Tuesday, March 5, 2013, 6 – 8 p.m.
MERCER UNION A Centre for Contemporary Art
1286 Bloor Street West
What/Where is Social Practice?
A public conversation with Linda Duvall, Kim Simon and Amish Morrell
Where can we view social practice within the frame of art? Do Canadian institutions make space for these kinds of socially- and community-engaged artworks? What is the role of the institution, curator and artist in making these works more visible? This conversation takes place between an artist, a curator and a critic, and invites the public to collaborate in unpacking some of these ideas.
Space is limited. Priority is given to Mercer Union Student Members.
We ask those interested in attending a session to RSVP to Ellyn Walker, RGRG Program Coordinator at ellyn@mercerunion.org
Mercer Union RG*RG sessions are ad hoc meeting groups, lectures and workshops aimed towards the needs of recent graduates and emerging cultural workers. Topics ranging from grant writing to public speaking, from D-I-Y initiatives to building professional relationships have been the focus of resource groups, led by various professionals within their respective disciplines. Mercer aims to engage the community and its young audiences in these insightful, interactive resource groups that help develop the skills needed for careers in the contemporary art and cultural sectors.
Linda Duvall is a visual and media artist who works and presents within gallery contexts, on the web, and within defined public communities. Linda Duvall’s projects focus on how individual identities are formed and revealed within a societal context. Her work often mimics the fieldwork of sociologists as she collects oral histories and records ordinary conversations in order to discern meanings hidden in mundane and familiar language. Her work consistently addresses public knowledge and presentation posited in contrast to the more intimate and possibly private material that is initially hidden.
Amish Morrell is Editor of C Magazine, a quarterly journal on contemporary international art, and Special Lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. For his PhD he wrote a dissertation looking at how contemporary artists address conceptions of community and identity through the re-staging of historical images. He has written for publications including Art Papers, Ciel Variable, Fuse Magazine, History of Photography and Prefix Photo. Curatorial projects include The Frontier is Here, an exhibition of works by contemporary Canadian and international artists that explore landscape and identity, and The Walking Projects, a collaborative project to produce new artworks that investigate walking as aesthetic practice. He recently edited The Anti-Catalogue (The Model, 2010), a book on contemporary artists collectives, and is published in Byproduct: on the excess of embedded art practices (YYZBooks, 2010), edited by Marisa Jahn.
Kim Simon has been active as a curator for over 15 years; she is currently curator at Gallery TPW in Toronto. Founded in 1980 as a non-profit venue for photographic practices, TPW is now committed to an expanded media-specific and discursive mandate, addressing the vital role that images play in contemporary culture and exploring the exchange between photography, new technologies and time-based media. For the last few years Simon’s particular curatorial research investigates an ethics of viewing in relation to the aesthetics of troubling images, within the context of pedagogical and journalistic turns in contemporary art.