ARTIST IN THE ARCHIVES: PAMILA MATHARU IN CONVERSATION WITH GABRIELLE MOSER

Pamila Matharu, stuck between an archive and an aesthetic (installation view) 2019. Colour HD video, 40 mins.
Wednesday, November 20, 2019 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm

Join artist Pamila Matharu for a screening of stuck between an archive and an aesthetic, a new experimental documentary recently featured at A Space Gallery as part of the 32nd Images Festival of Independent Film + Video. Mining lost and forgotten voices reverberating inside the institution, Matharu uses event documentation from found videotapes to explore what is missing from the AGO's archive. Remixing found materials that travel outside the museum, on the streets, on community-television and returning back inside the institution she asks, what exactly has or has not changed in the often-misunderstood area of “diversity programming”?

The screening will be followed by a conversation between the artist and Gabrielle Moser about the generation of this work. 

 

Pamila Matharu (b.1973) is an immigrant-settler of north Indian Panjabi-Sikh descent, born in Birmingham, England, based in Tkarón:to (Toronto). As an artist, she explores a range of transdisciplinary feminist issues, blurring the lines between objects, activism, community organizing, and public pedagogies. Her practices include object making (installation, collage, film/video/photography), curating/organizing, artist-led teaching, arts administration/advocacy, and social practice.

Gabrielle Moser is a writer, educator and independent curator based in Toronto. A founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA, she holds a PhD from the art history and visual culture program at York University in Toronto, Canada and is an Assistant Professor in art history at OCAD University.

This is an Accessible Event.

Venue & Address: 
E.P. Taylor Library & Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street West
Website: 
https://ago.ca/events/artist-archives-pamila-matharu-conversation-gabrielle-moser?fbclid=IwAR0u28feVv_xmAWo-7D92GNm9LxklWvl1F7yh1ZgtzdUqvMU71DplrORAfQ
Cost: 
Free

New Publication from Dr. Gerald McMaster

The cover of the special "Entangled Gaze" edition of the ab-Original journal.
Wednesday, June 12, 2019 - 3:00pm

New Publication from Dr. Gerald McMaster: “The Entangled Gaze: Indigenous and European Views of Each Other” 

OCAD University is pleased to announce the new peer-reviewed journal ab-Original: Journal of Indigenous Studies and First Nations and First Peoples' Cultures is now available. This special issue entitled “The Entangled Gaze: Indigenous and European Views of Each Other”1 co-edited by Dr. Gerald McMaster and Dr. Julia Lum (University of Toronto), contains ten essays. The Entangled Gaze shares its title and theme with the 2017 conference that was co-hosted by OCAD University and the Art Gallery of Ontario. The conference convened an international group of scholars and museum professionals from the fields of art history, anthropology, cultural studies and curatorial practice to explore the topic of how Indigenous and European artists have represented each other in historical art and visual culture.  

 

ab-Original is a biannual, multi-disciplinary publication dedicated to exploring Indigeneity in the new millennium. To learn more about the journal, see here:  http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_ab-Original.html.  

 

  1. McMaster, Gerald, et al. “The Entangled Gaze: Indigenous and European Views of Each Other.” ab-Original, vol. 2, no. 2, 2018.  

The Entangled Gaze: Indigenous and European Views of Each Other

Sea Captain Figure, c. 1840. Haida, Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. Argillite, ivory, 46.8 x 13.5 x 8 cm. Purchased with Funds from the Estate of Mary Eileen Ash, 2008. Image © 2017 Art Gallery of Ontario 2008/43 / Paul Kane. Death of Omoxesisisany or Big Snake, 1858 c – 1859. Embossed chromo lithograph on paper, 17.2 x 46.1 cm. Gift of Robert Hunter, 2006. © 2017 Art Gallery of Ontario 2006/29

 

The Entangled Gaze: Indigenous and European Views of Each Other was a two-day conference co-hosted by OCAD University and the Art Gallery of Ontario. The conference convened an international group of scholars and museum professionals from the fields of art history, anthropology, cultural studies and curatorial practice to explore the topic of how Indigenous and European artists have represented each other in historical art and visual culture. The conference builds on the ground-breaking work of Julius Lips, “The Savage Hits Back, or The White Man through Native Eyes” (1937), Nii Quarcoopome’s landmark exhibition “Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present (2010) at the Detroit Institute of Art, and on the research of project lead Dr. Gerald McMaster, conducted over the past decade, into how historical Indigenous artists in North America have represented their Euro-American Others.

