Orion Series presents visiting artist Jim Holyoak

by | Feb 23, 2022 | Events, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Visual Arts

The Orion
Lecture Series in Fine Arts

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:

Jim Holyoak

Visiting Artist

7:30 – 9:00 pm (PST) Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Room A162, UVic Visual Arts building

 

Free & open to the public in-person or via Zoom

Presented by UVic’s Department of Visual Arts

For more information on this lecture please email: visualarts@uvic.ca

Jim Holyoak’s art practice consists of drawing and writing, artists’ books and room-sized drawing installations. Throughout his life, drawing has been a way of contemplating animals and monsters, the real and unreal, metamorphosis and other worlds. He received a BFA from the University of Victoria, an MFA from Concordia University, and studied as an apprentice to master ink-painter Shen Ling Xiang, in Yangshuo, China. In parallel to his solo practice, Holyoak has orchestrated numerous collaborative drawing projects, often with fellow artist Matt Shane, and sometimes involving hundreds of people drawing together. Holyoak has attended artist residencies in New York, Mumbai, Banff, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, England and throughout Norway. His work has circulated widely, including at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, the GEM Museum in the Hague, the Drawing Association in Oslo, the Carnegie Mellon International Drawing Symposium in Pittsburgh, the Museum of Drawings in Sweden, and Open Space Arts Society in Victoria. Holyoak presently lives in Nelson, BC, while teaching remotely at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

 

 

About the Orion Fund

Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.

The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting  artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.

Free and open to the public  |  Seating is limited (500 Zoom connections) |  Visit our online events calendar at www.uvic.ca/events

Young Alumni Lunch & Learn Series

by | Feb 17, 2022 | Alumni, Art History & Visual Studies, Visual Arts, Writing

Wondering how to connect your studies to the wider world of the arts? Interested in exploring creative career opportunities? Curious about professional life after graduation? Bring your questions when recent Fine Arts alumni offer the inside scoop in these moderated, informal, free lunch & learn sessions on a variety of topics.

Find out the steps these recent grads took to get where they are—and how they applied skills they already had—in this new Fine Arts Young Alumni Lunch & Learn webinar series.

“Inside the Gallery” with Jenelle Pasiechnik & McKaila Ferguson

What’s it like to work at a regional gallery? How do you make meaningful connections in the art world? How do you connect your studies to the wider art world?

Join two recent Art History & Visual Studies grads who are currently engaged with the arts & community galleries: Jenelle is the curator of contemporary art with the Campbell River Art Gallery and McKaila is the operations & development officer at the Penticton & District Community Arts Council.

12-1pm Friday, March 4: register here

Jenelle Pasiechnik

McKaila Ferguson

“Are You Media Ready?” with Cormac O’Brien

Regardless of your artistic discipline, you need to be able to tell your story through words and pictures—but while many people have social media accounts, not everyone knows how to put it to use to leverage their creative careers. Is your content appropriate and relevant? Do you have current and accurate contact information online? If you’re putting yourself out there, what’s the media going to find?

Currently social media manager with Toronto’s Six Shooter Records, Cormac O’Brien is a multifaceted Department of Writing grad who has held all sorts of jobs across multiple arts industries—including musician, journalist, editor, podcast host/creator, content creator, artist manager and graphic designer!

12-1pm Friday, March 25: register here

 

“Finding Meaningful Work in the Arts” with Caroline Riedel

Everyone wants to find a relevant job after graduation, but what are the actual steps you’ll need to take to get there? How do you make connections and learn to network? How important can volunteering be to career development? What career assistance is available to you, both before and after graduation?

An experienced arts professional, Caroline Riedel is passionate about creating job opportunities help students mobilize classroom learning into rewarding professional experiences. she coaches students & alumni on career development, employment prep and work search transitions.

12-1pm Friday, April 8: register here

Note: these sessions are open to all students and recent alumni.

Adapting The Waste Land for the stage, 100 years after its literary debut

by | Feb 10, 2022 | Events, Faculty, Theatre

Director Conrad Alexandrowicz on the set of his adaptation of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (photo: John Threlfall)
Since its publication in 1922, T.S. Eliot’s landmark modernist poem The Waste Land has never ceased to be controversial. Inspired by the physical and emotional devastation of both the First World War and the global influenza pandemic, Eliot’s 433-line poem has spawned countless courses, studies, reviews and books. But, over the course of its 100-year life, The Waste Land has rarely been adapted for the stage—and usually only for solo performers.

