Aaron Richmond named new JRSP resident artist

by | Jun 15, 2026 | Art History & Visual Studies, Award, donor, Research, Visual Arts

The Jefferey Rubinoff Foundation and the Faculty of Fine Arts are pleased to announce that Canadian artist, scholar and curator Aaron Richmond has been selected as the 2026 Recipient of the UVic/Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Artist-Scholar Residency.

Aaron’s practice situates in the intersection of visual art, architecture and performance studies. With a PhD in Art & Architectural History from McGill University, a Masters in Intellectual History from Cambridge University and a Masters in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art, Richmond holds an extensive record of awards and residencies. He is currently an affiliated assistant professor with Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts.

Aaron Richmond

During his July 5-26 residency at Hornby Island’s JRSP, Richmond will develop a body of work that moves, like a relay, from landscape-architectural drawings to the creation of lightweight temporary sculptures. With this work, Richmond hopes to engage the park’s sculptural environment as a living archive, while also treating it as a prompt for the continued exploration of material practices, ideas and gestures. He is interested in art’s continued relevance as a space for experimentation and its dynamic interplay between graphic, formal, textual and performative modes of attention, and about the kinds of fleeting scenography suited to this moment of social and environmental uncertainty.

While at the JRSP, Richmond will share his working process with visitors at the sculpture park and offer limited select guided attentional walks: an embodied on-site demonstration of the relays, prompts and curiosities that animate it. Then, from November 17-20, he will visit UVic’s campus, where he will offer guest lectures, artist talks, a workshop and studio visits for Fine Arts students, staff and faculty members. An exhibition of the works he  creates at the JRSP will also be on display and open to the public in November (venue TBA).

Following his JRSP residency, Richmond will be the 2026-2027 Leonard A. Lauder Fellow in Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he will be working on Cotyledons: A Catalogue of Exchanges between the graphic and performing arts. This project asks: when does the mapping of a situation — whether in the form of an architectural projection, a conceptual schema, or a choreographic score — become an experimental prompt for bodies in motion? And what kinds of artworks or artifacts give evidence of this dynamic interplay between graphic form and performative play?

We are very much looking forward to welcoming Aaron this July for his three-week residency at the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park on Hornby Island. Stay tuned to follow his body of work develop as he responds to the interplay between continued exploration and the Park’s sculptural environment.

Established in 2025, the annual UVic/JRSP Artist-Scholar Residency was created as a competitive inter-institutional partnership based around an unwavering belief in cultivating the arts. Find out more about this partnership.

This residency is for artists and scholars seeking space to focus on creating a work for exhibition or publication that is in some way informed by their investigation of Jeffrey Rubinoff’s work and their experience working at the sculpture park.

The successful applicant enjoys a 2-5 week  residency at the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park with an additional week at UVic to engage with Fine Arts faculty and students.

Conference marks Canadian Association for Theatre Research’s 50th anniversary

by | May 29, 2026 | Alumni, Events, Faculty, indigenous, Research, Theatre

Keynote speaker Nininsky Lee Aquino

Our Department of Theatre was proud to support the 50th annual Canadian Association for Theatre Research conference, which took place at UVic from May 26-29 and welcomed an exciting mix of theatre artists, scholars and researchers from across Canada plus Phoenix students, faculty & alumni.

Co-chaired by Theatre professor Sasha Kovacs & University of Toronto’s Sarah Robbins, CATR50 brought together over 200 people to investigate questions of inheritance, transition, transformation and change. The conference was highlighted by passionate conversations — kicked off by keynote speaker Nininsky Lee Aquino — and performances by Git Hayetsk dancers, Theatre SKAM’s Aster Brae plus drag performances at The Vicious Poodle. Other highlights included the conference exhibition, panel, roundtable, praxis workshop, seminar and working group contributions.

The Canadian Association for Theatre Research was originally created in 1976 under the name “The Association for Canadian Theatre History.” Since its inception it has been the principal catalyst for expansion of theatre research in Canada, as evidenced by the change in name in 1990. It aims to shape Canada’s theatrical present and future by preserving and interpreting our theatrical past and investigating areas of contemporary theory and performance. Specifically, the Association works to promote research and publication of the results of this research into Canadian theatre and drama, to encourage the collection and analysis of Canadian theatre materials, and to maintain a communications network for the exchange of information and research in progress.

