship with the cosmos and Earth is revealed. It is through experiential learning that Shelby becomes deeply embodied, as her totality is reflected in the mysterious and cyclical nature of our universe, and it in her. With her artwork mirroring the phenomena and relationality of the world, either in creative process or representation of subject matter, vibrancy is revealed.
Shelby Lund is from Saskatoon, Canada, and works primarily in painting, photography, and installation practices. In 2015 she received her BFA with great distinction from the University of Saskatchewan. Shelby is currently completing her MFA at the same institution and is expecting to graduate this upcoming fall, 2023. Shelby is the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, with the most notable being the BMO 1st Art! prize and the SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship. Shelby has shown provincially in projects at the Art Gallery of Swift Current, Mann Art Gallery, AKA artist-run, and PAVED Arts. She has also exhibited nationally in juried exhibitions at the Byward Market Gallery, the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, and the John. B. Aird Gallery.
Red, Blue, Waves, and Vibrations
Brody Burns
March 8, at 12:30pm
IN PERSON at the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
ONLINE via Zoom
I produce artwork that examines the connection between indigenous nations' traditional and modern knowledge. In my artistic practice, flux is essential. Energy is vibrational information that changes states. It is transmitted from one generation to the next, but it is also disrupted in several ways. How I can record that change as energy stretches, contracts, and changes throughout time is what interests me. My personal experiences and current world events have an impact on the artwork I create. I use my artistic work to address and heal issues like trauma, loss of language, loss of identity, loss of culture, and so on. Learning traditional knowledge and language is important to me, but I use my artistic practice, which blends traditional and modern techniques, to reimagine this knowledge in my own way.
there is a voice living in the margins of life
Narges Porsandekhial
March 15, at 12:30pm
IN PERSON at the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
ONLINE via Zoom
While everything has been said before we still yearn to find new ways to enter into conversation to address key concerns and concepts anew. It is particularly this repetition that both bores and excites me. In seeking a connection within the repetition of daily life, I aim to create a familiar condition that welcomes anyone, regardless of their positionality. I believe that art should not be a luxurious object or activity that only a certain group can relate to. In their emphasis on the importance of access to art socially engaged practices and public art best serve my intentions. Through removing any physical or monetary barrier to the experience of art, these fields often exist beyond institutions and invite the new relationships I seek out in the repositioning of the mundane and everyday.
Narges Porsandekhial (she/her) is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist. She primarily works in installation, text-based work, socially engaged, and public art. In her works, she creates the conditions for an experience to happen by removing the artist’s direct presence in the artwork while focusing on conceptual and social practices, and mental health issues, each as a form of inherent institutional critique.
2022
There Will Be Chips
Jesse Fulcher Gagnon
March 23, 6pm
IN PERSON in the lecture theatre Murray 299
I am an experimental artist whose scattered mind leaves me frequently moving between mediums. With projects generally involving digital media in some way, I combine performance and installations, projections and animations, or simply boredom and impatience. My work has a tendency to be rooted in myself and my own experiences, so I feel well situated in a largely egotistical digital age. It is often not vanity but insecurity that drives the present generation to focus on themselves, and this resonates with me. I escape reality in my work but am frequently confronted with my own insecurities - especially my Peter Pan-ish fear of growing up. Having spent years working in theatre, particularly theatre for young audiences, I have found that an intense focus on the creation process creates the most exciting results. As an unofficial spokesperson for potato chips, I hope that this artist talk will leave you hungry.
Jesse Fulcher Gagnon Artist Talk
Fragments of Space
Rod Goertzen
March 30, 6pm (ONLINE)
I explore how space, the ways we create and recycle it connects with time. Space as social geography and the physical/nonphysical structures we create often collide with aspects of Physics in my work. The dialogue and tensions between these ways of knowing and doing are interesting points for me. My art often becomes about ‘us’ and not just ‘me.’ It’s asks who are we, where we are going, and what is the long game? Often stories from my grandparents weave into my narratives.
I am a process-oriented artist with the physical act of making and doing being important. Printmaking is my Zen place. It’s liberating to break and reassemble materials to make new surfaces for plates, print on nontraditional surfaces and shapes, incorporate found objects and bring multimedia approaches into the process. I use my own digital images as source materials. My work has been shown both nationally and internationally.
