Faculty news

Former sessional faculty member Margaret Dragu has been named as one of eight winners of the 2012 Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. The $25,000 award recognizes career achievement in the visual and media arts by Canadian artists.

For more information regarding the awards, please visit The Canada Council for the Arts.

Congratulations, Margaret!

DiVA (Digitally Ventriloquized Actor), a three-year research project that ran from 2008 to late 2011, concentrated on developing digital musical instruments for realtime conversion hand gestures into synthetic expressive voice.

The interdisciplinary team based out of UBC include: computer and electronic engineers, linguists, musicians, performers and designer and Emily Carr Assistant Professor Hélène Day Fraser.

The work has recently received notice and publicity in the mainstream media:

CTV News

CBC Radio

The Burnaby Art Gallery presents the first survey exhibition of Professor Emeritus, Renée Van Halm’s work in Cross-Cutting/Inside Out.

The exhibit primarily focuses on Renée’s works on paper, as the exhibition explores in detail the artist’s interest in the role architecture plays in shaping our physical and social interactions. With this as an underlying theme, Cross-Cutting/Inside Out surveys over thirty years of work by the recognized Canadian painter.

The Bellevue Arts Museum presents sessional faculty member Dirk Staschke’s first museum solo exhibition Falling Feels a Lot Like Flying.

Winner of the John and Joyce Price Award of Excellence of the BAM Biennial 2010: Clay Throwdown!, Dirk returns to BAM with this ultra-relaistic installation focusing on desire and consumption. Inspired by the bountiful Vanitas still-life paintings of 16th-century Northern Europe and the excessive ornamentation of the Baroque period, he seduces the viewer with his voluptuous organic forms while exploring themes of excess and its effects.

March 1 – May 27, 2012
Bellevue Arts Museum
Bellevue, Washington

This first of a two-part exhibition looks at how artists in Vancouver worked with camera images during the vital period of the 1980s. The project brings together photographic and media art from two generations, including key innovators of the influential “Vancouver school.” Many of the works will be seen for the first time since they were originally exhibited. C. 1983 identifies self-reflective and concept driven camera works that points to the significance of photographic images in contemporary art practices at that time.

The photographs in professor Ruth Beer’s exhibition engage with ideas inspired by the formations and visible properties in geological rock samples. Many of the rocks presented in these photographs were collected by a young geologist last summer in the mountains of BC, Yukon and Nunavut. They were collected because they are tangible examples of time, material, form and events.

Lecturer Jane Slemon has published a paper in the a special issue of the Journal, Enculturation (rhetoric, writing and culture), commemorating McLuhan's 100th birthday (University of Minnesota): Playful DisPlay: Contemplating McLuhan’s View of the Modern Cadaver. Find it at Enculturation.

On December 21st, a discussion took place at TRIUMF about the parallels between art and science, as seasoned physicists interpreted art projects from a class taught by Associate Professor Ingrid Koenig. Ingrid, an Artist in Resident at TRIUMF; Associate Professor Randy Lee Cutler; Chris Jones, Coordinator for the Low Residency Program MAA; and four of the student artists joined in on the discussions.

The discussion was used as a test run in preparation for the worldwide art and science project, But hbar? Particle Interactions in Physics and Arts: Artistic Transformation.

A talk Alexandra Samuel recently gave at TEDx Victoria, has been blogged about by The Atlantic. Her talk focused on ten reasons to stop apologizing for your online life.

Alexandra is the Director of the Social and Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr and the co-founder and principal of Social Signal, one of the world’s most experienced social media agencies.

The Vernon Art Gallery presents Drawn Passages an exhibition of twenty recent collaborative drawings, and prints by Assistant Professor, Rodney Konopaki and Rhonda Neufeld (79).

The artists made the work in the exhibition over the past two years on visits to Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

A full colour catalogue with essays by curator, Lubos Cullen and Associate Professor, Ben Reeves is available for Drawn Passages.

Vernon Art Gallery
January 5 – April 5, 2012

Opening Reception | Thursday, January 5, 6 - 8pm