Sasha Kovacs & Sarah Robbins

This event wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada Connections grant program, the Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories Partnership, Canada’s Theatre Museum, Playwright’s Guild of Canada, Playwright’s Canada Press, Professional Association of Canadian Theatres, Talon Books, Belfry Theatre, the Centre for Socially Engaged Theatre plus numerous other departmental and community sponsors.

Special appreciation to Kurt Archer and previous co-chair Kara Flanagan for facilitating community artist engagement in this year’s event, Jenn Boulay for supporting accessibility plus all members of the incredible programming and local arrangements team for contributing to this memorable gathering!

Act 2 continues online June 11-12. See the CATR website for more info to join the digital act of the event.

Students & volunteers participating in Git Hayetsk performance

Music sponsors national choral conference

by | May 13, 2026 | Alumni, Events, Faculty, Research, School of Music

The School of Music is excited to be sponsoring PODIUM 2026, Canada’s national bilingual choral Conference and Festival! Co-chaired by Music professor Adam Con and presented by Choral Canada and the BC Choral Federation, this multi-day celebration runs from May 14-17 at both UVic and downtown Victoria, bringing together 400 delegates from across the country and 3,000 performing singers from dozens of choirs.

“It’s a celebration of the best of the best of what we do in Canada,” says Con in this Times Colonist interview. “We like to think that Victoria has more choirs, disproportionate to the population, than any other city . . . there’s a choir for every taste or flavour. That’s a good thing.”

But our involvement goes beyond organizing and hosting, as we’ve got Music students in the mix too: Sadie Karlsson is Podium’s volunteer coordinator, Dominic and Bree Ann Bartle-Clar are performing with the National Youth Choir of Canada, our Vocal Jazz Ensemble is doing a pop-up concert in the MacLaurin building’s A-wing (12:30pm Sunday, May 17), and we have two music education students assisting with the event’s technology. Also, 2024 Distinguished Alumna Carrie Tennant is directing a performance of the Vancouver Youth Choir, and a number of alumni are performing in the various featured ensembles.

Adam Con

Held every two years since 1982, PODIUM 2026 aims to ignite meaningful dialogue within the global choral community. Through offerings both on-site and online, we will showcase new music, bold ideas and exciting opportunities for collective singing, through participatory workshops and massed singing events. Key themes will look at the role of the choral arts in topics such as social justice, climate change action, health and wellness, diversity and inclusion.

“PODIUM 2026 is more than a national gathering — it is a moment of reflection, connection and renewal for Canada’s collective singing community,” says Con in this Victoria News article. At a time when connection and collective expression matter more than ever, PODIUM 2026 invites us all to raise our voices, not only in harmony, but in hope. In song, we find strength. In community, we find courage. And together, we shape what’s next.

Find out more

Visual Arts joins new downtown studio

by | Apr 2, 2026 | Faculty, Graduate, indigenous, News, Research, Visual Arts

We’re excited that UVic’s Visual Arts department is part of Victoria’s newest collective studio and gallery space: The Hourglass. Developed by Vancouver Island Visual Arts Society (who also run downtown’s ambitious 80-artist Rockslide Gallery), with support from the City of Victoria’s Storefront Activation Program, Hourglass is an 8,500-square-foot space housed in the former Volvo dealership at Yates and Cook, now repurposed to house 18 art studios and an exhibition space.

Visual Arts professors Heather Igloliorte (Canada Research Excellence Chair in Decolonial & Transformational Indigenous Art Practices) and Joel Ong (Canada Research Chair in Emergent Digital Art Practices), along with three graduate students, will have dedicated studios in the Hourglass.

“Having studio and presentation space at the Hourglass studios gives us a place to create and a place to connect,” says Visual Arts chair Megan Dickie. “We’re excited to build stronger ties with the Victoria arts community and to see MFA students working alongside our new faculty.”

Visual Arts will also maintain a small project space in the building to share work by students, instructors and community members: the first public presentation was the group exhibition The Work Yet to Come, which ran March 27-29 and featured the work of eight early-career Indigenous student artists.

