Fine Arts shines at Ideafest

by | Feb 21, 2020 | Art History & Visual Studies, Events, Faculty, Graduate, indigenous, School of Music, Theatre, Undergraduate, Visual Arts, Writing

From issues in contemporary Indigenous arts to plastic waste, fake news and comic books about very serious topics, UVic’s annual Ideafest always offers one of the most fascinating weeks of the year!

Running March 2-7 at locations both on- and off-campus, Ideafest 2020 is UVic’s week-long festival of research, art and innovation. There are over 35 free events to capture your imagination, and tickets are not required (unless otherwise stated in the event description).

While you can peruse the full list of Ideafest events here, we’ve rounded up the Fine Arts offerings for your quick reference.

Luff: An Exploration of Kites

Take a stroll through UVic’s Fine Arts courtyard for an outdoor exhibit on kites from third-year drawing students in our Visual Arts department and other contributors. With a history dating back more than 10,000 years, the kite has entranced inventors and creative thinkers from Benjamin Franklin to Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers. This exhibit seeks inter-disciplinary connections and philosophical insights grounded in a fundamental truth: Without good design and careful construction, nothing flies.

Luff runs March 2-7 in the Fine Arts Courtyard

JCURA Student Research Fair

A recent installation by JCURA student Josh Franklin

Nine different students from all five of our departments are presenting their work in the annual Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards fair, including:

  • Josh Franklin (Visual Arts): “Holon Inc.: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Holistic Process Based Art”
  • Megan Ingram (AHVS): “Police, Prejudice, and Film: Contemporary Perspectives on Filmic Representations of Law Enforcement”
  • Emily Markwart (Music): “Florence B. Price: An Antidote to the Whitewashed Classical Music Canon”
  • Hana Mason (Writing): “Re-coming of Age: Themes, Motifs and Conventions in New Adult Fiction”
  • Hannah Moore (AHVS): “Revisiting the Anarchist Politics of Barnett Newman’s ‘Zip’ Paintings”
  • Benjamin Parker (Music): “Post-War Art in Europe: Stravinsky, Sibelius, Vaughn Williams and Schoenberg in the wake of WW1”
  • Christian Tervo (Theatre): “Representing War on the Canadian Stage”
  • Olivia Wheeler (Theatre): “EVOKE: An Exploration of Theatrical Designs Emotional Stimulus”
  • Keren Xu (Music): “The flute solo repertoire ‘Reflections 1’ and reception of female composer Diane Berry”

JCURA runs 11:30am-3pm Wednesday, March 4, in the SUB

Where are the Women Composers?

Even in 2020 there are significant challenges and barriers to women who are composing music. How did a patriarchal concept of art music routinely ignore historical and contemporary achievements by women in the classical music industry? Through performances of four solo flute works by female composers and a discussion with the performers and scholars, this session will explore the reasons why female composers have been excluded, ignored or sidelined.

Presenters include School of Music professor Suzanne Snizek with Sikata Banerjee (Department of Gender Studies) and flute students Emily Morse, Lisa Matsugu, Charlie Mason and Rhiannon Jones.

Where are the Women Composers? runs 12:30-2:20pm Wednesday, March 4, in Mac B037

Artistic Alliances: Indigeneity & Fine Arts

The District of Saanich along with the artist, Carey Newman, officially welcomes Earth Drums to Cedar Hill Park in September 2019 (photo: Kevin Light)

Indigenous arts engage people in multiple ways. Some works are more visible than others for some audiences and for different reasons. What is the social impact of Indigenous arts?

The research and creative activity happening in the Faculty of Fine Arts reflects the dynamic range of contemporary work being created, Indigenous knowledge and both the written and spoken word. Join fine arts teaching faculty and graduate students at this timely interactive session to learn about some of the surprising and engaging approaches to contemporary practices.

Presenters include Gregory Scofield (Writing), Carey Newman (Visual Arts), Lauren Jerke (Theatre) and Lindsay Delaronde (Indigenous Resurgence Coordinator). Hosted and moderated by Allana Lindgren (Acting Dean, Fine Arts).

