E.2 Emotional Wrecks: Ruins and Disasters as Sites of Feeling, Part 1
Sat Oct 21 / 8:30 – 10:00 / KC 204 / Part 2
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- Keith Bresnahan, OCAD University
This session solicits reflections on the links between emotion and disaster or ruins in the histories of art, design, urbanism, and visual culture more broadly. From Romantic meditations on ancient fragments of sculpture or architecture, to dramatic evocations of disaster (natural or human-made) in art, to debates on the fate of ruined buildings, to acts of intentional destruction and their reception, to fears of impending climate disaster: how have feelings – anger, fear, ecstasy, sadness, outrage, despair, love, admiration, hope, and more — been mobilized, represented, or otherwise engaged by artists, architects, and audiences in response to disaster and ruins? Presentations dealing with any aspect of this topic are encouraged, from any historical period, medium, or theoretical perspective.
keywords: emotion, feeling, disaster, ruins
session type: panel (double)
Keith Bresnahan (he/him) is an Associate Professor of design history at OCAD University in Toronto, specializing in the histories of architecture, urbanism, visual communication, and interior design. His research explores the politics of architectural destruction and reconstruction, symbols and visual signs in communication, and histories of emotion in design and urbanism.
Fire Season: Collective Sense-Making Around Wildfires
- Liz Toohey-Wiese, Kwantlen Polytechnic University
- Amory Abbott, Emily Carr University of Art and Design
The Fire Season anthology has been published in 2020 and 2022 by artists Liz Toohey-Wiese and Amory Abbott. Compiled through an open call for submissions process, these artist books curate a wide spectrum of contributions under the topic of wildfire. Showcasing visual art, poetry, writing, and essays, the featured works in each book explore the complex and experiential effects of wildfire. As the books have been a collective response to a range of moments and ideas around wildfire in western Canada and the Pacific Northwest, each editing process has revealed unexpected thematic veins and universal experiences that end up guiding the narrative of each publication. Our presentation will cover these overarching and undercurrent themes as they relate to our time and place, and share works that have been included in our books.
We’ve found that for many of the contributors to Fire Season books wildfire serves as a metaphor for more personal losses: loss of relationships, loss of ideas of home, loss of the stability of our annual seasons and the changes forced on the landscape by cataclysm. Also evidenced in the works, however, is that the wildfire metaphor opens up deeper opportunities for personal reflection; to practice acceptance in the face of loss, cultivate a deeper appreciation for landscape as it changes over time, and consider the new growth that emerges from the ruins. Our publications attempt quorum from a range of perspectives as a collective sense-making around the topic of wildfire, holding space for all of its complexity.
keywords: grief, wildfire, climate change, environment, interdisciplinarity
Liz Toohey-Wiese is a settler artist residing on the homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. She is a graduate from the MFA program at NSCAD University. She completed her undergraduate degree in painting at Emily Carr University, also undertaking coursework at the University of Victoria and the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. She has taken part in solo and group shows across Canada, and was the artist in residence at the Sointula Art Shed (2019), the Caetani Cultural Center (2020/21/22), Island Mountain Arts (2021) and the Similkameen Artist Residency (2023). Deeply interested in the history of landscape painting, her paintings explore contemporary relationships between identity and place. Her most recent work explores the complicated topic of wildfires and their connections to tourism, economy, grief, and renewal. She teaches drawing and painting at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey BC.
Amory Abbott is an American visual artist, illustrator, and author living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. His recent research has landed him in artist residencies in Olympic National Park in Washington, Glacier National Park in Montana, and along the northwest coast of Ireland at the Boghill Centre. Amory’s creative practice primarily addresses the modern West’s relationship to wild places. Through dark and dramatic charcoal landscape drawings, Amory blends folkloric and mythic themes with contemporary ecological concerns to reveal new perspectives about wilderness. Amory holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art (2016), and a BFA in Illustration from Herron School of Art and Design (2004). He has been core faculty in the Illustration department at Emily Carr University since 2017.