The goals of The Entangled Gaze were as follows:

  • To generate new knowledge of the media, methods and meanings of historical Indigenous and European representations of each other;
  • To develop innovative conceptual approaches to the study of Indigenous and Euro-North American art/histories, by drawing on Indigenous epistemologies and perspectives in order to generate scholarship outside the mainstream anthropological/art historical purview;
  • To share and develop new interdisciplinary methodologies for collecting, interpreting and disseminating knowledge on the diverse artistic histories of Indigenous and Euro-North American peoples;
  • To communicate this knowledge to our scholarly, professional and public audiences in relevant and accessible media;
  • To develop OCAD University’s Indigenous Visual Culture Research Centre as an international leader in collaborative research on the art/histories of Indigenous and Euro-North American peoples.

Drawing on a global archive of Indigenous and Euro-North American art and visual and material culture from international public collections, conference contributors will approach two key questions:

  • how do we represent people who are different from ourselves, and
  • what are the consequences or results that arise out of this representation?

For over a decade, Dr. McMaster has been gathering various types of information on how First Nations and Inuit artists depict Europeans or people of European ancestry. We are all, of course, familiar with European and North American artistic representations of First Nations and the Inuit; however, the reverse is not within the current artistic or public discourse. In effect, there is an unequal dialectical exchange. McMaster's course of research is intended to redress this inequality. In 2013-14 he examined 38 European collections, where much early North American material history is housed; since then, he remains the sole researcher with sustained interest in this particular subject matter. Dr. McMaster's research is grounded in the theory of the "reverse gaze," a conceptual approach he uses to promote Indigenous representations of Europeans as primary documents in the reconstruction of Canadian history.

Conference participants are international and interdisciplinary researchers, museum professionals, artists, and Indigenous Elders. As anthropologist Regna Darnell has pointed out, cross-cultural study of the Other is no longer the preserve of the discipline of anthropology. Drawing from perspectives in art/history, cultural studies, fine art and anthropology, The Entangled Gaze will also generate print and online publications from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Select papers will be published as peer-reviewed articles in a special issue of AbOriginal: Journal of Indigenous Studies and First Nations’ and First Peoples’ Cultures, for which primary applicant Dr. Gerald McMaster is an Editor.

Conference participants included: host Gerald McMaster; artists Kent Monkman, Bonnie Devine, Barry Ace, Rosalie Favel, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Embassy of Imagination, Lisa Myers; scholars Krista Ulujuk Zawadski, Rainer Hatoum, Kaitlin McCormick, Jonathan King, Nicole Perry, Monika Siebert, Christopher Green, Anna Brus, Markus Lindner, Rick Hill; and curators Wanda Nanibush, Nika Collison Jisgang, Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, Nii Q. Quarcoopome, and Candace Greene.

SPEAKERS:

Kent Monkman, The Four Continents. Monkman’s major series “The Four Continents” reflected on the “painted voyage” from the Renaissance to Romanticism – a visual journey upon which Europeans projected their views of the world onto other continents. 

Gerald McMaster, Introduction. McMaster’s presentation was an overview of his research through the collecting relevant materials in the world’s museums, amassing the evidence needed to demonstrate that the character of the creative strategies with which Indigenous peoples documented Europeans amounts to a “reverse gaze.” 

Kaitlin McCormick presented the work of Tsimshian artist Frederick Alexcee (1853-1939) and how he chose to represent his community of Fort/Port Simpson through an examination of works which he created and sold to non-Indigenous people.

Anna Brus, Obstinate Objects: Native American Art as Seen by Julius Lips. Brus addressed the work of Julius Lips, who advanced a kaleidoscopic view of representations of the European worldwide, thus inverting the colonial gaze onto the “Other.” 

Nii Quarcoopome, Representation/Re-Presentation: Five Centuries of Changing African Depictions of the European ‘Other.’ Quarcoopome offered an historical review of this rich and complex visual record, and aims to illustrate shifting and conflicted African emotional responses to the European presence.

Barry Ace and Rosalie Favell, In conversation, Every.Now.Then: Reframing Nationhood. Ace in particular spoke about the Anishinaabe Maungwaudaus’s trip to Europe in the 19th century.

Justine Kohleal + Tak Pham, Virtual Indigenous Platform for Global Indigenous Initiative. They spoke about how the Indigenous Visual Culture Research Centre is embarking on the creation of a research and knowledge exchange that will link with local, national, and international universities, museums, galleries, and Indigenous communities.