Traces
Emily Conlon
March 30, 7pm (ONLINE)
My practice is motivated by encounters with movement in natural spaces. I primarily work with drawing and printmaking, mediums that allow my process to be intuitive and take shape as a form of note-taking. This is reflected in my subject matter through meandering lines and repetitive marks which mimic rhythms of steps. The ephemeral imagery I work with motivates me to explore the relationship between memory and place through non-linear, fragmented, visual narratives of nature.
Emily Conlon is a multidisciplinary artist and holds a BFA Honours in Visual Arts from the University of Windsor. She is currently on the Board of Directors for Saskatchewan Printmakers and has participated in print exchanges and exhibitions within Canada and internationally.
Re:source Re:main Re:claim
Louisa Ferguson
April 6, 6pm (ONLINE)
My art practice is rooted in the exploration of the natural world and memory. My work is intensely personal, yet it is grounded in communal ways of being and seeing–collective memory, culture and belonging to place.
Within exterior landscapes, I am interested in ecologically restorative works that seek to support and repair environments in transition, often damaged watersheds or damaged ecosystems (communities of organisms living together in combination with their physical environment).
For interior spaces, I create sculpture and installations that invite contemplation and awareness of our interconnectedness to the more-than-human world. Using materials such as textiles, glass, paper, natural materials and found objects, I create sculptures called “dwells”, that serve as reliquaries of remembering and meditation.
My physical practice of creating work, such as building, cutting, rubbing, printing, sculpting, casting and sewing, is meditative and healing for me.
Framing Fragments
Chelsea Brant
April 6, 7pm (ONLINE)
My artistic practice reflects on and engages with lived-experiences, vicarious encounters, intimate moments and memory. I am often working with image fragments, extracting and concealing through my process of making to reveal intangible thoughts through tangible means. Engaging with both text and image, I utilize mediums that best support the meaning or the message behind the work, dabbling in sculpture, collage, printmaking, drawing and in-the-moment inspired mediums or objects. Using visual poetry and emotional familiarity, I weave narratives of compiled moments and reflect on themes of absence and the passing of time.
Chelsea Brant (she/her) is a Mohawk/German multidisciplinary emerging artist and curator, with a BA honours degree in studio arts from the University of Guelph. Brant has exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally and has curated and co-curated exhibitions within Ontario. She is primarily an oil painter and text-based artist.
2021
Uncertain Familiarity
Mohsen AhiAndy
March 24, 6pm
Mohsen AhiAndy (he/him) is an Iranian artist/ designer, currently lives in Saskatoon. His background in industrial design (BDes/MDes) has had an evident impact on his artistic practices. Mohsen’s artistic production generally maneuvers between two main approaches: studio installations that are mostly made through a trial and experimental process, and outdoor projects and site-specific sculptures that are fabricated through a definite and design process. The visual language Mohsen utilizes in his practice is drawn from the geography of his Iranian upbringing which is filled with memories of a chaotic revolution and the political and social crisis which followed. In Mohsen’s works, alteration of form, structure, physical matter, and material are parts of his instinctive exploration. A process that helps him to understands the notion of his psyche as an independent meaningful object cluttered with layers of complicated realities.
I Made You a Mixed Tape
Jasmin Fookes
March 31, 6pm
My intuition is the catalyst for the myriad of ephemera I collect and organize, trusting that a deeper camaraderie will emerge over time. I am energized by natural materials spotted in urban green spaces by virtue of chance encounters. Freely exploring ways to disrupt the traditional forms, systems, rules and surface barriers of unheeded everyday objects permits me to cultivate new meaning. Merging these materials as I reimagine collections methodologies, documentation, and taxonomies in an endeavour to create my own systems of organisation is at the heart of my current curiosity.
reMARKS
Breanne Bandur
March 31, 7pm
My artistic practice is rooted in drawing, and the core of this practice is inherently both experiential and embodied. This practice is deeply tied to process; this process is reflective, material, self-revealing, and attempts to engage in the “here and now.” Intuition is central to this engagement, and so I consider the act of mark making as it relates to inner thought and feeling, emotive and physical.
Within my practice, drawing takes place both within and outside of myself, and then becomes something of its own. Drawing facilitates a solitary dialogue through which I attempt to materialize – a mark, a moment – attempt to come to know, and ultimately, try to make sense of.
In Between Two Worlds
Adrian Golban
April 7, 6pm
Adrian Golban is in the second year of the MFA program. He trained in Romania in figurative and technical traditions with wood, stone and bronze. Since arriving in Saskatoon in 2012, he has adapted his working methods and now primarily expresses himself with found and everyday materials as well as clay. This transition has posed many challenges and opportunities; increasingly, he is referencing his diasporic identity, often working with memories and experiences specific to his life in Romania. Adrian holds a BFA from the Academy of Visual Arts in Romania and a MA in Educational Management. His award-winning artworks have been exhibited across Europe and are in many private collections.