Now, theatre professor Conrad Alexandrowicz has taken on the somewhat daunting task of directing and choreographing his own adaptation for a February 17-26 full-cast run at the Phoenix Theatre.

“This is not a play, and it completely ruptures all the rules of drama,” explains Alexandrowicz. “The attention of the poetic voice is constantly changing . . . but I wanted to create continuity within the piece, so I’ve rearranged the text to create dialogue—which was really an amazing thing to do, as it works brilliantly and reveals meanings in an entirely different way. So yes, every single line he wrote will be spoken—sometimes more than once—but not necessarily in the order [he wrote them].” He pauses and laughs. “I’m sure T.S. Eliot would really hate that.”

An unconventional adaptation

No stranger to stirring strong emotions in his audiences, Alexandrowicz is a physical-theatre maker who specializes in the creation of interdisciplinary performances which address subjects central to the human journey: issues of relationship, gender and power, and the nature of the performance event itself.

Given that The Waste Land has been described as “the most revolutionary poem of its time” and still has the ability to spark controversy a century after its publication, Alexandrowicz’s unconventional adaptation seems ideally suited to such groundbreaking source material.

“We’ve never done this kind of abstract physical theatre at the Phoenix, so I’m really interested to see what people will think of this adaptation,” he says.

Working with a cast of 13 students plus four designers, Alexandrowicz is taking his creative cues from the poem itself. “In one scene, for example, Eliot quotes a song called ‘The Shakespearean Rag’—so we have a singer appear and the rest of the cast comes running on and suddenly we’re in a musical—then all that disappears and we go back to scene that was interrupted. I’m trying to embody and reveal as much as possible given the shifts within the text.”

Exploring a queer subtext

Another aspect of this adaptation Eliot would likely hate is the foregrounding of the poem’s homosexual subtext, which offers a marked contrast to the poet’s famously disastrous first marriage. While studying in Paris as a young man, Eliot shared a rooming house with Jean Verdenal, a medical student who then died during WWI.

“There is very significant and convincing evidence that he was very much in love with this man,” says Alexandrowicz, whose first book was Acting Queer: Gender Dissidence and the Subversion of Realism. “There are a lot of tensions in the text I’m trying to reveal. But, as a gay man, I really want to bring this relationship to the forefront and pull it out as a narrative thread people can follow.”

While he appreciates this adaptation may not satisfy Eliot purists, Alexandrowicz insists that—much like The Waste Land itself—there’s meaning beyond what appears on the page.

“If you’re really exploring something, you’re going to create strong feelings in response to it,” he concludes. “I think, in these times of crisis, we should be trying to create vital drama.”

The Waste Land runs Feb 17-26, with in-person performances (at 50% capacity) Tuesday to Friday evenings at 8pm, and Saturday matinees at 2pm. Online streamed performances can be viewed at 7pm Thursday & Friday, Feb 24-25, plus 3pm Saturday, Feb 26. 

Regular performance tickets range from $26-$30, with $16 Cheap Tuesdays and $16 student rush tickets available 30 minutes before each show. UVic Alumni ONECard holders can also attend the Saturday matinees for just $21. 

Please review our current COVID-19 protocols.

Orion Series presents visiting playwright Carmen Aguirre

by | Feb 10, 2022 | Events, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Theatre, Writing

The Orion
Lecture Series in Fine Arts

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:

Carmen Aguirre

Visiting Author & Playwright

12:30 pm (PST) Thurs, Feb 17, 2022

Phoenix Theatre

 

Free & open to the public in-person or via Zoom

Presented by UVic’s Department of Theatre

For more information on this lecture please email: theatre@uvic.ca

About Memoir & Satire

(Advisory: Some content includes a description of sexual assault. )

Author, playwright and actor Carmen Aguirre will read from her bestselling memoir, Mexican Hooker #1: Art, Love, and Forgiveness After Trauma and from her new play The Consent Club. Her reading will be followed by a question and answer period.

