This talk is a draft toward the conclusion of Linsley’s book length history of art in British Columbia. He will discuss the dialectics of regionalism in contemporary art and the failure of regional discourse in Vancouver. Linsley suggests a new critical perspective on contemporary art to explain how a valid regionalism could exist. A number of well-known contemporary Vancouver artists will be discussed and in this lecture Linsley will propose a new way to evaluate their works.

Robert Linsley is an artist who lives in Kitchener, Ontario. He has recently exhibited at ACME (Los Angeles), Miguel Abreu (New York) and Diaz Contemporary (Toronto). He has written for numerous catalogues, including Frankfurt MMK, the Venice Biennale, Sydney Biennial, Vancouver Art Gallery, Belkin Art Gallery, Centre Santa Monica and FRAC Haute-Normandie. He has published criticism and art history in the Oxford Art Journal, Res, Trans E-Zine, Canadian Art, Fillip and Xtra, and has given talks at the Tate Modern, Yale, The Royal College of Art, University College London and The Whitney Museum among others. He teaches at at the University of Waterloo, in the Department of Fine Arts.

The Curatorial Lecture Series is organized by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in collaboration with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory; the Museum of Anthropology; and the Department of Anthropology; with the support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies and the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia.