B.7 Materiality, Meaning, and the Senses: Art and Placemaking, Part 2
Fri Oct 20 / 10:15 – 11:45 / KC 206 / Part 1
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.
An Architectural Revolution of Everyday Life
- Anna O’Meara, University of Victoria
“Architecture is the understanding of the self (…) The final product of creation is the creator,” argued Attila Kotányi in 1946. Kotányi argued that architecture expressed the architect’s vision of the world, leading many architects to become so immersed in their imagination that they would neglect ethical questions about whether the spaces they were creating were fit for the betterment of human life. The debate surrounding architectural form and function led to, in both cases, architectures that did not benefit everyday human existence. Kotányi and the Situationist International looked to public housing projects by Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (Le Corbusier) as examples of attempted aesthetic beauty that was unlivable, and Georges Eugène Haussman’s urbanism as functional architecture in the service of authoritarianism, to the detriment of human life.
The places where people live have central significance to the lives of the people living there. As an alternative to modern architecture and urbanism, Kotányi looked to indigenous cultures in Australia and Siberia to consider how inhabitants rather than architects might define (for themselves) the centrality and significance of their own place, treating their homes as expressions of their personal lives and insular communal world. In order to extend possibilities in placemaking to incorporate the will of inhabitants, Kotányi and the Situationist International asked: what if architecture could be constructed with the intention of being manipulated by human choice?
keywords: Kotányi, Situationist, Eliade, Lefebvre, architecture
Anna O’Meara is the Jeffrey Rubinoff Scholar in Art as a Source of Knowledge and a PhD Candidate at the University of Victoria. Her dissertation research focuses on the Situationist critique of Surrealism and how it relates to the creation of dreamspaces and worlds. She has written articles about how the Situationist International was influenced by Zengakuren for Common Notions and she is teaching a Special Topics film course at the University of Victoria that focuses on internationalism and the avant-garde.
“The Girls” and Their “Church”: Making Work, Queer Life and Place in Early Twentieth-Century Toronto
- Evan Pavka, Wayne State University
In 1920, artists Frances Loring and Florence Wyle (affectionately known as “The Girls”) purchased what was then an abandoned church-turned-school-house-turned-religious-meeting-ground in an undeveloped area of Toronto, Canada. In the intervening decades, the former Anglican Christ Church in Deer Park at 110 Glenrose Avenue became a significant node in the city’s cultural an artistic milieu, cementing both Loring and Wyle as fixtures in the local imaginary. In the process, the pair turned the soaring ceilings into the prime site for the production of works while grafting on additions and interior renovations that reimagined the already appropriated structure anew as their home and studio. Widely publicized and discussed in local newspapers, the church became inseparable from their identities, domesticity and artistic practice — an architectural oddity mapped onto their own as elderly women who lived together, struggled off and on with poverty and worked in a neoclassical, figurative language. By examining how existing materials and building elements were strategically recontextualized and deployed throughout pair’s fourty year stay, this paper takes up the series of architectural adaptations enacted by Loring and Wyle to their unconventional residence as queer tactics of appropriation and placemaking, asking: What role did such modification play in both masking and mediating their arguably queer life? How was space — and therefore place — central in shaping a highly visible but distinctly non-normative domestic environment in an otherwise protestant, conservative metropolis? Such an analysis may allow us to situate these quotidian histories of survival by non-architects as precursors to contemporary architectural discourses of adaptive reuse, sustainability and the more expansive histories of marginalized communities in these practices.
keywords: architecture, interior design, queer history, queer space, Canadian art
Evan Pavka is a writer, editor and educator whose work explores the intersections of power, memory, gender, sexuality and the built environment. His scholarly and creative work has been presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, DesignTO festival in Toronto, CICA Museum in South Korea and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. In addition, his writing has appeared in numerous journals including Article, Disc, Inflection, Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture, idea, Lunch, Pidgin, Pool and -SITE, among others, and the book Digital Fabrication in Interior Design: Body, Object, Enclosure. He studied design and architecture history & theory at Toronto Metropolitan University and McGill University.
Dwelling as landscape: a virtual project
- Paul Landon, Université du Québec à Montréal
Dwelling as landscape is a proposal for a new artwork that develops on the intersection of the perception of landscape with applications of imaging technologies. It is a project that imagines dwellings in natural landscapes and how these might be constructed and perceived. It builds from historical conceptual art practices where the artwork exists primarily as an idea and links these to recent approaches for sustainability in artmaking. This project incorporates technologies of digital imagery leading to the realisation of speculative artforms that reflect upon the notion of dwelling and its changing relationship to landscape, nature, and environment. As 3D line drawings, these forms recall architectural plans, projections of material forms in space, what is yet to be built.
This project extracts the notion of dwelling from the built environment and considers it as a perceptual activity that is not constrained by architectural norms and land ownership. It proposes the dwelling as a state of being with the landscape that can be re-imagined and envisioned using technological processes. Dwellings exist in the imagination as speculation but also as memory. They have endured historically and will continue to reappear in much of what we call landscape. Unlike sedentary settlements, dwellings often lack permanence, oscillating between being part of both built and natural space. Virtual objects will be used to draw attention to the environment in which they are inserted; inaccessible landscapes become settings for temporary homes, or dwellings. Computer generated, these open-ended structures reframe landscape as an immanent geography of perception and nature.
keywords: dwelling, landscape, architecture, virtual, conceptual art
Paul Landon is a visual and media artist who has exhibited video and installation works internationally for over 30 years. His artworks are in public collections including the Musée d’art contemporain in Montréal. In his research and in his visual art practice, Paul Landon explores neglected spaces of modernity. These explorations are transcribed through mediatised processes of recording, editing, archiving and reconstruction. Landon’s artworks are structured through the physicality and perception of architecture and landscape, positing these as sites inscribed with forgotten promise. Landon graduated from NSCAD in Canada and from the Jan van Eyck Academie in The Netherlands. In 2016, he completed a Doctor of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Paul Landon works in Montréal as a professor in visual and media arts at UQAM.
