Line & Verse: An exploration of Visual Arts and Poetry between Canada and Taiwan

Wednesday, November 7, 2018 - 10:00am to Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - 4:00pm

This project was initiated by artists Carlina Chen (Canada) and Hsieh, Chi-Chang (Taiwan), who share a mutual interest in the intersection of poetry and the visual arts and the fostering of a cultural conversation. In the fall of 2016, one poem from each of three Canadian poets, Anne Carson, Patrick Lane and Claire Caldwell, was selected; and three works were chosen from two contemporary Taiwanese poets, Yu, Kwang-Chung and Wang, Feng-Hsiang.

The exhibition features work on paper by 21 Canadian artists and 21 Taiwanese artists and one Canadian performance artist.

The Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library will host the first Canadian exhibition. 

Closing Event - Panel Discussion

January 16th, 2019

2:00pm - 4:00pm

More details to come.

--

Opening Reception

November 14

4:00pm - 6.30pm

There will be a poetry reading by Claire Caldwell and remarks.

 

Please RSVP via https://lineverse.eventbrite.ca by November 7th, 2018.

Venue & Address: 
The Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library 8th Floor Robarts Library Toronto, ON, M5S 1A5
Website: 
https://lineverse.eventbrite.ca
https://web.stagram.com/lineverse
https://www.facebook.com/Line.Verse
https://lineversecollective.wordpress.com/
Cost: 
FREE
"Line & Verse" in white text on a blue monochrome photo of a stone staircase

IT'S ABOUT TIME DANCING BLACK IN CANADA 1900 TO 1970

IT'S ABOUT TIME DANCING BLACK IN CANADA 1900 TO 1970
Saturday, July 14, 2018 - 1:00pm to Sunday, August 12, 2018 - 6:00pm

Curated by Seika Boye, PhD, this exhibition illuminates the largely undocumented dance history of Canada’s Black population before 1970. Featured are individual dance artists such as Leonard Gibson, Ola Skanks, Ethel Bruneau, Joey Hollingsworth and Kathryn Brown. The exhibit exposes the representation of Blackness on Canadian stages, as well as audience and media reception of Black performance in Canada during this era. It’s About Time explores legislation of leisure culture, dance lessons and the role of social dances at mid-century.

Venue & Address: 
Ignite Gallery, 165 Augusta Ave
Website: 
https://www.ocadu.ca/gallery/ignite-gallery.htm
Email: 
ignitegallery@ocadu.ca
Cost: 
Free

Citizen Subjects: Photography, Race and Belonging in Canada

The front page of The Clarion newspaper from 1947, featuring a photograph of the Prevoe family.
Monday, November 27, 2017 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm

In this talk, Gabrielle Moser discusses her current research project that analyzes how racialized subjects pictured themselves as citizens around 1947, the date that Canada’s first citizenship laws were enacted. Through extensive research in local and state archives, this project aims to analyze how viewers recognize citizens through modes of photographic self-presentation.

 

Gabrielle Moser is a writer, educator and independent curator. Her writing appears in venues including Artforum.com, Canadian Art, Journal of Visual Culture, Photography & Culture, and Prefix Photo. Moser has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art, the Ryerson Image Centre, the University of British Columbia and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Brown University in 2017. 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.

Research Rendezvous is a series for faculty and students to share and learn about research at OCAD U. Light refreshments will be available.
Presented by the Office of Research and Innovation

 

Venue & Address: 
Room 701K, 205 Richmond St. West
Website: 
https://www2.ocadu.ca/research/gmoser/project/citizen-subjects-photography-race-and-belonging-in-canada
Email: 
research@ocadu.ca
The event poster

What is Foresight? Video Series

Policy Horizons Canada commissioned a series of short videos on the subject "What is Foresight?" that have been conceived, authored and co-produced by Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab), together with students from OCAD University's Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) and Graphic Design programs.

