Articulation

In January 2008, OAG will launch Articulation, a critical art writing workshop series. This exciting series will give both experienced and aspiring writers the opportunity to learn from prominent members of the national art writing community. All workshops will run on Saturday afternoons from 1:00pm to 4:00pm and are limited to 18 participants each.

Saturday 12 January 2008
Adult Workshop with Ray Cronin (in English)

Saturday 16 February 2008
Adult Workshop with Meeka Walsh (in English)

Saturday March 15 2008
Adult Workshop with Richard Fung (in English)

Saturday 19 April 2008
Adult Workshop with Olivier Asselin (in French)

Saturday 10 May 2008
Adult Workshop with Kirsten Forkert (in English)

Monday 5 May to Friday 9 May 2008
School Group Youth Workshops with Kirsten Forkert (in English)

Cost:
$20.00 per workshop
$15.00 per workshop for OAG members

Location:
Adult workshops will take place at the Arts Court Building in the CAO Boardroom (Micaela Fitch Room).

For registration and information:
Amber Yared
Public Programs Coordinator
613-233-8699 x228
public@ottawaartgallery.ca

This program has been supported by the Artist and Community Collaboration Program (ACCP) of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Ray Cronin

Articulation with Ray Cronin
Senior Curator of Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS)
Saturday 12 January from 1 to 4pm

This workshop will teach you how to enhance your exhibition review writing through the application of critical writing techniques. Participants will develop opinions and draft reviews based on direct contact with exhibitions and individual artworks on display at the Ottawa Art Gallery. Those who enroll should be prepared to share their exercises with other participants in roundtable discussions. Discussion topics will include the value of research and best practices; understanding the physical, theoretical and emotional qualities of an artwork; and what makes a review critical.

Ray Cronin is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Bachelor of Fine Arts) and the University of Windsor (Master of Fine Arts). He is the author of several catalogue essays, as well as articles for Canadian and American art magazines. In 2000 he received the Christina Sabat Award for Critical Review in the Arts. He was the Visual Arts Columnist for the Daily Gleaner (Fredericton) and Here (Saint John). As a freelance writer he has published reviews and articles on art for several magazines over a fifteen-year career. As Senior Curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Cronin is responsible for overseeing the Exhibitions, Education, Collections and Conservation programs of the gallery. His recent and upcoming curatorial projects include a survey exhibition of the work of Thierry Delva, retrospectives of the work of Nancy Edell and David Askevold, and the nationally touring Woodrow, a multi-media installation by Graeme Patterson. He was the coordinator of the first Sobey Art Award, is chairs the Sobey Art Award Curatorial Advisory Committees, and Curator of the annual Sobey Art Award exhibitions.

Border Crossings

Articulation with Meeka Walsh (in English)
Editor of Border Crossings magazine
Saturday 16 February from 1 to 4 pm

For her workshop Meeka Walsh will focus on the form of the art review. In her workshop she will discuss the nature of reviewing and the expectations she has for material that is published in Border Crossings. Participants will submit reviews of 600 words addressing an exhibition mounted at an Ottawa gallery, in advance of the workshop. A number of these will be critiqued for content, effectiveness and style and discussed in depth at the workshop. Participants will gain from both the strengths and weaknesses of material which is to be submitted without authorship. Cringing and embarrassment will not be part of the programme.

Meeka Walsh is the editor of Border Crossings, an award-winning international art magazine. She has contributed essays to a number of catalogues published in Canada and the United States; most recently on Canadian photographer Sarah Anne Johnson (On-Transit, Visual Narratives in North America, 2005, and reprinted in 2006 for Platform Gallery, Winnipeg); on April Gornik (Danese, New York, 2005); Richard Williams (Gallery 1.1.1., University of Manitoba, 2005); and on the drawings of Leon Golub (Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, N.Y. and Anthony Reynolds, London, 2004). Her short fiction has been published in a number of anthologies, including The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Women Writers and Great Stories from the Prairies, Red Deer Press. Her books include Ordinary Magic, a travel memoir and The Garden of Earthly Intimacies, a collection of short stories. Ms Walsh has also edited Don Reichert: A Life in Work, and The Body, Its Lesson and Camouflage: The Photographs of Diana Thorneycroft. From 1995 to 2000 she was a member of the Canadian Artists and Producers Professional Relations Tribunal and she served on the Board of the National Gallery from 2001 to 2005. She is a Member of the Board of Winnipeg's Plug In ICA. In 2003 she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Western Magazine Awards Foundation and in 2007 she received a medal from the RCA for her contribution to visual art in Canada.