Jonathan King, Beyond the Glazing: Aboriginal Artists Behind Glass No More. King spoke about artists from the Arctic and the Northwest coast, and how they have taken control not merely of narrative in art practice, but of traditional continuity in politics and self-presentation.

Krista Ulujuk-Zwadski, Stitching our Knowledge with Miqqutiit and Kakpiit. Ulujuk-Zwadski spoke about how Inuit art has a history of representing Inuit ways of life, beliefs and stories through an autoethnographic lens, and how the early Inuit gaze seldom represented “others” but was dominated by Inuit representations of ourselves.

Monika Siebert, Pocahontas Looks Back

Elder Jan Longboat, Turtle Clan of the Mohawk Nation, is an Elder, educator, writer, herbalist, cultural advocate, and visionary, having dedicated her life to the dissemination and learning of Indigenous language and culture. Elder Longboat talked about Mohawk ways of seeing.

Gary Sault, Anishinaabe Elder from Mississauga’s New Credit Nation. Elder Sault used various wampum belts to discuss Indigenous/European relations.

Rick Hill, Two Row Wampum. Hill spoke about how the people from the ship and the people from the canoe viewed each other as told through the oral history of the Two Row Wampum; and how Indigenous artists were more open and less biased that the western art that followed, using Iroquois hair combs and western art to illustrate.

Hulleah Tshinhnahjinnie, Visualizing Reciprocity. Tshinhnahjinnie presented the idea of how protocols enacted by Indigenous researchers, historians, and artists effects reciprocity, whereas western-based researchers, historians, and artists unaware of protocol as establishing relationships, tend to revert to utilizing research as a buttress of colonization.

Christopher T. Green, [House] Post Modern: Tlingit Responses to the ‘Modern’ Revival. Green discussed Tlingit artists Nathan Jackson and Jim Schoppert’s individual critiques of the Western modernist aesthetics defining the category of fine art, which Northwest Coast artists entered into in the 1960s and 70s.

Alexa Hatanaka and Patrick Thompson, Embassy of Imagination Artists Talk. Along with a number of youth from Kinngait, Cape Dorset, Hatanaka and Thompson spoke about how they achieve self-empowerment through creating collaborative projects in their community and public art projects by inserting Inuit youth voices in Southern Canadian city centres.

Bonnie Devine and Lisa Myers, In conversation, Every.Now.Then: Reframing Nationhood

Jisgang Nika Collison and Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, Gud Gii AanaaGung: Look at One Another. Collison and Bunn-Marcuse spoke about how Haida artists during the 19th century documented their observations using voice and clever hands, often in life-like sculptures of Europeans and their exotic possessions, reflecting their complicated relationships with Euro-American settlers, colonial administrators, and visitors.

Rainer Hatoum, Revisiting Boas: Exploring Issues of the “Entangled Gaze” on the Basis of His Field Notes. Reflecting four years of deciphering and transcribing Franz Boas’ shorthand notes, Hatoum’s presentation lent fresh insights into Boas’s lifelong attempts to grasp “Indigenous Others” and their manifold artistic expressions, which sometimes reversed the gaze onto Europeans.

Candace Greene, Friends/Enemies; Partners/Competitors. Greene’s paper explored a small but important group of 19th century pictorial art from the Arikara and affiliated tribes as they engaged with Euro-Americans along the Missouri River.

Nicole Perry, German Cultural Appropriations of Indigeneity: ‘Indianer,’ Winnetou, and Indigenous Interventions. Perry’s paper explored how Kent Monkman engages with and challenges (German) colonial pasts and Euro-American tropes of the “Indianer” and the cultural appropriation of the Indigenous image, thus exemplifying contemporary Indigenous struggles through the lens of native survivance.