Artistic Alliances runs 4-6pm Wednesday, March 4, in ECS 116

All Lit Up

Meet the next generation of Canadian literature as Master’s of Fine Arts students from UVic’s legendary Department of Writing read (and perform) groundbreaking graduating manuscripts in fiction, poetry, screenwriting, playwriting and creative non-fiction in this lively literary cabaret.

Hosted by Writing professor Kevin Kerr, readers include MFA candidates Martin Bauman, Daniel Hogg, Ellery Lamm, Troy Sebastian / nupquʔ ak·ǂam̓ and Guochen (Chen) Wang.

All Lit Up runs 7-8pm Thursday, March 5, at the Intrepid Theatre Club, 1609 Blanshard

And while Ideafest offers over 35 events, members of the Fine Arts community may also be interested in some of these other Ideafest offerings:

UVic’s annual Ideafest runs March 2-7. UVic is accessible by sustainable travel options including transit and cycling. For those arriving by car, hourly pay parking is in effect. Evening parking is $3.50. Click here for parking info and campus maps.

Preserving Performance symposium seeks to capture “lightning in a bottle”

by | Feb 14, 2020 | Alumni, Events, Faculty, Theatre

How does an object in a museum accurately depict its lively performance history? Consider the costume of late 19th / early 20th century Canadian Indigenous performance poet Pauline Johnson: just seeing it on display at its current home in the Museum of Vancouver tells the viewer nothing about the vibrant part it once played as part of Johnson’s live performances, which were never recorded.

Pauline Johnson’s performance dress (City of Vancouver Museum)

While artists have galleries, musicians have recordings and authors have books, theatre and performance artists and dancers have been grappling with the issue of how to accurately archive the “lightning in a bottle” of live performances for decades.

But now, UVic Theatre professor Sasha Kovacs is gathering artists, curators, performers, researchers, archivists and arts enthusiasts together in a unique two-day free public event, Preserving Performance in the Pacific Northwest, running Feb 20-21 at UVic and the Royal BC Museum.

Reanimating performance history

While Kovacs’ own research focuses on Pauline Johnson’s performance history, the Preserving Performance event hopes to highlight the vibrant performance history of the Pacific Northwest by gathering together many of the region’s leading voices in archival knowledge, performance research and artistic practice.

“It’s such an eerie thing when you see a costume that’s fundamentally about life, about action—yet you see it completely still, in a museum space,” says Kovacs, a co-investigator on the Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance project, which is providing principle funding for this event.

“Preserving Performance is about reanimating those performance elements of the past that we’ve forgotten about as soon as they’re put in the archive. They go to the archive because we want to remember them, but it also means they’re being released to forget.”

Theatre historian Sasha Kovacs

This curated series of conversations, gatherings and discussions looks to connect museum and archive specialists with performance historians and professionals to consider the political and pragmatic challenges of archiving performances. They will also look to the future, with an eye to collaborating and building networks to ensure the rich activity of performing artists working in this region have the contacts—and appropriate methods available—to ensure that legacies are preserved.

This event highlights the vibrant performance history of the Pacific Northwest region and will gather together many of the region’s leading voices in archival knowledge, performance research, and artistic practice. Goals of the symposium include:

  • deepening knowledge related to the performance activity of the Pacific Northwest region
  • imagining best practices for the preservation of performance materials by surveying and discussing the approaches currently used by local, regional, and national performance organizations and publics, and
  • highlighting the significant role of archives in creative production by inviting some of the region’s celebrated artists to reflect on the impact of archives on their artistic process.

“For so long, theatre artists have romanticized the idea that we’re the magical art form that exists and then disappears, but now there are issues of legacy, of how people remember that work,” says Kovacs. “It makes these huge contributions, but we can’t talk about it if there’s no material.”

Changes in technology and society

“I don’t want to create arguments about which art forms get more funding or attention,” says Kovacs, “but for performance, one of the reasons we’ve had a hard time generating public understanding of how important performance has been to our cultural, political and economic development is because of the challenge of creating any sort of record of it. And even when it is held in a memory institution like a museum or archive—like Pauline Johnson’s dress—it’s lost something.”

Henry Savage’s “King Dodo”, Vancouver Opera House, 1903 (RBCM)

Yet even when performances are recorded, those recordings don’t capture the essence of a living performance, and viewing them seems hollow in comparison to the live event. And recording technology continually changes (stills, film, VHS, Beta, DVD, Blu-ray, digital), which can make watching it in the future difficult.