Spirit in Black: Photography and Wildfire
- Andreas Rutkauskas, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus
The correlation between European-settler forest management and wildfire presents a wicked problem. Over a century of fire suppression has resulted in unhealthy forests with high fuel loads. Climate change, including extreme heat, drought, and periods of heavy rain, exacerbate fuel issues and contribute to liability for megafires. While Indigenous cultural burning and governmentally prescribed burns are gaining support due to their benefits, these strategies often fail to prevent large-scale fires due to severely deteriorated forests.
In 2017, I began investigating wildfire as a subject matter through photography, video and immersive stereoscopic imaging. My artistic research centers primarily on the Okanagan region of Southern British Columbia. A relatively optimistic outlook on fire ecology was embedded in my earlier imagery. I felt I might contribute to shifting popular perceptions of wildfire through art. However, for every forest that benefits from low-intensity fire, a larger swath of land has been severely transformed due to a fire of high magnitude. This territory is often considered a sacrifice zone, where salvage logging results in virtual clearcutting. Throughout a month-long residency in the Similkameen Valley, I have been leaning into darker photographic images, literally and symbolically, as I utilize artificial lighting and embrace a sense of despair for these places. My presentation will unpack the emotional trajectory of this body of work, from a space that lauded settler resource extraction alternatives to the presentation of unremittingly harsh details of poorly managed forests.
keywords: wildfire, photography, climate change, land use
Andreas Rutkauskas has made photographs of landscapes for over twenty years, four of which have been dedicated to the aftermath and regeneration following wildfire. His past projects have focused on land that has been developed through the implementation of a range of technologies, including surveillance along the Canada/U.S. border and cycles of industrialization & deindustrialization in Canada’s oil patch. Andreas was the inaugural artist in residence at the Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment (2020), a Research Fellow with the Canadian Photography Institute (2018), and currently teaches photography at UBC’s Okanagan campus, on unceded Syilx territory.
Bibendum’s Barony: Rubber at Rat Creek, Failure at Fordlandia
- Darcy Fraser Macdonald, University of Alberta
Bibendum is the proper name of the character most of us know as the Michelin Man. He represents the first rubber baron. Wherever remnants of the pre-war, pre-synthetic rubber industry can be found we shall consider them to fall under Bibendum’s Barony. Bibendum’s domain therefore encompasses both the discarded rubber waste found at Rat Creek in Canada as well as the failed venture of Fordlandia in Brazil. In my current studio practice, pre-1947 rubber waste observed and collected over the period from September 2020 to November 2022 for use in artmaking or as art in and of itself, has played an important role by encouraging my engagement with the historical and theoretical background of the materials of the objects themselves. This, in turn, creates a meaningful context for situating current and future work involving early twentieth century trash which has been effectively archived in my own region of Northwestern Canada, by placing it within the stream of the global migration of materials and commodities of the early twentieth century. Through a new materialist lens I explore how these relics from my grandparents’ era function in my work and the work of artist Melanie Smith in her film and exhibition Fordlandia, and how discarded remnants of rubber have the capacity to unlock the secrets of a buried historical epoch.
keywords: remains, waste, loss, ruins, climate
Darcy Fraser Macdonald (he/him) is an artist/designer beginning the second year of his MFA Intermedia studies at the University of Alberta. His current studio practice and research utilizes contemporary art making methods coalesced around objects and fragments of his late grandparents’ era; the early twentieth century, particularly the 1940s. Many of these objects have been retrieved from a local city dumpsite (closed just after WWII) along the North Saskatchewan river over the past four years. Darcy holds a Bachelors of Design in Industrial Design from the University of Alberta and spent 4 years studying Architecture before the birth of his two children interrupted his march and sent him on a different path. Together with Tanya Klimp he has completed public art projects for the City of Spruce Grove, The County of Strathcona and The City of Edmonton.