Produced in English and French versions, and fully captioned for inclusive accessibility (AODA-compliant), the work is co-directed by sLab's Director of Research, Greg Van Alstyne and SFI graduate, Zan Chandler. The production team is rounded out by OCAD U undergrad research assistants Alex Appugliesi and Jazeen Hollings, who developed original visual sequences and edited the video.

The video is composed in the form of three short segments approximately 2-1/2 minutes each which may be viewed back to back or separately.

In English: 
What is foresight?
Why use foresight?
Horizons' Foresight Process

En français:
Prospective: ce que cest? 
Le processus d'Horizons de politiques
Le Processus d'Horizons de politiques

For more information, please visit http://slab.ocadu.ca/project/what-is-foresight-video-series.

 

Monday, October 23, 2017 - 1:15pm

SSHRC Imagining Canada's Future: Dialogic Design Co-Lab

"In the face of intensified urbanization worldwide, what do we see as the highest impact social and human challenges for Southern Ontario, now through 2030?"

Southern Ontario is witnessing increasing urbanization, and with it a host of changes, challenges and opportunities.  For example, younger people are known as early adopters of new technologies, yet older people are experiencing technologies and their consequences in surprising ways. By 2050, we expect a third of Canadians to be older than 65.  What kinds of services, societies, and care do we envision to support our communities in the face of these changes?  

In an unprecedented study, Canada's research council for social science and humanities, SSHRC, has commissioned six regional panels to understand and imagine possible futures for the country in a global context. Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) at OCADUniversity is leading University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), Ryerson, Windsor and York universities and our combined intellectual communities.

sLab's participatory action research engages a diverse panel of academics, professionals, and students for a Co-laboratory workshop organized and facilitated according to principles of the Structured Dialogic Design methodology.  Dialogic Design is a multi-technique methodology based on human and computer-facilitated structuring of inquiry for a complex social or civic concern. Democratic by design, SDD produces strong consensus while avoiding cognitive biases, by adopting a series of language structures that conserve participant autonomy, authenticity, and shared commitment while mitigating group cognitive bias, power bias, and content complexity. 

The OCAD U-led project centred on an Expert Panel structured as a Dialogic Design (DD) Co-Laboratory to gather primary data, together with an Online Survey, a Public Workshop, and documentation of these activities on the Web. 

Focusing on urbanization as a key regional and global driver of change, the Expert panel was asked:

In the face of increasing urbanization worldwide, what future challenges
do we anticipate for Southern Ontario, now through 2030?

91 challenges were identified by the Expert Panel. On the Top Ten list are those challenges that are most influential on the other challenges, and highly related to the triggering question:

  1. Advancing a diverse and inclusive society
  2. Enabling equitable access to ICT
  3. Governing ourselves responsively
  4. Designing sustainable cities
  5. Overcoming fear of change
  6. Including indigenous rights in planning
  7. Transitioning to a digital economy
  8. Upgrading transportation systems
  9. Stewarding regional ecosystems
  10. Supporting our aging population

A follow up survey, and a public Design with Dialogue session correlated and expanded on the Expert Panel workshop findings.

In naming and assessing the influence of these future challenges, the expert panel considered both increasing urbanization globally and in Southern Ontario. Though urbanization trends will be most apparent in Canada’s large cities, all cities and communities will be affected by the transitions represented by the challenges.

For more information, please visit http://slab.ocadu.ca/project/sshrc-imagining-canadas-future-dd-co-lab.