Markus Lindner, Buffalo Bill’s “Indians’ Gaze Back: Europe and Europeans in Arthur Amiotte’s Collages. Lindner focused Lakota artist Arthur Amiotte, who connects his family history – including that of his Austrian great-grandmother – with the general history of the Lakotas of the early reservation period.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE VISIT:
The Entangled Gaze Website
The Savage Hits Back Revisited
The Savage Hits Back Revisited review

 

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

SSHRC Logo

Creator: 
Image of Paul Kane painting juxtaposed against an ivory Haida carving of a "Sea Captain Figure"
Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - 1:30pm

3rd Annual Lynn Donoghue Artist in Residence Program at Spadina Museum

Release XII by Amanda Burk
Sunday, September 30, 2007 - 4:00am to Sunday, November 4, 2007 - 4:00am

Visitors to Spadina Museum on Sundays (Noon to 5 p.m.) from September 30 to November 4, will have the pleasure of seeing artist Amanda Burk working on pieces inspired by this turn-of-the-century historic house. At the end of her residency, her work will be exhibited at Spadina Museum from November 9 to January 6, 2008.
In her words:
"In preparing for my residency at the Museum, I find myself thinking about all the memory the Spadina Museum must hold; the people who have roamed the halls as inhabitants or as visitors over the years and the tangible and intangible traces they have left in the space. I have also been thinking about the impact architecture and place has on us, that is, how the spaces and places we inhabit shape who we are. I am interested in how small details of architecture and of our surroundings, like a particular decorative carving on the arm of a chair, will embed themselves vividly in our memory.
I am interested in the Museum as both an enduring physical structure and a transitory space of human activity, memory, and experience. During my residency at the Spadina Museum, I will be producing a series of graphite drawings that examine the physical and transient aspects of the Historic House and Garden, which will be called "Thresholds". I anticipate that in crossing the threshold of the Historic House this Fall, its history, architecture and presence will have a significant and meaningful impact on my work."
An extensive biography and examples of previous work can be found on her website www.amandaburk.com.
"We think Amanda's work will blend beautifully into the house's legacy of art and artists and are very pleased to have her on site this month. This program is very special to all of us and Amanda's presence will add enormously to the experience visitors will have as they tour Spadina Sundays this fall," said Karen Edwards, Museum Administrator for the Historic Houses of Old Toronto.
This annual program commemorates Lynn Donoghue, who was a respected and critically acclaimed artist and portraitist. A member of the museum board, Ms. Donoghue was a strong supporter of the three historic houses - Colborne Lodge, Mackenzie House, and Spadina Museum: Historic House & Gardens. The Lynn Donoghue Artist in Residence Program continues the legacy initiated by John Howard of Colborne Lodge, founding member of the Society of Artists and Amateurs (1834); William Lyon Mackenzie's printing endeavours; and the Austin women of Spadina through their patronage of the arts as members of The Women's Art Association of Canada, Toronto.
Spadina Museum: Historic House & Gardens was built in 1866 and occupied by the Austin family until 1982. The house is set on six acres of beautifully landscaped grounds including rolling lawns, an intimate orchard and one of Toronto's finest restored Victorian and Edwardian Gardens. The furniture, art and decoration are original to the house and reflect the Toronto art scene of the late 19th and early 20th century and its Victorian, Edwardian and Art Nouveau influences.
The Museum Board of Colborne Lodge, Mackenzie House and Spadina Museum, as part of Toronto Culture, City of Toronto, in partnership with the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), and with the support of Romspen Investment Corporation, present this third annual Lynn Donoghue Artist in Residence Program.
Spadina Museum is located at 285 Spadina Road, Toronto. The site can be reached at 416-392-6910 or spadina@toronto.ca. Paid parking is available next door at Casa Loma.

Venue & Address: 
Spadina Museum 285 Spadina Road, Toronto, Ontario
Email: 
spadina@toronto.ca
Cost: 
Free

Sarat Maharaj: Puckering, Billowing, Stuttering: Thinking Through Textiles

Sarat Maharaj
Friday, March 28, 2008 - 10:30pm

OCAD's Faculty of Art, in partnership with the Textile Museum of Canada, presents an evening with cultural theorist Sarat Maharaj.

Sarat Maharaj is a South African cultural theorist based in the UK who has written prolifically on textiles as expressions of cultural translation and globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He has held many academic positions, among them Professorial Fellow, Goldsmiths College, University of London and Professor of Visual Art and Knowledge Systems, Lund University, Sweden.

Maharaj will look at visual arts practice/textiles and textiles
processes as forms and modes of knowledge production. But what sorts of
knowledge do they generate? What ways of 'knowing the other' and 'other ways
of knowing' are spawned in these spaces of the knowledge economy? He will
try to explore this in relation to the contemporary migrations - the scene
of translation, the demand for assimilation and the ethics of difference shaping up today.