One of the grad student studios

Like so many arts spaces in Victoria — including the bustling Rockslide itself — the Hourglass location is destined to be short-lived, as the property is slated for redevelopment into a 21-storey mixed-use tower over the next few years. But until then, it will serve as the city’s latest innovative arts space.

Follow the Hourglass here

The research behind the curtain of In My Day

by | Mar 31, 2026 | Events, health, Research, Theatre

By focusing on BC’s historical HIV/AIDS crisis, the new UVic production In My Day highlighted collaboration between researchers, community and performance-makers

Neon lights, club beats, a generation on the edge of disaster: when UVic’s Phoenix Theatre staged the moving and dynamic verbatim play In My Day in March 2026, it brought an essential chapter of Canadian history to life on the stage.

In My Day was both inspired by and based on the UVic oral-history research project “HIV In My Day”, which was supported by the School of Public Health & Social Policy, funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council and now housed in the UVic Libraries Special Collections & University Archives. Between 2017 and 2020, “HIV In My Day” collected sound and video interviews with long-term HIV survivors and their caregivers about their experiences living through the first 15 years of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Vancouver.

The original “HIV In My Day” archive was established by Nathan Lachowsky, then a professor with UVic’s School of Public Health and Social Policy and now Dean of UNBC’s Faculty of Human & Health Sciences, but the resulting play In My Day was written by Victoria playwright Rick Waines and guest directed by former Belfry Theatre artistic director Roy Surette. Nearly 100 authentic voices drawn from the original archival material were brought to life by a cast of 19 student actors, using themes of joy, care and connection to tell the story of life in the queer community during the early days of the epidemic.

“What does performance do to both archival and oral histories, in terms of activating that material?” asks Department of Theatre professor Sasha Kovacs, whose own SSHRC funding via the Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance partnership also supported this production. “And what does it mean for a new generation of students to understand this particular moment in history, to hear these stories from those bodies and these perspectives?”

Set designer Claudia Fraser’s research brought BC’s turbulent AIDS history to life (photo: Dean Kalyan)

Life becomes art through research

A Victoria playwright whose work uses autofiction and verbatim material to discuss his experiences living with HIV and the historical impacts HIV has on communities, Waines is intimately involved with this story. A hemophiliac who was diagnosed with HIV at just 21 in the 1980s, he was both one of the interviews for, and transcriber of, the original oral-history project; now, he uses the tools of narrative theatre to amplify his lived experience and challenge ongoing stigmas.

“This is a piece of memorial art,” he says. “It’s a powerful way of telling the stories of people who are no longer with us — it’s a naming, like, ‘Here we are, here are our stories.’ You’re going to get to know some of the folks through the memories of those of us who survived.”

As a play, In My Day was first workshopped in 2021 in the Belfry Theatre’s SPARK festival, then later performed in 2023 by Vancouver’s ZeeZee Theatre at the Cultch. The Phoenix production offers a significant reworking of the material to fit the student cast — “including a guy named Rick, who’s transcribing these interviews poorly and slowly,” laughs Waines.

Part of Avery Kester’s lobby display

In all iterations of the play to date, Waines has worked with young casts lacking firsthand experience of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, so educating them — as well as audiences — is a priority. “Not just the dates, names and drugs, but the feeling [of having HIV/AIDS] in their bodies,” he says. “Young queer folk don’t always understand or know the genealogy of their history . . . so when a young queer couple in the audience stands up at a talk-back session and says what the show meant to him or her, that’s enough for me.”

“It’s been fantastic having Rick here throughout the whole rehearsal period,” notes Kovacs. “Being able to share first-hand memories of these times has been invaluable — and the student playing the character ‘Rick’ [Elliot Baskin Smith] has been regularly conversing with him, which has been a fun part of the process.”

In fact, the two Ricks — Waines and Baskin Smith — both did a live interview with CBC Radio about their experiences working on this play.

Projection designer Molly Somers captured Vancouver’s queer hotspots (photo: Dean Kalyan)

Theatre with an ongoing impact

Kovacs believes the impact of In My Day goes well beyond the Theatre department and into the broader community: by dramatizing the oral history archive, the play provides an opportunity for students to understand how their work can serve larger goals and priorities — which is one of the goals of any research-informed creation project, like the Climate Disaster Project’s verbatim  survivor play Eyes of the Beast, presented at the Phoenix in 2024. “This is an opportunity to think more about producing this kind of work,” says Kovacs.

