In January 2023, I attended the 2023 Winter Writers Retreat at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity with faculty mentors Lisa Robertson and Nasser Hussain, and guest mentor Holly Melgard. I was quite honestly thrilled to have been one of the 12 attendees selected from over 300 applicants to work on my first full-length poetry manuscript, which is now almost complete thanks to my time in the mountains. I can’t recommend applying to work at Banff enough! I’m already thinking about applying for one of their prestigious Leighton Artist Studios for a self-directed writing retreat in the near future, perhaps with access to the gorgeous library and Vistas buffet in mind. I am not usually one for winter travel, but being nestled in the Rocky Mountains in the snow proved to be highly conducive to focusing on my poetry and making new writer-friends — I returned from my 2 weeks in Banff feeling refreshed and ready to publish!
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York U: Art History Speaker Series – Preserving Digital Artworks, November 2022
On November 17 2022, I organized and hosted the first event of 2022-23 season of the York University Art History Speaker Series, Preserving Digital Artworks, featuring guest speakers Patricia Falcão (Tate, UK) and Gaby Wijers (LIMA, NL), both international specialists in the conservation of digital media artworks. The attendance for the Zoom webinar-based event was excellent (64) thanks to the support of graduate student staff at AMPD and the Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology.
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.
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.