Material Witness is a groundbreaking lecture and workshop series, developed by the Textile Museum of Canada. This series brings together international thinkers and artists who will address textile concepts and practices through several lenses, including those of ethno-anthropology, current practices by artists who use textiles as media and inspiration and theories of cultural translation and diversity.

Presented with the support of the Jean A. Chalmers Fund for the Crafts.

Venue & Address: 
Auditorium 100 McCaul St., Toronto, Ontario
Email: 
general@ocad.ca
Cost: 
Free

Worn Dialogues: Gallery Conversations

Bust of Harriet Tubman's dress
Sunday, September 20, 2015 - 6:30pm to 7:00pm

Join us once a month for a personal exploration of the exhibit Worn: Shaping Black Feminine Identity and its themes. Special guest speakers give us their take on this stunning work by Karin Jones in an informal in-gallery presentation.

August 16:  Dalton Higgins

September 20: Mimi Joh

October 18 Jessica Karuhanga

 

Dalton Higgins is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist, broadcaster and author who has written six books that interweave the worlds of digital culture, hip hop and popular culture into one potent mix. He is also one of Canada’s foremost experts on hip hop, the leading youth sub-culture of this generation.

Mimi Joh currently teaches in OCAD University’s Continuing Studies program and writes on contemporary art.  She received degrees in Art History from Cornell University and OCAD U, and worked for many years with German and Austrian Expressionist art in New York.  Mimi Joh is an active volunteer in the arts, holding positions with multiple Toronto based arts organizations. Her varied art background gives her a multiplicity of viewpoints into contemporary art, ideas and themes.  She is particularly interested in how art practices can critically reflect and respond to our society and how they ultimately shape our culture.

Jessica Karuhanga is an artist currently based in Toronto, Canada. Her practice undulates between performance, video, drawing and sculptural processes. She holds a BFA Honors from The University of Western Ontario and a MFA from University of Victoria. Her visual art and performances have been presented at various centres nationally including Royal BC Museum, Deluge Contemporary Art, Art Mûr, Whippersnapper Gallery, OCAD U Student Gallery, Videofag, Electric Eclectics, Nia Centre for the Arts, and The Drake Hotel. Karuhanga was featured in FADO Performance Art Centre's 2014 Emerging Artist Series at Xpace Cultural Centre. She has lectured for the Power Plant's Sunday Scene Series and Art Gallery of Ontario's Idea Bar Series. Most recently she presented her work at 2015 Black Portraitures Conference, a series organized by Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, in Firenze, Italy.

 

Venue & Address: 
Royal Ontario Museum
Website: 
http://www.rom.on.ca/en/activities-programs/events-calendar/worn-dialogues-gallery-conversations

Cronenberg Project wins 2014 Ontario Museum Association Award

David Cronenberg
Wednesday, October 29, 2014 - 4:00am

TIFF’s The Cronenberg Project is the recipient of the 2014 Ontario Museum Association (OMA) Award for Excellence in Special Projects, for the combined nominations of the following components: the exhibition David Cronenberg: EvolutionDavid Cronenberg: Virtual Museum and the interactive Body/Mind/Change initiative. OCAD University was an academic partner in the project, along with Sheridan College, and York University.

“We are thrilled to be the recipient of the 2014 OMA Award for Excellence in Special Projects,” said Piers Handling, Director and CEO, TIFF. “The Cronenberg Project was a milestone achievement for TIFF: it included our first large-scale original touring exhibition David Cronenberg: Evolution which recently finished exhibiting at Amsterdam’s EYE, as well as our Virtual Museum which will continue to be an online resource for further scholarship on Cronenberg’s films, and Body/Mind/Change which brought together Cronenberg enthusiasts from all corners of the globe for one unique interactive experience.”
 
TIFF’s multi-platform celebration of the work of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg was centred on the exhibition David Cronenberg: Evolution which charts Cronenberg’s growth as a filmmaker. With more than 300 original artifacts, visionary designs, as well as rare and unseen footage, the exhibition focuses on his longstanding fascination with the possibilities and perils of human evolution itself.
 
David Cronenberg: Virtual Museum is an online source that explores Cronenberg’s films through new scholarship and artistic explorations, including essays, academic writing, an interactive map and timeline, and a selection of behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with Cronenberg's past and present collaborators.  
 
Body/Mind/Change, a digital extension of David Cronenberg: Evolution, immerses audiences in a “Cronenbergian” world inspired by the film Videodrome, re-imagined for the 21st century and brought to life across three platforms — online, mobile, and real-world.