Rescheduled - Sabbatical Talks: Dr. Lynne Milgram and Dr. Charles Reeve

Thursday, January 23, 2020 - 3:00pm

Please join the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and School of Interdisciplinary Studies for two sabbatical talks:

“Social Entrepreneurship, Specialty Coffee Production, and Transnational Trade in the Northern Philippines”
Dr. Lynne Milgram

3:00 P.M. - 4:00 P.M
While the fair-trade-certified coffee movement created advantageous terms for producers, its perceived inadequate concern for higher quality and its uneven producer-vendor relations have given rise to social entrepreneurial initiatives marketing more directly-traded, specialty coffee. The latter’s practice champions business transparency, high quality, and sustainability. As these enterprises expand, however, questions arise regarding the extent to which operations can scale up from their start-up premises and still maintain quality standards and a social justice mandate to engage socioeconomic infrastructure change for producers?
Engaging these issues, this paper analyzes new northern Philippine Arabica coffee enterprises that employ “fairly traded” practices. I argue that while social entrepreneurs have established more equitable terms for their local and transnational trade, people’s subsistence needs can challenge enterprise sustainability. By shortening commodity chains, paying higher prices, and providing cultivation training, Philippine social entrepreneurs have enabled farmers’ engagement in alternatives to conventional mainstream and fair trade markets. Yet, Philippine farmers’ lack of income diversity, weak government support, and competition among traders for limited supplies, can frustrate entrepreneurs’ efforts. Given coffee culture’s growing third wave, I explore whether Philippine entrepreneurs’ timely initiatives might still resolve these push-pull tensions to yield an industry for, and more responsive to, stakeholders needs.
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“Artists, autobiography, auto fiction”
Dr. Charles Reeve

4:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M.
An “embarrassment,” Paul de Man said. “Disreputable” and “self-indulgent.” He was speaking about autobiographies, and no doubt his assertions would intensify if he focused specifically on artists’ autobiographies, given how that sub-genre doubles down on unreconstructed Romanticism. Omissions, misrememberings and outright lies notwithstanding, though, artists’ autobiographies have been popular ever since the Vita of Renaissance sculptor Bevenuto Cellini was unearthed and published in 1728. If anything, as Julie Rak shows, autobiography enjoys more popularity now than ever before—and artists’ accounts contribute robustly to that popularity. Why? What launched that interest in the first place and what sustains it now?

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University, 100 McCaul St., Room 258 (George Reid Wing)
Website: 
https://www.facebook.com/events/432007204130130/
Email: 
folas@ocadu.ca
Cost: 
Free
Poster for Sabbatical Talks: Dr. Lynne Milgram and Dr. Charles Reeve

Design for the Other 90%: A Panel Discussion

Design for the Other 90%
Saturday, November 8, 2008 - 12:30am

The Professional Gallery of the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) present Design for the Other 90%: A Panel Discussion, in response to the Smithsonian’s touring exhibition of design solutions addressing the basic needs of poor and marginalized populations not traditionally serviced by professional designers, on now at the university.

The panel, which will be moderated by OCAD Curator Charles Reeve, includes:
Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Design for the Other 90%, of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (New York, U.S.A.);
Vikram Bhatt, Professor of Architecture, McGill University School of Architecture, where he teaches courses in Housing Theory and Housing Project, and directs the M.Arch. in Minimum Cost Housing (Montreal, Canada) and
Modesta Nyirenda-Zabula, Project Manager with Godisa Technologies Trust (Gaborone, Botswana), designer/manufacturer of “SolarAid”, a solar-powered hearing aid (exhibited in Design for the Other 90%).

Design for the Other 90%, on exhibit at the OCAD Professional Gallery in Toronto until January 25, 2009, is the only Canadian stop for the touring exhibition. An extensive website, including a blog, discussion forum and additional resources is available at http://other90.cooperhewitt.org/.

Design for the Other 90%: A Panel Discussion is held in conjunction with the Universities Art Association of Canada’s annual conference, held November 6 to 8, 2008 at York University in Toronto. For complete conference details, visit www.yorku.ca/uaac.