“Performance forces us to reframe our understanding of what the archive is as memory,” says Kovacs. “If you think of it broadly—in terms of an audience’s memory—then there is a living archive of every performance. But that’s part of a larger conversation about the space performance gets, and some resistance to the art form.”

Defining performance, describing archives

There’s also the issue of what constitutes live performance. “Is Indigenous ceremony performance? Are the materials related to the potlatch ceremony considered performance? If it is, then the RBCM has a lot of materials.”

Danette Boucher of Histrionics Theatre

Participants in the symposium include Fine Arts alumni Danette Boucher (of Barkerville’s Histrionics Theatre), Matthew Payne (Theatre SKAM) and Lindsay Delaronde (Victoria’s first Indigenous Artist in Residence), plus representatives of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, the Royal BC Museum, the Burke Museum of Natural History, UVic’s Archives and a number of Pacific Northwest universities. See the full list and register for the event here.

“Part of this is also about bringing the leaders of these museums together to say what’s in their collections that is performance-related, to develop an inventory of where performance sits in these memory institutions, and what the challenges are that theatre artists are facing with archiving their own work,” says Kovacs.

“For me, it’s about bridging these two worlds—what’s happening in these museums and archives; they’re really interested in performance, and we need a lot of help figuring out what to do with all these materials. Can there be some kind of cross-fertilization between those two fields?”

2019 in review: part two

by | Jan 5, 2020 | Alumni, Art History & Visual Studies, Award, School of Music, Theatre, Undergraduate, Visual Arts, Writing

From our amazing alumni and stellar students to new creative spaces, a $1 million-plus donation and the passing of a literary legend, here are the final five top Fine Arts stories of 2019.

Active alumni

It was a good year for Fine Arts alumni, with School of Music alumni composers Linda Catlin Smith and Cassandra Miller both making venerable UK newspaper The Guardian’s “Best Classical Music of the 21st Century” list .

In Writing, alumni Eve Joseph won the Griffin Poetry Prize, Jenny Boychuk won the CBC CNF Prize, Steven Price was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and Jenny Manzer and Esi Edugyan were nominated for the City of Victoria Book Prize. Recent Art History & Visual Studies PhD alumna Atri Hatef was awarded a postdoc at MIT’s Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture.

Theatre alumni and noted CBC comedy writer Sam Mullins brought his Weaksauce & Other Stories to the annual Spotlight on Alumni, the Banff Centre’s new managing director of performing arts, Nathan Medd, was named the recipient of the 2019 Distinguished Alumni Award for Fine Arts, and puppeteer Ingrid Hansen appeared as a lead character on Helpsters, Apple TV’s new Sesame Workshop production.

That’s Theatre alum Ingrid Hansen as the big orange creature, Heart

And three Fine Arts alumni received all the ProArt awards in 2019, including two from Visual Arts—MFA Lindsay Delaronde received the inaugural Early-Career Artist Award, and Colton Hash was honoured with the new Witness Legacy Award for Social Purpose and Responsibility Through Art—while Theatre alum and Theatre SKAM artistic producer Matthew Payne picked up the Mid-Career Artist Award.

Student successes

Of course, no one in Fine Arts has to wait to graduate to start succeeding: current Visual Arts undergrad Austin Willis was named the only Canadian winner of the US-based International Sculpture Centre’s 2019 student achievement awards for his piece, “Framed Landscape”. With 325 nominations from 139 institutions in 4 countries, Willis— a painter and sculptor due to graduate in spring 2020—was one of the 11 overall winners. Current Visual Arts MFA candidate Danielle Proteau was named one of five recipients of the inaugural Audain Foundation $7,500  travel awards in September.

Austin Willis with his “Framed Landscape” at the ISC conference in Portland

It was exciting to see current Writing undergrad Kai Conradi make the top-three finalists in the annual Writers Trust Journey Prize, while current Writing MFA candidate Troy Sebastien received the inaugural Roger J. Bishop Writing Prize and fellow MFA candidate Ellery Lamm picked up a pair of Pick of the Fringe Awards at the Victoria Fringe Festival for the debut run of her new play, Summer Bucket List. And a passion for Indigenous arts and activism led Art History & Visual Studies undergrad Melissa Granley to a seven-month position at downtown’s Legacy Art Gallery; she will also be curating two exhibits for First Peoples House in 2020.

