EXHIBITING ARCHITECTURE OPPORTUNITIES for INVENTION is a symposium discussing creative approaches to curating exhibitions and installations that will happen on Wednesday, March 12, 2014 in the Main Lecture Hall at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture from 1:30 to 8:00 pm.
Two related panels, [INSIDE] OUTSIDE, will be followed by an evening keynote in the Main Lecture Hall. This post features the three speakers of the early-afternoon [INSIDE] panel. Follow-up posts will feature the late-afternoon OUTSIDE panel, as well as evening keynote speaker Felicity D. Scott.
1:30 – 3:30 pm [INSIDE] examines the disciplinary issues of designing exhibitions and generating vibrant discourse on current issues. How do we instigate critical conversations among different disciplines?
Christine Shaw, Blackwood Gallery – TBA
As a curator, educator and artist, Christine Shaw has created and directed interdisciplinary and collaborative programs to produce opportunities to transform our understanding about culture, creativity and inquiry. She has held the positions of Program and Outreach Manager for the Canadian Art Foundation where she managed over a dozen programs nation-wide, including The Ecology of an Art Scene symposium as part of Paris-Toronto; Project Manager for Musagetes where she designed and developed expansive curatorial programs including 1mile2 and co-curated the Big Ideas in Art & Culture Lecture Series with Gordon Hatt of CAFKA; Program Director at Neutral Ground Artist-run Centre in Regina; and Lecturer of Visual Culture at the University of Regina, OCAD University and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
In her independent practice, Shaw’s credits span a wide range of curatorial productions including Public Acts 1-29 (a networked exhibition in 29 acts along the Trans-Canada Highway), Love and Politics in Contemporary Art Practices (a conversation series co-curated with Adrian Blackwell for Justina M. Barnicke Gallery), Public 29: Localities (co-edited with Janine Marchessault), and softcatalogue (a publication project with Eduardo Aquino and Karen Shanski for Neutral Ground’s Architecture Series). Shaw has been involved in a number of collaborative projects related to artistic engagement and alternative education including Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry, Technologies of Lived-Abstraction Research Group, and, currently, Letters & Handshakes, a curatorial research project inquiring into precarity, pedagogy and participation. As a visual artist, she has exhibited work at artist-run centres, festivals and public institutions across Canada. Equally committed to discursive practices, Shaw has participated in numerous conferences and research forums such as Edu-Factory: The University is Ours! (Toronto), Pharmakon: the Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (Kitchener), KRAX: City Mine(d) (Barcelona),Version06>Parallel Cities (Chicago), The Genealogies of Biopolitics (Montreal), and Extra-curricular: between art & pedagogy (Toronto).
Shaw is currently Lecturer of Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Studies and Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She holds an MFA in visual art from Western University and a PhD in social and political thought from York University.
Larry Richards, WORKShop – “insideOUT”
Larry Wayne Richards is Professor Emeritus and Former Dean of the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. He is also Creative Director of WORKshop, Inc., a Toronto design centre and gallery. He served as Director of the Waterloo School of Architecture from 1982 to 1987 and continued at Waterloo as professor until 1997. A graduate of Yale University, Richards has curated (and in most cases also designed) more than 40 exhibitions on architecture. This includes exhibitions for the Venice Biennale, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, The Power Plant, University of Toronto Art Centre, the Patricia Faure Gallery in Los Angeles, WORKshop-Toronto, and the three Canadian schools of architecture where he taught between 1975 and 2011. He is a fellow in the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and received the RAIC Advocate for Architecture national award.
Ila Berman, Waterloo Architecture – “Expanded Field”
Dr. Ila Berman is the recently appointed O’Donovan Director of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and Principal at the newly formed firm ScaleShift. Previously, she was Director of Architecture at the California College of the Arts and Associate Dean of the School of Architecture at Tulane University. In 2012, Dr. Berman co-designed and curated Architecture in the Expanded Field, an exhibition exploring the intersection of architecture, installation, and curation:
Over the last three decades, increasingly blurred boundaries between art and architecture have generated a series of works known as installations whose conceptual, spatial and material trajectories have similarly produced a new and expanding network of relations between the domains of architecture, sculpture, interiors and landscape.
Such installations, emerging both from architects and artists, often operate on the fundamental conditions of the architectural without producing buildings, and expand the spatial, perceptual and material field within which architects are operating…Installations have enabled architects to explore architectural ideas, experiment with emerging technological strategies, and distill perceptual and experiential conditions without the limitations imposed by the permanence of architecture.
