5 March 2013 6pm - 8pm
A public conversation with Linda Duvall, Kim Simon and Amish Morrell
Where can we view social practice within the framing of art? Do Canadian institutions make space for these kinds of socially and community-engaged artworks? What is the role of the institution, curator and artist in making these works more visible? This conversation is takes place between an artist, curator and critic, and invites the public to collaborate in unpacking some of these ideas.
For more information, please contact Ellyn Walker, RG*RG Program Coordinator at ellyn@mercerunion.org
Linda Duvall is a visual and media artist who works and presents within gallery contexts, on the web, and within defined public communities. Linda Duvall’s projects focus on how individual identities are formed and revealed within a societal context. Her work often mimics the fieldwork of sociologists as she collects oral histories and records ordinary conversations in order to discern meanings hidden in mundane and familiar language. Her work consistently addresses public knowledge and presentation posited in contrast to the more intimate and possibly private material that is initially hidden.
Amish Morrell is Editor of C Magazine, a quarterly journal on contemporary international art, and Special Lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. For his PhD he wrote a dissertation looking at how contemporary artists address conceptions of community and identity through the re-staging of historical images. He has written for publications including Art Papers, Ciel Variable, Fuse Magazine, History of Photography and Prefix Photo. Curatorial projects include The Frontier is Here, an exhibition of works by contemporary Canadian and international artists that explore landscape and identity, and The Walking Projects, a collaborative project to produce new artworks that investigate walking as aesthetic practice. He recently edited The Anti-Catalogue (The Model, 2010), a book on contemporary artists collectives, and is published in Byproduct: on the excess of embedded art practices (YYZBooks, 2010), edited by Marisa Jahn.
Kim Simon has been active as a curator for over 15 years; she is currently curator at Gallery TPW in Toronto. Founded in 1980 as a non-profit venue for photographic practices, TPW is now committed to an expanded media-specific and discursive mandate, addressing the vital role that images play in contemporary culture and exploring the exchange between photography, new technologies and time-based media. For the last few years Simon’s particular curatorial research investigates an ethics of viewing in relation to the aesthetics of troubling images, within the context of pedagogical and journalistic turns in contemporary art.