Current Theatre undergrad Tallas Munro had the honour of taking the lead role in the historic Phoenix Theatre production of Shakespeare’s Othello—performed for the first time in the Theatre department’s 53 year history. A number of Theatre students also mounted productions during the Victoria Fringe Festival, including the new play Summer Bucket List which won Favourite New Work and Favourite Drama for not only student playwright Ellery Lamm and alumni director Anna Marie Anderson, but also the talents of current Theatre students Aaron Smail, Hina Nishioka, Devon Vecchio, Arielle Parsons, Emily Hay, Willa Hladun and Isaiah Adachi. 

Theatre student Tallas Munro in the lead role of Othello (photo: Dean Kalyan)

Three School of Music undergraduates were named winners of the annual UVic Concerto Competition: Anna Betuzzi (oboe), Jeanel Liang (violin) and Xheni Sinaj (piano). Liang performed Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Majorwith the UVic Orchestra in November, while Betuzzi was a featured performer at the December Orchestra concert, performing the Oboe Concerto by Richard Strauss, and Sinaj will be performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major with the Orchestra on January 21, 2020.

Creating the new CREATE Lab

Whether it’s Queen recording their iconic title track in Bohemian Rhapsody or Will Ferrell’s hilarious “More Cowbell” sketch on Saturday Night Live, what happens in the recording studio has long been mythologized in popular culture. Now, students and faculty are able to activate that knowledge first-hand in the School of Music’s new Create Lab: a dedicated, state-of-the-art recording studio where music technology professor Kirk McNally and his students explore the role of sound recording engineers and music producers.

Kirk McNally in the School of Music’s Create Lab, with music student Ayari Kasukawa (UVIC Photo Services)

Completed in early 2019, the half-million-dollar Create Lab is already being booked 15 hours a day by student composers, musicians, engineers and sound artists in the undergraduate Music and Computer Science program—unique in Canada—and with Master of Music Technology students.

“It all comes down to listening,” says McNally. “Our job as engineers is to communicate something—either through technical or verbal means—in a way that’s understood by the person on the other side of the glass. That’s the importance of having a space where you can understand exactly what the sound is.”

Roger Bishop’s $1.6 million donation

If the name Roger J. Bishop rings a bell, it’s likely from his namesake theatre space in the Theatre building. But future students will also know the late local scholar, avid book collector and lifetime supporter of the arts at UVic better as the creator of a series of new student scholarships and prizes—thanks to a $1.6-million donation from Bishop’s estate to UVic in September.

“Roger Bishop’s generosity, as represented by this gift, will directly and positively contribute to the success of our students and continue the great legacy of excellence in the Theatre department which he helped to found,” says Theatre chair Anthony Vickery.

UVic alumnus Brian D. Young, estate executor and close family friend of the Bishops, with UVic Music student Emily Markwart, one of the first recipients of the new Roger and Ailsa Bishop Travel Award in Music, outside the Bishop Theatre (UVic Photo Services)

Over $300,000 of the estate gift goes specifically to Fine Arts for the creation of three new endowments: the Ailsa and Roger Bishop Entrance Scholarship in Theatre, the Roger J. Bishop Writing Prize, and the Ailsa and Roger Bishop Travel Award in Music.

Remembering Patrick Lane

When award-winning poet, novelist and former Writing instructor Patrick Lane passed away in March, he was described as “one of Canada’s most renowned writers” — a claim few would argue.

“BC’s poetry power couple”: Lane & his wife, Lorna Crozier

His distinguished career spanned 50 years and 25 volumes of poetry, as well as award-winning books of fiction and non-fiction, published in over a dozen countries. The winner of numerous accolades — including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, the Canadian Authors Association Award and three National Magazine Awards — Lane was named an officer of the Order of Canada in 2014.

Husband to beloved Writing professor emeritus Lorna Crozier, Patrick’s passing made headlines in every major media outlet nation-wide, with a number of his former students and Writing colleagues quoted in the memorials.

Be sure to read part one of our 2019 top-10 roundup here.