Venue & Address: 
Auditorium 100 McCaul St., Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

Brian Groombridge

Thursday, October 23, 2008 - 4:00am to Saturday, November 29, 2008 - 5:00am

With four new works, Groombridge continues his long engagement with metaphorical reductionism, this time referencing codification itself, throwing our perceptual reflexes in flux as we work to decipher the visual codes embedded in the meticulous objects and graphical work on exhibition. Among the works in the show, a small, sculptural construction detailed in a De Stijl palette of red, blue, and yellow alludes to a radio, a site of transmission, with the fullness of a sign, but no signal. A silkscreen work entitled, Marco Polo, features three typographical “utterances”—the words “distant,” “briefly,” “still waiting”—set in a specific spatial relation, in a durational frame of waiting, waiting for meaning to settle, or not, and it is that function of “seeking to define” or finding the key that activates the works in this exhibition. As Charles Reeve observes in his essay for the catalogue that also launches with this exhibition, “Art seems transparent when it invokes code we understand, when it speaks our language, when it meets our expectations. Groombridge reverses the equation—by withholding meaning while making clear that his art has one, he encourages other meanings to proliferate, while pointing out that all art has the potential to be obscure. All art speaks in code. Obscurity and clarity are functions of knowing or not knowing a particular code, not of whether a given work is coded. Beyond that, what seems obscure in Groombridge’s work actually is the metaphorical point: a message that, drained of purpose, goes nowhere.”

At the opening we will launch a new publication on Brian’s work with essays by OCAD Curator Charles Reeve and Siobhan Roberts, this 48 page full colour monograph will be available that evening at the special price of $20. Afterwards the monograph will be available through the gallery for $25.

Venue & Address: 
Susan Hobbs Gallery 137 Tecumseth Street, Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

Rosalind Nashashibi: Bachelor Machines

Bachelor Machines
Saturday, September 20, 2008 - 4:00am to Sunday, November 2, 2008 - 4:00am

The exhibition Rosalind Nashashibi: Bachelor Machines, curated by OCAD Curator Charles Reeve, tours to Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver.

"We expect movies to tell stories — these groundbreaking works both confirm and disrupt that expectation," said Reeve. "And the fact that they're on celluloid emphasizes the differences between digital and conventional technologies. Film, video and DVD are complements, not competitors."

Bachelor Machines Part I (2007) premiered at the Scottish pavilion in last year's Venice Biennale. The 16mm work was filmed on an Italian freighter sailing from Italy to the Baltic Sea. "Bachelor Machines I portrays the single-sex society of men aboard a cargo ship, and describes the machine that they serve as much as the men themselves," said Nashashibi, who calls the ship "a bachelor-maker, for the way of life it imposes."

Bachelor Machines Part II (2007) comprises two simultaneously screened projections. On the left appears artist Thomas Bayrle and his wife Helke, while on the right are interwoven altered scenes from Nashashibi's earlier works. The soundtrack plays Bayrle's voice describing his apocalyptic vision of our machine-dominated world. Nashashibi describes the term 'Bachelor Machines' as encompassing something sexual — simultaneously masculine and emasculating.

About Rosalind Nashashibi
Group interactions and social rituals are the starting points for Rosalind Nashashibi, who primarily uses 16mm film. She is concerned with portraying the psychological atmosphere of locations and detecting subconscious projections, beginning from scenes filmed of everyday life. Born in Croydon in 1973, Nashashibi studied at Sheffield University and Glasgow School of Art, where she completed her MFA in 2000. Based in London, she is represented by Harris Liebermann, New York and doggerfisher/Susanna Beaumont, Edinburgh.

Venue & Address: 
Presentation House Gallery 333 Chesterfield Avenue, North Vancouver, British Columbia

Design for the Other 90%

Design for the Other 90%
Saturday, October 4, 2008 - 4:00am to Sunday, January 25, 2009 - 5:00am

The OCAD Professional Gallery will host Design for the Other 90%, a collection of design solutions addressing the basic needs of poor and marginalized populations not traditionally serviced by professional designers.

The exhibition, organized by the New York-based Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and curated by Cynthia E. Smith, explores a growing movement among designers to design low-cost solutions for the “other 90%” — that is, the 5.8 billion people (out of the world’s total population of 6.5 billion people) who have little or no access to most of the products and services many of us take for granted. Design for the Other 90% looks at how individuals and organizations are finding unique ways to address the basic challenges of survival and progress — for example, nearly half of the other 90% do not have regular access to food, clean water, or shelter.

"Unconventionally, this exhibition highlights products that are economically self-sustaining, yet affordable to people living on a dollar a day — inexpensive irrigation systems for farming, for instance," says Charles Reeve, Curator of the Professional Gallery. "The new forms of ingenuity here focus on pressing issues like poverty relief and environmental sustainability, both of which are key themes in what we teach and research here at OCAD."

Launching as part of OCAD’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche programming, Toronto is the only Canadian stop for the touring exhibition, which is currently showing at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. An extensive website, including a blog, discussion forum and additional resources is available at http://other90.cooperhewitt.org/.

