M.4 Sustainability: Teaching, Making and Long Visioning

Fri Nov 4 / 14:20 – 15:50 EDT

chairs /

Holly Fay, University of Regina
Sean Whalley, University of Regina

This roundtable session will consider possible ways university art pedagogy and art practices can move towards sustainability in this time of urgent environmental crisis. Presentations will focus on directions for long-term viability within visual arts. Submissions are welcomed by studio and studies practitioners, including grad students, faculty, sessional instructors, curators and independent artists.

Topics for presentation and discussion include: What methods can assist to gauge the balance of environmental and social impacts of art making and its public reception? How do we address dilemmas concerning the materials in art creation? What approaches to curriculum and course development can address sustainability in institutions such as universities? Can virtual platforms and online conferencing be better integrated into a more sustainable academic environment?

keywords: sustainability, environmental, pedagogy, impacts, stability

M.4.1 Outdoor Art Education: A Lateral Approach to Environmental Engagement

Allison Rowe, University of Iowa

On this roundtable I will discuss how I restructured a Studio Methods course to prioritize material and conceptual explorations of out outdoor art education. One of main objectives of the class was to de-emphasize traditional studio processes and instead consider how more in-depth relationships to land, flora, and fauna might foster different types of art production with natural and digital materials. I will share with others how I partnered with an existing environmental education organization, UI Wild, to leverage their facilities and knowledge to get my students working on various studio projects in and for Macbride Nature Recreation Area. In addition to taking on installation, video, 3D scanning, and photographic assignments outdoors, we also took up environmental topics in our non-outdoor projects such as designing educational signage for UI Wild’s Raptor rescue project mews. To support students in making connections between our outdoor explorations and their lives I assigned a visual journal instead of a traditional sketchbook with the intent that students could use the space not only to create but also to process and reflect upon how being and creating outside made them feel.

keywords: outdoor art education, visual journaling, collaborative making, studio methods

Allison Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher. Her artistic work attempts to re-personalize political discourses, exploring the possibilities that exist in this transitional process. Allison’s socially engaged and environmental projects have been manifested in numerous spaces including; the Dovercourt Boys and Girls Club, the Yukon Riverside Arts Festival and at Toronto Public Library Culture Days. Allison holds a PhD in Art Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MFA in Social Practice from California College of the Arts and a BFA in Photography from Toronto Metropolitan University. She is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor of Art Education at the University of Iowa.

M.4.2 Envisioning the Future of Visual Arts: Avenues for Sustainability Online

Yang Lim, Independent

This presentation will consider the possibilities that the online (digital) context can offer for the sustainability and long-term viability of the visual arts. Since it does not occupy a specific physical space, I propose that the online platform can allow us to innovate and reimagine the forms that artistic productions and activities can take. It has the potential to disrupt the assumptions underpinning “traditional” gallery spaces and open up possibilities for outreach and engagement that are non-linear, multimodal, and empowering for both artists and their respective audiences. Drawing upon some examples to illustrate these possibilities, I discuss how the online context can function as a space of agency for artistic practitioners and their audiences. As a mode of presentation and engagement, the online platform expands possibilities for artists to produce new types of artistic creations and disseminate them to audiences who may otherwise lack the opportunity to experience them in conventional exhibiting contexts. Leveraging the online platform, we can also increase the public visibility of underrepresented artists, encourage different modes of engagement from the public and the artists’ respective communities, and build connections among artistic practitioners that can contribute to future collaborations. This presentation will also touch on the importance of addressing the challenges associated with the online platform, so that it is accessible and empowering for everyone. Organizations and other institutional entities need to engage in a significant and conscious investment of resources, so that the online platform’s possibilities become a growing reality for practitioners in this discipline.

keywords: online, virtual, curating, exhibition, engagement

Yang Lim completed his PhD in English and Master of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. Currently based in Edmonton, he is an independent curator, writer, and researcher. As part of his curatorial practice, he has an ongoing interest in the discursive impact of contemporary art and collaborating with artists from underrepresented geographical and cultural contexts. He is also interested in uncovering marginalized and alternative perspectives that deal with timely topics in contemporary society. He has curated exhibits that revolve around issues pertaining to representation and cultural identity and is interested in exploring new possibilities for curating that can facilitate the dissemination and public reach of art.

M.4.3 From Unsettling to Unmaking: One Settler’s Critical Methodology for Disrupting Anthropocenic Perspectives and Gestures Towards Land

Jill Price, Queen’s University

Starting from the perspective that the Anthropocene is a colonial, capitalist, industrialist, patriarchal and petrol phenomena (Loveless, 2019) that began with early global exploration (Todd, 2015), From Unsettling to Unmaking is a research-creation PhD inspired by the important writing of American author Jane Bennett, in which she describes how waste is a “lively” actant that lingers and seeps across time and space. (Bennett, 2010). In coming to acknowledge how all “art is land art” (Price, 2020), as it from the earth all materials come, upon all art occurs, and eventually, to which all art returns, this paper begins by outlining how traditional and contemporary visual art materials, media, messaging and modes of presentation, carry forward anthropogenic values and aesthetics.

So as to work towards developing an UN/making Methodology that offers other settler artists and educators strategies for becoming more ecologically and socially responsible during this important time of truth and reconciliation and ecological crisis, this presentation then brings forward examples of artists and thinkers working in and around dematerialization, relational aesthetics and eco art to offer counterpoints to the mass production, consumption, dissemination and discard perpetuated by art institutions, the global art market and public art today.

Also sharing examples of “un/making” happening within Price’s personal praxis so as demonstrate how unmaking has been both generative and at times transitioned to the arena of “artivism” and community-based art practice, this presentation ends by posing the question, what else needs to be unmade in order to encourage and sustain creative praxis and practitioners who wish to take up reparative or restorative acts of care that help grow livable and equitable worlds (Myers, 2018) where both humans and the more than human can flourish.

keywords: art, ethics, decolonial theory, new materialism, sustainability

At her best after an iced americano with oat milk, Jill Price is of German, Scottish, Welsh and unknown descent grateful to be living, working and playing on the traditional territory of the Wendat Nation and Anishinaabeg people, in Barrie, Ontario.

Working at the intersection of art, ecology and ethics, Price completed an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art Media and Design at OCAD University in Toronto, Ontario where she was the recipient of a 2016 SSHRC, 2017 Michael Smith Foreign Study Bursary and 2017 Research and Writing Award for her thesis Land as Archive: A Collection of Seen and Unseen Shadows. Also awarded the 2018/2019 Faculty of Arts and Science Dean’s Award for Environmental Justice at Queen’s University where she is a SSHRC PhD Research-Creation Fellow in Cultural Studies, Price continues to explore the histories and agency of materials while investigating unmaking as a creative act.