Category: Publication Announcement

Canadian Critical Luxury Studies: Decentring Luxury

I have a chapter in the recently-published book Canadian Critical Luxury Studies: Decentering Luxury (Intellect, 2022), edited by Jessica Clark and Nigel Lezama. The book is the first study of Canada’s historical, economic and cultural relationship to luxury. From the fur trade to Indigenous resurgence, Eaton’s Made-in-Canada campaign to Toronto Fashion Week, Vancouver public artworks to Montréal’s fashiontech sector, this collection explains what makes Canadian luxury.

In my chapter, “Vancouver’s Monuments to Capital: Public Art, Spatial Capital and Luxury,” I perform material analyses of Douglas Coupland’s Digital Orca (2009)and Ken Lum’s Monument for East Vancouver (2010), two public artworks that emerged out of funding initiatives related to Vancouver’s successful bid to host the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. Given that public artworks have a unique relationship to their viewership and as such necessitate a different interpretive perspective and framework than other forms of art, I closely consider the spatial and historical contexts for the artworks’ commissions, and explore how they have contributed to the construction of space during a dramatic period of commerce-led development that transformed the city.

Order the book here!

Material, a digital chapbook with Model Press

My new chapbook Material, published with Ryan Fitzpatrick’s Model Press in 2020, explores concepts of materiality, embodied realities, and subjectivity. Many of the poems are inspired by Downer, a recent installation by Canadian artist Liz Magor, whose work has captivated my imagination for several decades, mainly because of its radical ambiguity. Notable, I wrote the poems concurrently with the final draft of my dissertation, which resulted in some thematic crossover.

New article published in Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft

With thanks to editors Christian Berger and Annika Schlitte, my article “Reconsidering the Photographic Encounter: Materiality, Conceptualist Photography, Sublimation, and the Subject” on conceptualist photography and feminist, materialist subjectivity, examining some of Jeff Wall’s photos as a specific case study, has been published in the recent issue of Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (The Journal for Aesthetics and General Art History.

MLA citation: “Reconsidering the Photographic Encounter: Materiality, Conceptualist Photography, Sublimation, and the Subject.” Eds. Christian Berger and Annika Schlitte, special issue of Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (The Journal for Aesthetics and General Art History) no. 19, 2021, pp. 393-412.

poem | image | self (after Adrian Piper and Lucy Lippard’s _Catalysis_ )

poem | image | self is a continuation of my research creation project exploring ambiguities related to specific works by conceptual artist Adrian Piper and my evolving relationships to these works.

This chapbook was published by Ottawa’s above/ground press in part for my participation in the TEXT/SOUND/PERFORMANCE: Making in Canadian Space conference at University College Dublin, Ireland, April 25-27, 2019.

Review in Prefix Photo Magazine

I published a review of Leah Modigliani‘s Engendering an avant-garde: The unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism (U Manchester Press, 2018) in issue 40 of Prefix Photo. The text is part of Manchester’s Rethinking Art’s Histories series, edited by Marsha Meskimmon and Amelia Jones (!!!), which “aims to open out art history from its most basic structures. Its function is to foreground work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional art history, and to address a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.”

I was initially drawn to the book because it relates so strongly to my dissertation work — in fact, at the 2018 Universities Art Association of Canada conference at Waterloo University, I had more than one colleague mention the then-brand new book to me, so I knew it was a must read (and it truly was).

New peer-reviewed article published in English Studies in Canada journal

A recent article I wrote, “Lisa Robertson’s Archive, Singular and Collective,” has been published in a special issue on “Pedagogies of the Archive” (Vol. 44, No. 2 (June 2018), pp. 75-100) of the journal English Studies in Canada edited by Dr. Jason Wiens. The article explores genealogical strands of the conceptual art movement as they pertain to Vancouver, with particular attention to Vancouver art’s archival unconscious, and relates the idea of a feminist conceptualist, archival unconscious to the creative and organizational practices of poet Lisa Robertson, using key terms developed by feminist archival scholars Linda M. Morra and Michelle Caswell. The article examines the contents of Robertson’s “maternal archive,” a small, private collection of key texts and textual objects the poet sent her mother in the early stages of her writing career.

Nikki Sheppy reviews Julia Polyck-O’Neill’s Femme (2016) in Arc Poetry Magazine #83

Calgary poet-critic Nikki Sheppy reviewed my chapbook, Femme (above ground press, 2016), in the newest issue of Arc Poetry Magazine. Although the journal is not available online, above/ground editor rob mclennan was kind enough to share this excerpt of the review on the press’s blog:

In this collection, the room is a feminist forum inhabited by poet Sylvia Plath, conceptual artist Gillian Wearing, literary theorist Hélène Cixous, and postcolonial queer theorist Sara Ahmed, among others. These lines of influence are named and engaged: Polyck O’Neill invokes several titles that absorb her attention: Plath’s “Elm,” Cixous’ Stigmata, and Ahmed’s “Affective Economies.” The effect is to expand the subject, the body and its language to surrounding feminist genealogies, engendering an inquisitive dialogue that is genuinely rhizomatic. In the matter of communication, “Hers is a field model.”