In addition to the exhibition at the OCAD Professional Gallery, the Design Exchange will present a complementary program of exhibits and events as part of Design for the Other 90%.
Gallery hours: Wed. to Fri., 1 to 7 p.m; Sat. and Sun., 12 to 6 p.m.

Design for the Other 90% is organized by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

The exhibition was made possible by The Lemelson Foundation. Additional funding was provided by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency, the Esme Usdan Exhibition Endowment Fund, and the Ehrenkranz Fund.

The exhibition's presentation at the OCAD Professional Gallery at the Ontario College of Art & Design is supported by the Toronto Arts Council.

Venue & Address: 
Professional Gallery 100 McCaul St., Level 2, Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

Rosalind Nashashibi: Bachelor Machines

Bachelor Machines
Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - 4:00am to Sunday, September 7, 2008 - 4:00am

Two films by internationally renowned artist Rosalind Nashashibi, Bachelor Machines Parts I and II, anchor the summer program of the OCAD Professional Gallery at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD). The show runs June 25 to September 7, 2008.

"We expect movies to tell stories — these groundbreaking works both confirm and disrupt that expectation," said curator Charles Reeve, who organized the exhibit. "And the fact that they're on celluloid emphasizes the differences between digital and conventional technologies. Film, video and DVD are complements, not competitors."

Never before seen in Canada, Bachelor Machines Part I (2007) premiered at the Scottish pavilion in last year's Venice Biennale. The 16mm work was filmed on an Italian freighter sailing from Italy to the Baltic Sea. "Bachelor Machines I portrays the single-sex society of men aboard a cargo ship, and describes the machine that they serve as much as the men themselves," said Nashashibi, who calls the ship "a bachelor-maker, for the way of life it imposes."

Bachelor Machines Part II (2007), presented here for the first time outside Europe, comprises two simultaneously screened projections. On the left appears artist Thomas Bayrle and his wife Helke, while on the right are interwoven altered scenes from Nashashibi's earlier works. The soundtrack plays Bayrle's voice describing his apocalyptic vision of our machine-dominated world. Nashashibi describes the term 'Bachelor Machines' as encompassing something sexual — simultaneously masculine and emasculating.

Rosalind Nashashibi: Bachelor Machines is presented in conjunction with Skip, Divided: The Films of Rosalind Nashashibi, organized by Pleasure Dome to take place Saturday, August 16 at 8 pm
at Cinecycle, 129 Spadina Ave., Toronto
(for details please visit pdome.org).

Summer Gallery hours: Tues. to Fri., 1 to 7 pm.

OCAD gratefully acknowledges the support of the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.

About Rosalind Nashashibi
Group interactions and social rituals are the starting points for Rosalind Nashashibi, who primarily uses 16mm film. She is concerned with portraying the psychological atmosphere of locations and detecting subconscious projections, beginning from scenes filmed of everyday life. Born in Croydon in 1973, Nashashibi studied at Sheffield University and Glasgow School of Art, where she completed her MFA in 2000. Based in London, she is represented by Harris Liebermann, New York and doggerfisher/Susanna Beaumont, Edinburgh.

About the OCAD Professional Gallery
OCAD’s Professional Gallery is devoted to facilitating connections between, and the contemplation of, contemporary art and design. Since its launch in April 2007, it has featured exhibitions by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Karim Rashid and Mark Adams.

The films of Rosalind Nashashibi are currently the subject of an article in Frieze magazine. To find out more, visit "Looking Out" by Martin Herbert in the May 2008 edition of Frieze.

Venue & Address: 
OCAD Professional Gallery 100 McCaul St., Level 2, Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

Back to Basics: Preserving Traditional Art & Design Practices in the Digital Age

Thursday, March 13, 2008 - 10:00pm to 11:30pm

The OCAD Student Union presents the forum "Back to Basics: Preserving Traditional Art and Design Practices in the Digital Age". All faculty, technicians, managers, staff and students are invited to attend.

Schedule:

6:05 pm: Vladimir Spicanovic
Vladimir Spicanovic, Associate Dean in the Faculty of Art, will discuss the way in which he sees his work as a painter as a commentary on contemporary media and the ways the addresses issues of contemporary and non-contemporary in his painting.

6:10 pm: Doreen Balabanoff
Doreen Balabanoff, Assistant Dean, First Year in the Faculty of Design will discuss her own design practice.

6:15 pm: Charles Reeve
Charles Reeve, Curator, explores our understanding of the words "tradition" and "traditional," observing the constantly shifting meanings attributed to them. Reinforcing the importance of these concepts, he will highlight their complexity.

