Dorian J. Fraser (they/he) is a writer, curator and lecturer operating along axes of the visual arts, culture and cinema as they express and complicate sexualities, queer and gender studies. They are a doctoral candidate at Concordia University and are currently an instructor at MacEwan University in Edmonton, AB/Treaty Six territory Raised in BC on Coast Salish territories among artists, he comes to feel the sand between his toes.
Current areas of interest include problematic artists, unfashionable queerness, weird archives and cancel culture. They have published in Canadian Art magazine, C magazine, and have work in the upcoming Unsettling Canadian Art History from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Past curatorial work includes On the Record, an installment of Canadian queer and 2Spirit short films in the ongoing Cinema of Gender Transgression series at Anthology Archives in Manhattan. Their new curatorial work, Eric Metcalfe: Pop Anthropology will be opening in October 2021 at the University of Victoria’s Maltwood Gallery.
Shaunna Moore is an archivist with an interest in emerging arts and cultural archives and their intersections with social justice. She is a graduate of the Master of Archival Studies program at UBC. Prior to becoming an independent information specialist, she was the archivist for the Belkin Gallery, where she managed the Morris/Trasov Archive. She currently works with arts organizations to empower their preservation of small archives and other collections.
Felicity Tayler, MILS, PhD is the Interim Head, Research Services (Arts and Special Collections) at the University of Ottawa. Most recently, she has curated Desire Lines: Mapping the Metadata of Toronto Arts Publishing for the AGYU. Her interests include art historical metadata modeling, data visualization, and the print culture of artistic community, as a co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership, which foregrounds a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study and digital development, with diverse collections of spoken recordings from across Canada and beyond. Tayler’s critical and scholarly writing has been published widely and related exhibitions have taken place at Artexte and the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, among other venues.
Please join us for a panel discussion with DJ Fraser, Shaunna Moore and Felicity Tayler who will explore the limits and expanded possibilities of the archive. Thinking closely about the ethics of archival, collection and exhibition practices, the panelists will draw from the Image Bank exhibition and the Morris/Trasov Archive to address how they can be engaged as a practical concern and as an affective space of the imaginary. Together they will think through the following questions: How do you work within the material culture of an information system when provenance is a distributed network? What do the aesthetics of this networked structure cause us to do?
This conversation will engage with the Image Bank directories, lists, documents and archives on a practical level, with archival concerns, and in relation to archival theory. The panelists will also explore the affective space that these practical concerns encounter in the erotics of the archive, as they engage with the materials of the past in a process that orients our future desires.
The panel will be held at the UBC Leon and Thea Koerner University Centre from 5 to 7 pm, with a reception to follow. The event is free and open to the public, but space is limited; to ensure a spot, please RSVP to belkin.rsvp@ubc.ca.
Dorian J. Fraser (they/he) is a writer, curator and lecturer operating along axes of the visual arts, culture and cinema as they express and complicate sexualities, queer and gender studies. They are a doctoral candidate at Concordia University and are currently an instructor at MacEwan University in Edmonton, AB/Treaty Six territory Raised in BC on Coast Salish territories among artists, he comes to feel the sand between his toes.
Current areas of interest include problematic artists, unfashionable queerness, weird archives and cancel culture. They have published in Canadian Art magazine, C magazine, and have work in the upcoming Unsettling Canadian Art History from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Past curatorial work includes On the Record, an installment of Canadian queer and 2Spirit short films in the ongoing Cinema of Gender Transgression series at Anthology Archives in Manhattan. Their new curatorial work, Eric Metcalfe: Pop Anthropology will be opening in October 2021 at the University of Victoria’s Maltwood Gallery.
Shaunna Moore is an archivist with an interest in emerging arts and cultural archives and their intersections with social justice. She is a graduate of the Master of Archival Studies program at UBC. Prior to becoming an independent information specialist, she was the archivist for the Belkin Gallery, where she managed the Morris/Trasov Archive. She currently works with arts organizations to empower their preservation of small archives and other collections.
Felicity Tayler, MILS, PhD is the Interim Head, Research Services (Arts and Special Collections) at the University of Ottawa. Most recently, she has curated Desire Lines: Mapping the Metadata of Toronto Arts Publishing for the AGYU. Her interests include art historical metadata modeling, data visualization, and the print culture of artistic community, as a co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership, which foregrounds a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study and digital development, with diverse collections of spoken recordings from across Canada and beyond. Tayler’s critical and scholarly writing has been published widely and related exhibitions have taken place at Artexte and the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, among other venues.
Image Bank explores the artistic collaboration of Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov with others, including their most spectacular works – extended performances with props, such as Colour Bar Research (1970-78) and Mr. Peanut’s mayoralty campaign (1974) – alongside their extensive mail-art exchanges with other networkers such as Robert Filliou, Ant Farm and Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School. The Peanut campaign, in which Vincent Trasov as Mr. Peanut ran for mayor of Vancouver, mobilized the artists associated with the newly founded artist-run centre, the Western Front (est. 1973) and the exhibition includes many collaborations with and amongst these artists (Martin Bartlett, Hank Bull, Kate Craig, General Idea, Gary Lee-Nova, Glenn Lewis, Eric Metcalfe, John Mitchell and others). The exhibition pulls films, photographs, drawings, collages and other ephemera from the Belkin’s Morris/Trasov Archive to track the collaborative history of Image Bank. Founded in 1970 and lasting to 1978, Image Bank was a project initiated by Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov and Gary Lee-Nova that originated when they were all associated with the legendary Vancouver artist-run centre Intermedia. The exhibition reflects on a period of optimism where artists envisioned a non-hierarchical alternative to the world of art galleries and museums, where images and ideas could be freely exchanged through the international postal system thereby creating an open-ended and decentralized method of networking that presages social media.
[more]The second in an ongoing series of events, Reactivating: Art and Archives gathers a community of interest around the issues of art, activism and archives. Talks by Christine D'Onofrio, Amy Nugent and Becki Ross will be followed by group discussions.
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