 

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

A photograph of Southern Ontario at night taken from the International Space Station
SSHRC Logo
Monday, October 23, 2017 - 10:15am

Citizen Subjects: Photography, Race and Belonging in Canada

When Canada’s first citizenship laws came into effect in 1947, photography had already been representing this mode of belonging in the country for more than 50 years. Citizen Subjects explores this unique context that allowed Canadian citizenship to emerge as a subject of photography long before it became a legal category. Building on research conducted in local, municipal, and national archives from coast to coast, this multi-year research project explores the intersections of photography, race, and citizenship, testing the promises—and limitations—of visual representation in securing identities and rights.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES: 

  • To source representations of racialized subjects in local, municipal and state archives in the lead up to 1947 and to analyze the visual vocabulary that subjects used to present themselves to the camera as citizens;
  • To evaluate how photographic claims to citizenship in Canada participated in global and transnational understandings of citizenship around 1948, a period of intense activity around de-colonial, civil rights and nationalist independence movements;
  • To engage recent debates about citizenship, race, and photography by problematizing these terms’ historical conjunction with colonialism;
  • To disseminate findings through a one day public symposium at OCAD in Fall 2018, an exhibition at Gallery 44 and Critical Distance in Toronto in Spring 2019, journal publications, conference presentations, pedagogical activities, and an online archive;
  • To visualize the effects of changes to citizenship and immigration law, with the potential to inform Canadian policy formation. 

Comprising exhibitions, scholarly articles, a series of newly commissioned public installations, and an interactive website that allows users to build a visual vocabulary of citizenship, this interdisciplinary project invites audiences to think critically about questions of belonging in and around Canada’s sesquicentennial year. How did subjects use the camera to make claims for equality as citizens before the law offered them any such protections? What are the gestures, expressions, poses, and modes of dress that we recognize as performances of citizenship? How were race and citizenship imagined, and pictured, alongside one another?

Citizen Subjects is framed around an important date in thinking about the history of visuality and citizenship it Canada, focusing on the period leading up to the enactment of Canada’s first citizenship laws in 1947. These were, somewhat unbelievably, the first citizenship laws in the British Empire. The period between the end of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War is important for thinking about Canada’s relationship to global and transnational politics, because it marks a host of other nationalist and de-colonial movements happening worldwide, including the passing of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Man, the partition of India and Pakistan, the start of apartheid in South Africa, and the destruction of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel. Examining race and citizenship between 1946 and 1948 therefore illuminates how Canadian visual culture participates in global and transnational movements, and also forces the spectres of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism—two global processes foundational to twentieth century politics—to come back into the frame of how we picture belonging in Canada.

In a contemporary moment marked by increasing restrictions on citizen rights, such as the recent cap on Syrian refugees permitted into Canada, public debates about the global refugee crisis, and political movements such as Idle No More and Black Lives Matter, the project of building a visual vocabulary of citizenship takes on political urgency for a wide range of audiences in Canada. By examining how citizenship appears in photographs, Citizen Subjects develops critical knowledge about why certain subjects continue to be left out of legal framings of citizenship and builds the public’s visual literacy for recognizing current claims to citizenship by immigrant communities, people of colour, and Indigenous subjects.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Timeline of World Events (1947-48)
Blog post about in-progress research
Classroom on “Spectatorship, race and citizenship” (Video program curated by Gabrielle Moser)
Instudio Article "Picturing Race and Citizenship — with Dr. Gabrielle Moser" by Heather Beaumont"

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

Creator: 
Image of gloved hands handling photograph.
SSHRC Logo
Monday, September 25, 2017 - 12:00pm
Embed Video: 

Dr. Gabrielle Moser on the Walrus Talks

The Walrus Talks: The next 150
Wednesday, June 21, 2017 - 11:00pm

Produced by the CBC and The Walrus Talks, youth leaders delve deep into what makes Canada... Canada.

Join Dr. Gabrielle Moser, in episode 11, as she imagines a series of photographs of Viola Desmond that never existed.

The podcast can be found online at: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcasts/arts-culture/the-next-150/index.html

More information on The Walrus Talks can be found at: https://thewalrus.ca/canada150/

 

keywords: 

OCAD U’s Dr. Gerald McMaster advisor on new CBC series 

Thursday, March 23, 2017

CBC’s new ten-part docu-drama series, CANADA: The STORY OF US, highlights extraordinary moments in Canada’s history and people that helped forge a nation, from early Indigenous history to the 20th century.  The series was produced under the guidance of historians and academic consultants, including OCAD University’s Indigenous Scholar, Dr. Gerald McMaster, who served as one of the primary consultants. Ground-breaking curator, author, artist and educator, Dr. McMaster is Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Visual Culture & Curatorial Practice at OCAD U.

