South Asian Art History Student Symposium

by John Threlfall | May 31, 2022 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Faculty, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research, Visual Arts

Interested in exploring the fascinating history of South Asian art? Don’t miss the South Asian Art History Student Symposium, hosted by our Department of Art History & Visual Studies.

Join leading and emerging historians of South Asian art history as they present research on diverse topics from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh running from the ancient to contemporary eras.

This free hybrid event runs from 10am to 5:30pm on Saturday, June 4 in room 103 of the Fine Arts building, but can also be viewed online via Zoom.

Keynote speaker Rebecca Brown

Schedule of events:

Welcome coffee: 9:30am
Plenary talk with Dr Dulma Karunarathna: 10:20am
Keynote/Orion talk with Dr Rebecca Brown on “Modern Ecologies: KCS Paniker’s Painted Gardens”: 1:00pm

All are welcome to attend!

Thanks to our partners for this event, including UVic’s Faculty of Fine Arts, the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives and the Centre for Global Studies.

Orion Series presents Rebecca Brown

by John Threlfall | May 31, 2022 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research

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:

Rebecca Brown

Professor & Chair, Department of Art History, Johns Hopkins University

“Modern Ecologies: KCS Paniker’s Painted Gardens”

1:00pm (PST) Saturday, June 4, 2022

Room 103, Fine Arts building + streaming online

Free & open to the public

Part of the South Asian Art History Student Symposium

Register here for the Zoom session

Presented by UVic’s Department of Art History & Visual Studies

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

Dr. Rebecca M. Brown’s research engages in the history of art, architecture and visual culture of South Asia from the late 18th century to the present. She is particularly interested in the tensions and struggles that emerge within visual culture at moments that present themselves as transitional (but usually do not constitute a true “break”)—the early British presence on the subcontinent, the anti-colonial movement of the early twentieth century, the decades after India’s independence in 1947, and the economic and political machinations of the long 1980s.

Her current research focuses on the painting and editorial work of K.C.S. Paniker (1911–77) as it evinces a rich mode of experimentation with gesture, colour and line to deeply question the foundations of knowing in a fraught postcolonial linguistic and political landscape of southern India.

“Throughout my work, I am attentive to the interplay between space and the activities it shapes and enables, as well as the temporality of movement, performance, and duration as embodied by textiles, photographs, paintings, and people,” she says. “At the core of each of these engagements lies an attentive commitment to visual culture in its materiality, its instability, its active role for history, and its reconstitution in different epistemes under changing political demands.”

Paniker’s work explodes with vibrant life, both vegetal and animal, all carefully arranged alongside the marks humans make to seek understanding of the world: writing, math, charts, and astrology. His work thus presents an ecology of human-animal-plant mutuality, one of painted, curated modernist “gardens.”

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

New Summer Arts Series with Continuing Studies

by John Threlfall | May 27, 2022 | Alumni, Theatre, Writing

New for summer 2022, Fine Arts is offering our inaugural Summer Arts Series in partnership with UVic’s Division of Continuing Studies and Alumni Relations, which will see returning alumni teaching courses for the general public. And for this first series, we’ve chosen to focus on two topics: one related to sustainability and the arts, and the other on professional development.

Environmental Writing Workshop: Turning Knowledge into Feeling

Join environmental journalist, author and Department of Writing alum Arno Kopecky for this four-day workshop exploring how to turn complex information into emotionally compelling narratives. Participants will dive into a range of current environmental writing, from advocacy journalism to op-eds and longform creative nonfiction.

This in-person session runs on the UVic campus from 9am to 1pm Monday-Thursday, July 4-7 ($390).

Arno Kopecky graduated from UVic in 2001 with a double major in Creative Writing and Environmental Studies. A regular contributor to The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The Tyee, The Narwhal, and other publications, he has also written three books of literary nonfiction: The Devil’s Curve, The Oil Man And The Sea (shortlisted for the 2014 Governor General’s Award), and most recently, The Environmentalist’s Dilemma: Promise And Peril In An Age Of Climate Crisis.

But if you’re looking for something more performance-based, check out an Introduction to Voice Acting.

In this series of four online workshops, Department of Theatre alum and now LA-based voice actor Erin Fitzgerald will introduce you to the basics of voice acting. You’ll learn how to apply theatre experience to behind-the-mic acting and pick up the basics of body and breath for creating characters for either animation or video games. You’ll also learn proper breathing and vocal warm-up techniques, create fresh new characters, and go over professional voiceover audition copy for animation and video games. Erin will then provide personalized feedback and teach a new technique on how to approach audition copy.

Erin is a Canadian-American voice actress and actress who has been living and working in LA since 2000. She is best known for her voice-over roles of May Kanker and Nazz in Cartoon Network’s classic original series Ed, Edd n’ Eddy. Erin also plays Bo in the Emmy Award-winning show Storybots on Netflix and is known for her voice work in We Bare Bears, Ever After High, Monster High, Wild Grinders, The Jungle Bunch and Miraculous Ladybug. She is also a frequent voice on video games, including World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, The Last of Us, Danganronpa, League of Legends: Skullgirls, Persona 4: Golden, Persona 5, FFXIV, FFIX, FFVIIR, Bravely Default and many many more.

While current or former theatre students will get the most out of this workshop, however this method is for anyone. This session runs July 5 – 14, online ($390).

For full information and registration, please visit the Summer Arts Series page on the Continuing Studies website.

Creative Futures: Documenting the Climate Crisis

by John Threlfall | May 6, 2022 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Faculty, Graduate, Research, School of Music, Visual Arts, Writing

Creative Futures:
Dean’s Speaker Series

“Documenting the
Climate Crisis”

With Sean Holman, Colin Malloy & Paul Walde

Moderated by Dennine Dudley

12:30pm (PST) Thursday, May 26, 2022

Online webinar

Free & open to the public via Zoom

Register here

Presented by UVic’s Faculty of Fine Arts

The climate crisis is one of the most urgent problems of our time, and the arts can play a vital role in helping people better understand its impact. This moderated panel discussion will explore current work aimed at documenting the impact of the climate crisis, and how Fine Arts artists, scholars and researchers are responding with innovative and compelling ideas. Audience Q&A to follow.

This session features moderator Dennine Dudley (instructor, “Environmental Art”, Art History & Visual Studies), 2022 Ocean Networks Canada artist-in-residence Colin Malloy (PhD candidate, School of Music), Crookes Professor in Environmental & Climate Journalism Sean Holman (Writing), sound & visual artist Paul Walde (professor, Visual Arts).

“The arts have a central role to play in motivating the average citizen to not only care about the climate crisis but also take action,” says Fine Arts Dean Allana Lindgren. “Sustainability and climate change touch people in an emotional way, so action in this area by us has potential to spur action that, say, scientific reports will not. We have no shortage of faculty members who are doing fascinating work when it comes to sustainability, the environment and the climate crisis.”

About Creative Futures

This continuing Dean’s Speaker Series was established in 2021 by Dean Allana Lindgren to showcase the scholarly and artistic efforts of professors, instructors and graduate students in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Each year we will present two sessions (fall & spring) exploring a central theme showing how Fine Arts has a demonstrative impact on the most pressing social issues of our time. Our Fall 2021 session on Sustainability & the Arts featured Theatre professor Conrad Alexandrowicz (author of Theatre Pedagogy in the Era of Climate Crisis), Writing professor Kathryn Mockler (Watch Your Head: Writers & Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis) and moderator & Writing professor Shane Book. Watch a recording of it here.