The Hidden Lives of Objects
Nicole Leroy
April 7th, 7pm
Nicole Leroy is a French-born American artist, whose practice and research focuses on commercial culture. Her work predominantly incorporates found objects and children’s entertainment media, which form multimedia electronic sculptures. Reinforcing this practice, her research revolves around visual and popular culture, as well as the autonomy of readily-available consumer objects.
Her current body of work focuses on constructing the mythology of the flora and fauna of a fictional planet, who manifest themselves in our world through sculptures made of altered children’s toys. As individuals, the sculptures express themselves through movements and vocalizations, which are created by altering the circuitry of electronic toys to produce unintended results. This ultimately results in a collection of works that form an interconnected community of eccentric creatures, who celebrate diversity and pluralism.
Tours
"Beads in the blood": Ruth Cuthand, a Survey
Talk Tour with Ruth Cuthand (BFA’83, MFA’92) and Felicia Gay (BA’04, MA’11).
The University of Saskatchewan Department of Art and Art History and the University Art Galleries and Collection invite you to attend an upcoming virtual event.
Date: Wednesday, April 7, 2021
Time: 7 pm (Saskatchewan time)
Location: Online via Zoom (link to be sent out prior to event)
This online event features Ruth Cuthand (BFA’83, MFA’92) and guest curator Felicia Gay (BA’04, MA’11) hosting an intimate talk tour of Cuthand’s current survey exhibition Beads in the blood. The talk tour will be followed by a live Q&A session.
Stories survive, stories move beyond the realm of our voices, they move beyond the realm of our memories and they do not live in the past…They say the stories live on in our language and on our faces. Our words are not gendered, they comprise of animate and inanimate beings. The beings in our language, we relate to them.
Ruth Cuthand is a Canadian mixed-media artist of Plains Cree and Scottish ancestry whose practice includes painting, drawing, photography, and beadwork. Born in 1954 in Prince Albert, Sask., she grew up in Alberta, where as a child she met artist Gerald Tailfeathers, who inspired her to become an artist herself. Cuthand earned a BFA from the University of Saskatchewan in 1983, and an MFA, also from the University of Saskatchewan, in 1992. Cuthand’s work is featured in many collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the University of Saskatchewan Art Collection. Cuthand was honoured with the Saskatchewan Artist Award at the Lieutenant Governor’s Arts Awards in 2013. In 2016, she was honoured as a College of Arts and Science Alumni of Influence. In 2020, she was awarded a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. In 2021, Cuthand was announced as a University of Saskatchewan Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award winner.
Felicia Gay, Swampy Cree/Scottish, is the first Curatorial Mitacs Fellow at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina, a partnership with the University of Regina and Faculty of MAP. She is currently completing a PhD that began in 2019 as well as working as an independent curator. Gay was the 2018 recipient of the Saskatchewan Arts Award for Leadership for her work with curation and advocacy for creating space with Indigenous art and artists since 2004. Gay holds a BA (honours) in art history (2004) and a master's degree in art history (2011). In 2006, Gay co-founded and was artistic director of the Red Shift Gallery, a contemporary Indigenous art space in Saskatoon, Sask., with Joi Arcand. In 2020, Gay was guest curator for Remai Modern, in partnership with the Art Gallery of Alberta, for the 2020 Biennial of Contemporary Art. Gay is from the northern island community of Cumberland House, Sask., on Treaty Five Territory.
Allen Sapp Exhibition
"This online exhibition of Allen Sapp’s work has been curated by Kathleena Chief Calf. The biography and extended labels draw on the existing literature and web presence of Allen Sapp, namely the Allen Sapp Gallery, the Virtual Museum of Canada, and the book “Through the Eyes of The Cree and Beyond. The Art of Allen Sapp: The Story of a People” by Dean Bauche, Lyndon Tootoosis, Lorne Carrier, L. Whiteman, D. Masqua."
@home
The way that we engage with art is constantly evolving. As we increasingly view art through screens, how does our experience change? Join Kenderdine Art Gallery and College Art Galleries as we explore our online database and examine how our environment changes the way we perceive art.
This all ages video will help you navigate our collection, as well as explain some of the choices that artists and curators make when creating an exhibition.