A. 7 Materiality, Meaning, and the Senses: Art and Placemaking, Part 1

Fri Oct 20 / 8:30 – 10:00 / KC 206 / Part 2

chair /
Erin J. Campbell, University of Victoria
Scholars and practitioners across a range of disciplines have shown that place matters for social life. Places have a distinct geographical location and material form. They are invested with meaning and value. Places are felt, perceived, understood, interpreted, narrated and imagined. Placemaking can solidify and perpetuate social hierarchies and differences, shape gendered, raced, and classed interactions, and reproduce power and privilege. Placemaking can be used to dominate people and nature, colonize, and exercise political power. It can also bring people together to create community, break down barriers, and create positive change. Focusing in particular on the intertwining of materiality, meaning, and the senses in making place, this panel invites academics and artists to examine how art and architecture across time and around the world transform space into place through processes that make space both meaningful and purposeful.
keywords: place, placemaking, space, materiality, senses
session type: panel (double)
Erin J. Campbell is Professor of Early Modern European Art in the Department of Art History & Visual Studies, University of Victoria. Her research focuses on the Early Modern domestic interior. Her publications appear in the Journal of Art Historiography, Sixteenth Century Journal, Word & Image, Renaissance Quarterly, The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, To Have and To Hold: Marriage in Premodern Europe 1200–1700, Design and Agency, Patriarchy, Honour, and Violence, and RACAR. She is co-editor and contributing author of The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior: People, Objects, Domesticities (Ashgate, 2013), co-editor of A Cultural History of Furniture, v. II, The Middle Ages and Renaissance, 500-1500 (Bloomsbury, 2022), and author of Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior (Ashgate, 2015). Her current SSHRC Insight Grant, “Art and the Stages of Life in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior,” explores art and placemaking in the home.

Painting Place: Geographic Knowledge in Li Gonglin’s (ca. 1041-1106) Mountain Villa

Julia Orell, University of British Columbia

This paper presents a case study to explore interstices of landscape painting, cartography, and geomancy in the pictorial construction of place. Li Gonglin’s (ca. 1041-1106) Mountain Villa depicts his private estate as a series of sites arranged in the horizontal handscroll format. The original painting does not survive, but several copies preserve the original composition. I will focus on one section of the handscroll that shows the estate’s main building, “Lodge of Establishing Virtue,” surrounded by fields and mountains. This scene is distinguished by combining a diagrammatic structure with cartographic elements and conventions of architectural and landscape painting. My paper examines this unusual composition as a visual claim for the embodiment of knowledge.

Studies of Mountain Villa have shown that the painting constructs Li Gonglin’s social and religious persona. For “Lodge of Establishing Virtue” and its cartographic elements scholars have e.g. suggested that reference to geomantic pictures evoke an auspicious significance, that it shows the Buddhist Western Paradise, and that we should reconsider the representation of agricultural activity from the perspective of the Anthropocene. On the basis of these previous studies, I ask whether specific types of maps and diagrams, including geomantic illustrations, are referenced, what certain cartographic elements mean, or whether these are generic to embed a visual claim about representational accuracy, architectural practice, and deep environmental knowledge. In conjunction with textual sources, including a preface, poems, and colophon composed for the original painting, I argue that the scene constructs knowledge of place beyond its sensory experience.

keywords: Chinese painting, landscape painting, cartography, place, Song dynasty (960-1279)

Julia Orell is assistant professor for Chinese art history at the University of British Columbia. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago, has taught at the University of Zurich, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles) and Academia Sinica (Taipei), and was recently a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Orell’s primary area of research in Chinese landscape painting of the Song and Yuan dynasties focuses on the depiction and construction of place in painting and other visual media, interrogating the role of painting in the production of knowledge and its entanglement with historical geography and cartography. Her second area of research addresses the formation of East Asian art history as an academic discipline in the German-speaking parts of Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Liminal Space of Banff, c. 1913: Another St. Moritz?

Joan Coutu, University of Waterloo

In 1913, Thomas Mawson, a British landscape designer cum town planner, presented an extraordinarily ambitious proposal for the development of Banff, Alberta to the federal government. It was nothing short of epic: a grid of streets diagonally cut through with immense avenues terminated by grandiose structures that included hotels, a park administrative building, church, museum, railway station, hotsprings, and zoo. The whole was bounded by a mile-long bobsleigh run. This was the epitome of Euro-American tourist liminality: an intensely sensual out-of-the-norm experience nestled against the magnificently sublime.

Mawson prepared a comprehensive report that accompanied his elaborate drawings and site surveys. The eurocentrism of the proposal is immediately obvious but what is especially striking – and disturbing – is the unavowed depth of that eurocentrism. He essentially conflated the Rockies with the Swiss Alps and characterized Banff as a blend of Munich and St. Moritz shot through with a strong dash of England’s Lake District. In addition to diminishing the singular actuality of the Rockies, Mawson utterly excluded Indigenous peoples and cultures while only obliquely considering settlers populations as service providers for the anticipated throngs of tourists.