Carmen Aguirre is an Electric Company Theatre Core Artist and Artistic Associate of New Play Development at The Stratford Festival. She has written and co-written over 25  plays and books,  including the international bestseller Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (CBC Canada Reads winner) and its bestselling sequel, Mexican Hooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution. She is adapting Euripides’ Medea and Moliere’s The Learned Ladies for Toronto’s Factory Theatre; Linebaugh and Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra for The Stratford Festival; and is writing Fire Never Dies for the Electric Company. Carmen is a 2020 Siminovitch Prize finalist, and a Studio 58 graduate. 

 

About the Orion Fund

Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.

The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting  artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.

Free and open to the public  |  Seating is limited (500 Zoom connections) |  Visit our online events calendar at www.uvic.ca/events

Orion Series presents visiting artist Abdoulaye Niang

by | Feb 7, 2022 | Events, Orion Series in Fine Arts, School of Music

The Orion
Lecture Series in Fine Arts

Through the generous support of the Orion Fund in Fine Arts, the School of Music, University of Victoria, is pleased to present:

Abdoulaye Niang

Teacher-Researcher

 

1:30 – 3:30 pm (PST) Saturday, February 12, 2022

David Lam Auditorium, MacLaurin Building, A-Wing

 

Free & open to the public in-person or online

Presented by UVic’s School of Music

For more information on this lecture please email: music@uvic.ca

Turn it up!: Music, citizenship and social change

Music is a powerful medium that crosses all cultures and boundaries, mobilizes movements and expresses the complex emotions of our times. For this Orion Lecture, join us for an exciting exploration of how music is being used by youth activists’ movements in Sénégal and Indigenous peoples in Canada to enrich the lives of listeners and empower and affect social change.

Orion guest Dr. Abdoulaye Niang will present on African rap, politics and the renewal of citizenship, followed by Ry Moran, who will present on the relationship between music, truth, reconciliation and justice.

After a short break, Kirk McNally from the School of Music will moderate a conversation between our guests that seeks to uncover the opportunities and challenges for music and musicians in both countries as we collectively work towards positive social change.

Dr. Abdoulaye Niang was awarded a PhD with distinction at the University Gaston Berger (UGB) in Saint-Louis, Senegal in 2010 for a thesis entitled, Social integration and professional insertion of young b-boys though the hip hop movement in Dakar. His prior affiliations and visiting sessions as a guest lecturer include Cape Town University, Northwestern University, Rutgers University, and Harvard University. Currently, Dr. Niang is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the UGB. His research interests include youth, social change, social movements, music and creative industries, the use of information and communication technologies, social uses of digital technology, identities, urban cultures, and the theories and methods of the social sciences.

Ry Moran is Canada’s inaugural Associate University Librarian – Reconciliation at UVic. Ry’s role within UVic Libraries’ focuses on building and sustaining relationships to introduce Indigenous approaches and knowledge into the daily work of the Libraries and across the campus community. Ry came to this position from the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) hosted by the University of Manitoba. Ry has also contributed to major national initiatives such as the creation of the National Student Memorial Register, designation of multiple residential schools as national historical sites, development and launch of the Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada, and a major educational broadcast which reached over three million Canadians. Prior to the NCTR, Ry served with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Ry’s life-long passion for the arts and music continues to be an important part of his life as he continues to write and produce original music. He is a distinguished UVic alumni and was awarded a Meritorious Service Cross by the Governor General. Ry is a proud member of the Red River Métis.

 

About the Orion Fund

Established through the generous gift of an anonymous donor, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts is designed to bring distinguished visitors from other parts of Canada—and the world—to the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and to make their talents and achievements available to faculty, students, staff and the wider Greater Victoria community who might otherwise not be able to experience their work.

The Orion Fund also exists to encourage institutions outside Canada to invite regular faculty members from our Faculty of Fine Arts to be visiting  artists/scholars at their institutions; and to make it possible for Fine Arts faculty members to travel outside Canada to participate in the academic life of foreign institutions and establish connections and relationships with them in order to encourage and foster future exchanges.

Free and open to the public  |  Seating is limited (500 Zoom connections) |  Visit our online events calendar at www.uvic.ca/events