6:20 pm: Sara Diamond
President Sara Diamond, taking a perhaps less theoretical approach to the issues before the forum, will comment on such matters as a perceived decline in studio time and concrete measures being undertaken to address them such as the recently announced pilot project of Saturday evening extended hours and the permanent move to extend hours Sunday-Friday for the last six weeks of term. To discuss the specific ways in which the DFI will be implemented.

6:25 pm: Jessica Kamphorst
Jessica Kamphorst will speak from her dual position as President of the OCAD Foundation and Executive Director of Development and Alumni Relations; to discuss efforts to raise funds to improve the student experience at OCAD such as the current campaign to raise OTSS funds; and to discuss the importance of fostering alumni relations – to raise the profile of OCAD, to generate concrete support, to generate respect and good will that results in referral of prospective students by satisfied alumni and to generate a network of ambassadors for the university.

Venue & Address: 
Auditorium 100 McCaul St., Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

Professional Gallery Information Session

Thursday, January 17, 2008 - 2:30pm

Students, faculty and staff are invited to join OCAD Curator Charles Reeve for an information session about the Professional Gallery's upcoming exhibitions. Find out what kind of resources the Gallery can provide to you.

Venue & Address: 
Location to be confirmed 100 McCaul St., Toronto, Ontario
Email: 
creeve@ocad.ca
Cost: 
Free

LAS/SIS Faculty Sabbatical Talks

Sabbatical Talks Poster - March 20
Friday, March 20, 2015 - 4:00pm to 6:00pm

PAULA GARDNER
Pace: the Affective Labour
of Activity Tracking

Pace is the new speed. Different from past expectations that we speed up constantly, activity tracking devices and apps implore consumers to track their consistent, optimal pace across activities of daily life. Activity tracking is far more than a consumer fad or an interesting new media practice that brings improved health. Employing feminist, mobility and affective labour theory, Gardner discusses how pace, as a new normal, encourages neoliberal self-practices of personal health monitoring, self-management, and automation. More, trackers suggest that pace should be shared and rewarded, and even exchanged for philanthropy credits. Trackers craft the successful worker/subject as one chronically in search of more likes, as s/he embraces global, corporate labour ideals.

Paula Gardner, PhD, is Associate Professor in LAS/SIS and co-directs the Mobile Experience Lab. Her scholarship focusing on feminist science and media studies is published in major journals of Communication, Feminist studies, Media and Mobile studies, and Critical science studies; she is currently working on a book entitled Pace, the Politics of Activity Tracking.

CHARLES REEVE
A House Divided: Academic Freedom, Artistic Freedom and Their Complicated Relationship

Academic freedom’s relation to artistic freedom isn’t self-evident. Indeed, art seems to enjoy less freedom in universities than other forms of expression. My discussion examines this tension and considers the rapport that artistic freedom might have with other forms of specialized academic freedom that often attract censure, like scientific freedom.

Charles Reeve, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Faculty of Art and LAS/SIS.

Venue & Address: 
100 McCaul, room 543

Paula Gardner and Charles Reeve co-edit PUBLIC 49: TRAUMA

Image from PUBLIC 49: TRAUMA
Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - 3:30pm

Associate Professors Paula Gardner and Charles Reeve are celebrating the launch of PUBLIC 49: TRAUMA, the latest issue of the interdisciplinary, double blind peer-reviewed visual arts journal. As co-editors, Gardner and Reeve curated the publication, which includes works by Francis Frascina, Lynn Crosbie, Florence Duchemin-Pelletier, Lloyd C. McCracken, Deanna Browne, Blake Fitzpatrick and Vid Ingelevics, and Ian Balfour.

Abstract:
When culture responds to trauma, it seems self-evident that three mechanisms are involved: the event, the trauma it provokes, and the cultural response. But what if that is backwards? What if trauma is itself a cultural production, borne of a need for societies to see themselves as traumatized? By bringing together essays, artistic interventions, and poetry, this collection examines trauma’s relation to culture in a variety of settings, from contemporary visual culture, to the art of the Inuit, to personal remembrances. Along the way, our contributors inspect the place of catharsis in the constellation of event, disturbance, repression, and release. To highlight the complexity of these mechanisms, we are especially pleased that “Trauma” includes “For You, The War is Over,” a previously-unpublished recollection by Canadian Airman Lloyd McCracken of his time in a Nazi POW camp, presented here with the generous permission of his family.

Preview and purchase PUBLIC 29: TRAUMA online 

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