For In My Day, the student cast all had access to the original interviews — both written transcripts and videos — which Kovacs describes as “a key part of the process.” She also ensured that the show’s student design team spent time in the Museum of Vancouver’s gay and lesbian archives to properly capture the period. In this work, the students also learned about the historical intersections of performance and health activisms across more locally situated 2SLGBTQIA+ communities.

“This production not only catalyzes all that work but is also a way of encouraging students to engage with raw archival material. I sometimes think we take for granted how progressive the work was in these communities at that time . . . the way they were talking about gender and sexuality was really groundbreaking.”

Costume designer Helga Woolsey recreated the queer looks of the 1980s (photo: Dean Kalyan)

Collaborating on authentic history

Kovacs feels interdisciplinary projects like In My Day offer an ideal opportunity to educate students about the importance of collaboration between researchers and performance-makers. “This is all about engaging community with public health history: how do we engage those conversations into artistic practice?” she asks. “But with this production, I’m also interested in how we care for the health of the performers lifting this powerful, emotional and authentic work — that’s something we need to talk about more in the work we do as theater artists. While we’re telling stories about health, we also need to keep our creative team healthy and safe.”

With that in mind, In My Day honours not only those who were lost but the resilient communities who continue to care for one another and shape our collective future. During the play’s run, Phoenix Theatre also hosted an HIV community day, supported by UVic’s Institute on Aging & Lifelong Health, and presented an engaging visual timeline (by local artist Peggy Frank), art pieces from HIV positive community members and an exhibit in the lobby (created by Applied Theatre MA student Avery Kester, with guidance from Kovacs) which offered further insight into the interviews and archival materials that inspired the play and its production.

A close-up of Peggy Frank’s timeline

“Most plays and shows about HIV/AIDS focus on the American or British experience, so In My Day also gives us an opportunity to reflect on a more localized circumstance,” concludes Kovacs. “What are the stories being told within our local community, being created by local theatre companies? Who’s devoted to fostering the voices of folks who actually live here? This is a big moment for the Phoenix to produce a Canadian story by a Canadian playwright, while also advancing the faculty’s strategic priority to address the intersections of arts and health.”

—John Threlfall, with files from Claudia Phillips

Orion guest artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie

by | Feb 25, 2026 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Faculty, Graduate, indigenous, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research, Visual Arts

All are welcome to hear visiting Orion Series visiting artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, a professor at the University of California, speak on “The Concreteness of Imagination”: 6:30pm Thursday, March 12 in room A162 of the Visual Arts Building. Free & open to all. This talk is presented by our Art History & Visual Studies department.

She’ll also be leading the 2-day workshop Printing Resistance on March 10 & 11 (10am–5pm) at the Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab (room A134) in our Visual Arts building.

For the workshop, you’ll get to design an image for printing based on social issues based on protest, activism & Indigenous resistance + learn a grassroots technique used in protest movements. You’ll keep their printing press after the workshop. Register here. 

Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie is a Professor in the Native American Studies Department, and Faculty Director of the Gorman Museum of Native American Art at University of California Davis, known for photography, social commentary and video. Her presentation will include recent photo projects and portraits.

Tsinhnahjinnie’s work is held in several collections including National Museum of the American Indian (New York and Washington DC), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Eiteljorg Museum (Indianapolis), Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (Norman), Museum Volkenkunde (Leiden, Netherlands), International Centre of Bethlehem, Dar Annadwa Addawliya (Bethlehem, Palestine) and the National Museums of Scotland (Edinburgh).

Tsinhnahjinnie was born into the Bear clan of the Taskigi Nation, born for Tsi’naajinii of the Dine’ Nation, adopted into the Eagle House of Metlakatla, adopted into the Killer Whale Fin House of Klukwan.Hunka to Muriel Antoine of Mission South Dakota. For the past 22 years, Tsinhnahjinnie has been living and working on Wintun land, located in Northern California.

Makareta & Moana: mentor & mentee,
Tūranganui-a-Kiwa (2026), Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie photo