This short paper will focus on two themes. The first explores the psychological and phenomenological elements of Mawson’s intensely filtered view, which springs from the inculcation of the picturesque and the sublime in the European imagination. The second complicates that discussion by considering Mawson’s plans and his swaggering British presence in Canada against Canadian settler society nationalist identities, including the hubris of national park development. The inherent tensions that become evident might explain, to some extent, why Mawson’s plans for Banff were never realized.

keywords: Banff, plans, tourism, Eurocentrism, identities

Joan Coutu studies built environments in the eighteenth-century British Empire and in Canada in the early twentieth century. Her focus is on monuments, buildings, sculpture, park and town planning, and their relationship with politics, time, and imperial and settler identities. She has published extensively, including sole-authored books, Then and Now: Collecting and Classicism in Eighteenth-century England (2015) and Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-century British Empire (2006), and a volume of essays (co-edited with Jon Stobart and Peter Lindfield) entitled Politics and the English Country House, 1688-1800 (2023), all published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. She is currently editing another volume (with David Galbraith), called Utopia and Hubris: Classicism in Canada, c. 1900-1950.

Raising the New and Caring for the Past: Contemporary Conservation of Northwest Coast Totem Poles in Indigenous Communities

Jeremy Jaud, Independent

In the summer of 2022, marking the 40th anniversary of the raising of the first totem pole in Haida Gwaii since the potlatch ban (1887-1951) with Robert Davidson’s pole in 1969; contemporary Haida Master carver Christian White raised a new pole in front of the Tluu Xaada Naay community longhouse in Old Masset. In preparation for the raising, inauguration and attendant potlatch to celebrate and commemorate the new pole, White commissioned the conservation treatment of two older poles flanking the longhouse. In light of the often-fraught colonial histories related to the perception, collection and institutionalization of indigenous material culture, this paper focuses on contemporary collaborative conservation treatments within indigenous communities through the case study of these two poles.

How are indigenous artists today reassessing long-accepted ideas about the social lives of totem poles? How might collaborative conservation practices contribute to a resurgence of indigenous expressions of sovereignty in public spaces? This paper examines community-based and collaborative efforts to incorporate conservation treatments in conjunction with contemporary totem pole carving and raising practices. It argues that as material manifestations of immaterial family wealth in the form of histories, rights and privileges, contemporary totem poles increasingly demand an attendant practice of caring for the past and in the process, constructing and consolidating indigenous visual sovereignty in public spaces for the future.

keywords: community, conservation, Northwest Coast totem poles, potlach, Haida Gwaii

Jeremy Jaud is an independent curator, conservator and culture worker interested in contemporary Northwest Coast art and the material intersections of resource extraction, identity and culture. He holds an MA in Critical Curatorial Studies and a BA in Art History from the University of British Columbia (UBC) with professional training in the conservation treatments of art objects. He currently manages the studios, facilities, technicians and exhibition spaces for the visual art program at the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at UBC. Recent conservation projects include work with Hereditary Haida Chief James Hart 7isdansuu and Musqueam artist Richard Campbell on the Reconciliation Pole (2023) and the restoration of two totem poles in Old Masset with Haida Master Carver Christian White (2022).

Forest Love: Grounded Normativity in T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss’s x̱aw̓s shew̓áy̓ (New Growth)

Denise Oleksijczuk, Simon Fraser University

This paper examines the placemaking practices at work in x̱aw̓s shew̓áy̓ New Growth《新生林), a public forest garden of flora Indigenous to the Pacific Northwest Coast. The participatory artwork was created by T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss (Skwxwú7mesh and Stó:lō) with the help of youth collaborators, in Vancouver’s Chinatown in 2019. My paper argues that for those open to the teachings of Wyss, the plants, and the pollinators, x̱aw̓s shew̓áy̓ fosters a renewed sense of belonging to the natural world. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson defines “grounded normativity” as a particular, ethical way of relating to the land that involves “Indigenous processes that are inherently physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual.” Grounded normativity is the “home of resurgence,” and exists in opposition to a colonial and capitalist regime founded on the commodification of life. As a response to the tremendous loss and suffering caused by colonial dispossession, and the increasing damage caused by climate change, x̱aw̓s shew̓áy̓ functions as a six-year attempt to put the beginnings of a grounded normativity into practice from a tiny sliver of unceded Coast Salish territory. The young forest is divided by a sinuous path, punctuated on one side by a spiral rock garden and on the other by a cob oven, and on both sides are densely foliated fruiting plants. Using a sensory studies approach, my paper draws from interviews, field observations, and immersion in the garden--attuning my ears, eyes, heart, and muscles to the singularity and unpredictability of what goes on there. I trace the multifarious, often fleeting sensory interactions that help to transform an empty lot into a place that, for some, feels like home. x̱aw̓s shew̓áy̓ functions as a place to practice an alternative cosmology, one which urges us to use our precious gift of attention to widen the network and strengthen the connection to things that really matter.

keywords: forest garden, grounded normativity, Indigenous knowledge

Denise Oleksijczuk earned her BFA and MA at the University of Toronto and her PhD at the University of British Columbia. Her art has been exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Or Gallery, the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Solo Exhibition (Toronto), and the Ann Arbour Film Festival. Her book, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism (Minnesota University Press) won the Historians of British Art Book Prize. Her research and teaching overlap and pay close attention to the various types of viewer experience made possible by different visual and material forms. Oleksijczuk’s current research explores art and activism, the history and aesthetics of landscape/sensescape/gardens, the ‘vegetal turn’ in contemporary art, sensory studies, and Indigenous ecological philosophy. Her special issue of PUBLIC on the theme of Creative Ecologies appeared in 2021.