CANADA: THE STORY OF US takes viewers inside Canada’s history with dramatic re-enactments, ground-breaking CGI sequences and documentary-style virtual reality experiences. The series features the stories of Indigenous peoples, women, immigrants, pioneers, rule-breakers, scientists and entrepreneurs – many of them untold until now. The series highlights key moments spanning centuries of history beginning with Indigenous nations in the pre-contact era to 1608 with the arrival of explorer Samuel de Champlain in “Worlds Collide,” to the introduction of the sea otter trade by Mowachaht leader and statesman Chief Maquinna in “Hunting Treasure” (1778-1802), to “Boom Bust” (1911-1937) with populations exploding in urban centres, concluding with the creation of Nunavut in “Canadian Experiment” (1970-1999).

Each week, during the run of the series, in partnership with Ancestry.ca, the world’s largest online family history resource and an integrated sponsor of CANADA: THE STORY OF US, CBC will air a short vignette featuring a Canadian celebrity from the series, including Susan Aglukark, Wendy Crewson, Sarah Gadon, Mike Holmes, Missy Peregrym, Jennifer Podemski and Mary Walsh, who will discover something new and surprising about their own family histories.

CANADA: THE STORY OF US will also be brought to life online through a trio of immersive, 360-degree videos that will put viewers inside key moments in Canadian history. Through these interactive vignettes, viewers will be transported into the lives of Chief Maquinna; Laura Secord; and Richard Rettie and W.C. Wilkinson – two Canadian scientists who led a team to decode the Nazi Smart Bomb. Produced by Secret Location, all three 360 videos feature ambisonic sound to further immerse viewers in the scene. The videos will be available at cbc.ca/canadathestoryofus and on Facebook for viewing on desktop, mobile and tablet devices.

Series premieres Sunday, March 26 at 8 p.m. on CBC

Information session for students interested in registering for: LandMarks 2017

Wednesday, November 23, 2016 - 3:00pm to 5:00pm

This course frames a critical context that marks a multifaceted dialogue about land and the occasion of 150 years of Canada, pointing to futures and to much longer histories.  Students will engage in conversation with curator Tania Willard and artists, Camille Turner and Cheryl L’Hirondelle, resulting in the installation of public artworks in Parks Canada sites and in an online platform.

Winter 2017 Course 

CROS S4001.  Credit Value: 1.0

Instructors: Min Sook Lee & Laura Millard

 

 

Venue & Address: 
100 McCaul Street, Room 650
info session poster with text superimpossed on a photo of people at night with beams of lighted smoke

Canada’s Creative Economy: a lecture by Michael Bloom

CUPICSER
Tuesday, December 9, 2008 - 12:30am to 2:00am

More than $84 billion.

That’s how much creators — artists, designers and the traditionally recognized arts and cultural industries of new media, broadcasting, film, publishing and music — contribute to Canada’s economy every year.

It’s a lot of wealth. With the right amount of nurturing and the support of public policy, our creators can engage new knowledge and invention across a wide range of disciplines.

Join Canada’s university presidents — as well as leading figures from the cultural, private and public sectors — in exploring how culture is key to the nation’s innovation agenda and economic success.

“Canada’s Creative Economy”
A lecture by Michael Bloom
Vice-President, Organizational Effectiveness and Learning Conference Board of Canada
Monday, December 8, 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Auditorium, 100 McCaul Street

“Knowledge Transfer without Widgets”
Geoffrey Crossick
Warden and Deputy Vice-Chancellor
Goldsmiths, University of London
Tuesday, December 9, 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.

Auditorium, 100 McCaul Street

These lectures are presented as part of the Canadian University Presidents’ Initiative in Cultural Sector Education and Research.

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

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