Christine D’Onofrio is an artist who works in photography, video, digital media, interactive media, printmaking, sculpture, book work and installation.Her practice explores themes related to art history and the nature of artistic practice, current and historical feminisms, exploitation, virtue, humiliation, humour and desire. She is interested in the contradictions and ambiguities of liberty, especially under capitalism and her work frequently juxtaposes consumer culture and mass media with art historical references. Her recent work critically addresses feminist strategies and discourses pertaining to structures of exploitation, humiliation and power. D’Onofrio is involved with Art+Feminism in Vancouver, an international campaign to improve the coverage of women and female identifying artists on Wikipedia.
Jacob is a Peruvian-born, Toronto-based artist whose work destabilizes viewing conventions and invites collisions of meaning. He studied semiotics and philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Since participating in documenta12 in 2007, he has achieved an international reputation — with exhibitions at The Corner at Whitman-Walker, Washington, DC (2021); Museum der Moderne Salzburg, the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, and the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019); La Biennale de Montréal (2016); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2015); Taipei Biennial (2012); Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Hamburg Kunstverein and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (both 2008).
In 2015, he co-curated the conference “This is Paradise: Art and Artists in Toronto” with Barbara Fischer, in collaboration with Kitty Scott. In 2016, he curated the exhibition “Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto” at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, with a catalogue co-published with Black Dog Press in 2020.
In this expansive consideration of his use of photographic archives, Luis Jacob describes the process of “aesthetic mobilization” that reveals the mediating – and mediated – character of human experience. With in-depth reference to two major works – his Album series (ongoing since 2000) and the recent project, The View From Here (2019) – he describes art’s capacity to arrest habitual trajectories of meaning-making, and to open spaces for new thoughts to become thinkable. Regarding photographic practice, he identifies in its very ubiquity a potential that lends itself to techniques that rupture photographic reception. Artists explore these gaps – these collisions of meaning – as a necessary condition for aesthetic experience, and as a mirror reflecting the tensions underlying socio-political life. Pondering Roland Barthes’s concepts of studium and punctum, Jacob speculates on viewing habits generated by digital databases and algorithm-derived search engines. Throughout the discussion, artistic reception comes into dialogue with artistic production, as the viewer’s sense of self-knowledge is implicated in worldly conditions of viewing shared by both artist and viewer.
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Recorded on 4 August 2021
Critical Image Forum is a collaboration between the Belkin and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory with funding from the UBC Public Humanities Hub.
Christine D’Onofrio is an artist who works in photography, video, digital media, interactive media, printmaking, sculpture, book work and installation.Her practice explores themes related to art history and the nature of artistic practice, current and historical feminisms, exploitation, virtue, humiliation, humour and desire. She is interested in the contradictions and ambiguities of liberty, especially under capitalism and her work frequently juxtaposes consumer culture and mass media with art historical references. Her recent work critically addresses feminist strategies and discourses pertaining to structures of exploitation, humiliation and power. D’Onofrio is involved with Art+Feminism in Vancouver, an international campaign to improve the coverage of women and female identifying artists on Wikipedia.
Jacob is a Peruvian-born, Toronto-based artist whose work destabilizes viewing conventions and invites collisions of meaning. He studied semiotics and philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Since participating in documenta12 in 2007, he has achieved an international reputation — with exhibitions at The Corner at Whitman-Walker, Washington, DC (2021); Museum der Moderne Salzburg, the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, and the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019); La Biennale de Montréal (2016); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2015); Taipei Biennial (2012); Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Hamburg Kunstverein and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (both 2008).
In 2015, he co-curated the conference “This is Paradise: Art and Artists in Toronto” with Barbara Fischer, in collaboration with Kitty Scott. In 2016, he curated the exhibition “Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto” at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, with a catalogue co-published with Black Dog Press in 2020.
Critical Image Forum is a research project that focuses on the political, ethical, aesthetic and social dimensions of expanded documentary practices. The Forum's primary medium of research is photography, with an interest in how the proliferation of moving images, performance, sound and digital networks have challenged and complicated the veracity of the visual document.
[more]Join multimedia artist Elizabeth M. Webb for a talk and film screening; both events are free and open to the public, no registration is required. Masks and proof of vaccination are mandatory. Webb is an artist and filmmaker originally from Charlottesville, VA. Her work is invested in issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her own family history of migration and racial passing to explore larger, systemic constructs. She has screened and exhibited in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Ecuador, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, Spain, Austria, Norway and Germany and was a recipient of the inaugural Allan Sekula Social Documentary Award in 2014.
[more]For this episode of the Critical Image Forum Dialogue Series, Tobias Ewé talks with Danish sound artist Sandra Boss about her practice-based research into mid-century German hearing machines, conceptions of hearing and how these shape the listening subject. The discussion takes its outset in Boss's dissertation, Tuning the Ear: Exploring Conditions and Conceptions of Hearing, which is much more than a collection of textual chapters, but a sound art object in and of itself.
[more]As part of the University Art Association of Canada's online conference, panel chairs Heather Diack (University of Miami) and Terri Weissman (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) brought together art historians and artists committed to deepening the discourse of photography studies and expanding its points of reference in Canada Global Photography: Critical Histories.
[more]From her earliest work in conflict zones to her most recent project documenting fluent speakers of the Haida language in Haida Gwaii, Farah Nosh is known for her intimate, empathic approach to photojournalism and photographic portraiture. In this wide-ranging conversation initiated by UBC journalism MA student Steven Zhu, Nosh discusses her formative experiences with photography as a Geography student at UBC, and subsequently learning photojournalism on assignment in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era.
[more]In this episode, through a far-reaching discussion of his illustration and photographic practice, and in dialogue with UBC professor emeritus John O’Brian, Robert Del Tredici touches on political, ethical and philosophical aspects of nuclear technologies and deployments. Through photographic projects from Three Mile Island, Hiroshima, Kazakhstan, Dene Territory in the Canadian Arctic and many other places and sites, Del Tredici’s presentation frames the enormity and devastation of the global nuclear industrial complex, helping to counter its forces of abstraction.
[more]For this second episode of the Critical Image Forum Dialogue Series, Daniela Perez Montelongo is in conversation with South African photographer Paul Weinberg where they discuss key issues pertaining to the role of photography in South Africa during the Apartheid and post-Apartheid eras.
[more]As part of Critical Image Forum's Dialogue Series, this online conversation with Althea Thauberger, Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw artist and activist Marianne Nicolson helps us understand how particular photographic acts, although initiated by Canadian colonial photographers, were used, by those depicted, as opportunities for assertions of political, cultural and territorial sovereignty during the potlatch ban in the early twentieth century.
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