OTHER WRITINGS

This section brings together all selected writings on contemporary art, exhibition practices, and Indigenous representation. The texts are also organized thematically and can be accessed through the menu under the following sections: “Accessibility”, “Art Exhibitions”, “My Art and Curation”, “Conciliation”, “Cultural Appropriation”, “Indigenous Art, Display, and Criticism”, and “Other Writing”.

“What do Artists Want from Science?”

I am not a scientist. So, the little I say here about science is likely to be either too cautious, incautious, or fundamentally wrong. That’s probably alright because this paper is not about science but about artists, their projections and desires, and the institutions that shape some of their practices. I am interested in the phenomena of so-called art/science collaborations. My thesis is that these partnerships are improbable if not logically impossible. Though touted by their host institutions as successes, the terms for evaluating achievement and proving it are unpublished—or might we say unconscious or repressed? These projects are more artistic and institutional wish fulfillment than viable possibilities.

“What do Artists Want from Science?”

Images as Speechless Texts: Hawthorne’s Hypotypotic Veil

Coming from visual arts, painting, a field well tilled by semiotic readings, I hope in a small way to return the favour by surveying textual images for sights beyond signs. My project is to take hypotyposis literally. I will view uncanny mental images produced while reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” as though they were works of visual art. I see these images as a philosophically distinct species of art, untitled works.

Images as Speechless Texts: Hawthorne’s Hypotypotic Veil

“Fine Arts Faculties and Indigenous Futures”

I am speaking to you from Treaty Four territory. You are all familiar with territorial acknowledgements. They are important courtesies, but are often rushed, their weight and implications blurred by recitation rather than resuscitation. Given the nature of our conversation, I’d like to take a minute to deepen my acknowledgement.

“Fine Arts Faculties and Indigenous Futures”

Art, Science and Aesthetic Ethics

Art and science are mutually exclusive fields. So-called art/science collaborations are inequitable: one discipline always dominates by using the other as a tool. Such ‘collaborations’ are more expressive of a desire than a logical possibility. What many artists desire from the exchange is to insert themselves as citizens into the debates that arise from scientific inquiry and the application of scientific results. In which case, artists do not really engage science but ethics, and while art does not have much effect on science, ethics permeates and influences the agents of both fields.

Art, Science and Aesthetic Ethics

Western Standard Time, Non-colonial Time, and Indigenous Futurisms

Indigenization is the transformation of any totalizing ideology, culture, or power to better suit the wisdom, ways, and needs of a local community. The process assumes that a People and their territory have been invaded, and that their futures—even ones that feature colonial expulsion—includes negotiated adaptations to the contemporary rather than a complete return to the past. Indigenization is decolonial in that it both conceptually and physically resists colonization’s totalizing drive. This refusal includes the decentering of Western standard time.

Western Standard Time, Non-colonial Time, and Indigenous Futurisms

Still Looking for E/quality: Quality of care versus aesthetic quality

Nearly three decades ago, I wrote "Beyond the Pale: Looking for E/quality Outside the White Imaginary" for Parallelogramme1. Electrified by the Minquon Panchayat cultural activists I orbited, the article considers resistance to other than Euro-North American art and artists, particularly in the artist-run centers where one would expect better. Reading it now, I remember growing pains: in the artist-run system, among racialized artists individually and as burgeoning collectives, and in myself. I wrestled with social expressions of my identity.

Still Looking for E/quality: Quality of care versus aesthetic quality