Richard Fung

Articulation with Richard Fung (in English)
Video Artist, Writer, Associate Prof. Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD)
Saturday 15 March from 1 to 4 pm

Richard Fung has been struck by the frequency with which critics, in their haste to develop their own theoretical insights, have misrecognized, not just misinterpreted, the works before them. This workshop will therefore focus on looking at-and hearing and feeling-art as the starting point to a critical engagement with the aesthetic, intellectual, social and/or political issues that it addresses. From there, participants will explore the relationship between language and ideas: criticality, rigour, poetics and communication. This workshop will involve a lot of writing and re-writing.

Richard Fung is a Toronto-based video artist and writer. His tapes, which include My Mother's Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000) and Uncomfortable (2005), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and have been broadcast in Canada and the United States. His essays have been published in many journals and anthologies, and he is the co-author with Monika Kin Gagnon of 13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics (Montreal: Artexte, 2002), recently updated and translated into French. Richard is a past Rockefeller Fellow at New York University and has received the Bell Canada Award for Video as well as the Toronto Arts Award for Media Art. He is Associate Professor of Integrated Media at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

Olivier Asselin

Articulation with Olivier Asselin (in French)
Art Historian, Associate Prof. University of Montreal
Saturday 19 April from 1 to 4 pm

This workshop will serve as both an introduction to critical writing and an opportunity to hone one's skills. Through discussion and practical work - analysis of chosen texts and of draft reviews written on current exhibitions up at OAG - participants will reexamine the history of art criticism as a genre that developed alongside public exhibitions and the art market, and they will analyze the main aspects of a critical text: description, interpretation, theory, judgement, style, and rhetoric. In conclusion, participants will reflect on the functions and the effects of art criticism on art practices, institutions, and the general public; as well as the range of means through which art criticism is disseminated, from articles in print to those in cyberspace.

Olivier Asselin is an Associate Professor at the University of Montreal, where he teaches courses in art theory, and film and video studies. As an art historian, he has focused on the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century as well as on contemporary art (Autofictions, 2002, Dédales, 2002, Le flâneur et l'allégorie, 2006). Asselin is interested in the dialogue between theory and practice, between film and visual art, especially in relation to certain kinds of technology (Écrans numériques, 2004). He has directed several films and videos, including La liberté d'une statue, Le siège de l'âme, Maîtres Anciens, La fin de la voix and The Last Days of Paris. He is currently involved in MIXARRT, a research group headed by Christine Ross of McGill University (FQRSC) devoted to Augmented Reality in contemporary art and he heads the research-creation group Menlo Park: Quelques fictions alternatives de l'histoire des sciences et des technologies (FQRSC). Asselin is also a regular member of the Center for Research on Intermediality (C.R.I.). He recently completed a new film titled Un capitalism sentimental.

Kirsten Forkert

Articulation with Kirsten Forkert (in English)
Visual artist, Independent critic, and Activist
Saturday 10 May from 1 to 4pm

This workshop will focus on writing art criticism as a process of understanding the relationship of art to society: of identifying and articulating links, connections, or contradictions between aesthetic or art historical issues and broader political or philosophical questions, current events, popular culture, etc. Participants will also look at how to bring their personal viewpoints and experiences into developing a critical perspective. In addition to writing and discussing, participants will go on 'field trips' to explore the wider context of Buildup, the current exhibition at the Ottawa Art Gallery.

Kirsten Forkert is a Canadian artist, independent critic and activist. She is currently beginning a PhD in media studies at Goldsmiths College in London; her dissertation focuses on working conditions for artists in a neoliberal climate. This fall, she participated in 'Public Address' in New York, a seminar and poster project organized by Publik (Copenhagen). Current/upcoming publications include 'Tactical media, institutions and neoliberalism: some questions' (Third Text, forthcoming in 2008), 'The Anxiety of the Reality-Based Community' (Fuse, Summer 2007) and as a member of the Radical Culture Research Collective, a critical response to documenta12 (Transform, 2007). Kirsten is a contributing editor for Fuse Magazine and is involved with the Radical Art Caucus of the College Art Association.