Future Objects: Queer Ecological WorldBuilding in the Photography of Oregon’s Lesbian Lands
This paper examines the “Ovular” artist workshops held at the lesbian land Rootworks in Southern Oregon from 1980 to 1984, and argues for their significance to queer, environmental and feminist pasts and futures as examples of imagining and constructing new worlds through photography. Each year the workshops culminated in the publication of The Blatant Image, a mail-submission and subscription magazine of feminist photography that ran from 1981 to 1983. I argue that the photographs created in the workshops and the circulation in The Blatant Image exemplify the radical approach to documentation, art making and speculative archival practice present in many alternative feminist communities
Breaking and making worlds through radical lenses such as decolonization, abolition, queering, feminisms (xeno-, cyber-, trans-), and destituency.
To change anything, start everywhere. – CrimethInc.
Radical (Re)worlding is a collaborative, interdisciplinary event, organized by current AHVA graduate students that is excited to present contributions on a wide variety of topics, both contemporary and historical, by emerging academics, artists, curators, and independent researchers and theorists.
We’re thinking about radical ideas such as xenofeminism’s post-gender world; anarchists’ dual-power projects; accelerationism’s embrace of automation and rejection of folk politics; Agamben’s destituency; and finally in the academy, the growing body of thinking around the Undercommons.
Forty-plus years ago, Gayatri Spivak defined “worlding” as the transformation of the colonized space by colonizers (e.g., through map making). Can we retake or remake that term? Rather than hit <undo>, can we, in fact, do better?
…imagination is a contested field of action, not an ephemeral afterthought that we have the luxury to dismiss or romanticize, but a resource, a battleground, an input and output of technology and social order. In fact, we should acknowledge that most people are forced to live inside someone else’s imagination and one of the things we have to come to grips with is how the nightmares that many people are forced to endure are the underside of elite fantasies about efficiency, profit and social control. – Ruha Benjamin
Another world is possible.
Schedule:
Thursday, March 4, 2021
Artist Talk: Lisa Jackson
4:00 – 5:30 pm
Friday, March 5, 2021
Artist Talk: 0rphan Drift
10:00 – 11:30 am
Session 1: Art (History) as a Site of Resistance
12:00 – 2:00 pm
From Activism to Artistic Practice: (Re)imagining Indigenous Women’s Labour Activism in Contemporary Art
Erika Kindsfather, MA student in Art History, the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, University of British Columbia
A Garden Among the Flames: Illumination Style as Resistance to Socio-Political Medieval Iberian Change in the Osma Beatus.
Zoey Kambour, MA student in Art History, the Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Oregon
Break – 10 minutes
Tentative Title: The Blatant Image: “Ovular” Artist Workshops at the Lesbian Land Rootworks in Southern Oregon, 1980 to 1984
Raechel Root, PhD student in Art History, the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Oregon
How Was the Situationist International “International”?
Anna O’Meara, PhD student in Art History, the Department of Art History and Visual Studies, University of Victoria
Moderator: Dr. Rachel Boate, Assistant Professor, the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, University of British Columbia
Session 2: Digital (Re)vision
2:00 – 4:00 pm
Warmth Is Not Simple
Eileen Isagon Skyers, MA Critical Studies, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Artist and Independent Researcher
Hypervolition: Our Sacrifice of Choice
Jevonne Peters (Jevi), MFA student in Digital Futures, OCAD University
Break – 10 minutes
Shimmering Horizons: Reflections and Refractions of an Online Exhibition
Laurie White, MA Critical and Curatorial Studies, the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, University of British Columbia; Program Coordinator at Or Gallery
Envisioning Our World through a Techno-Scientific Lens: Fiction and the Contemporary Mapping of Body and Empire
Cassandra Gemmell, MA student in Contemporary Art, Design, New Media Art Histories, OCAD University
Moderator: Dr. T’ai Smith, Associate Professor, the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, University of British Columbia
Session 3: Breaking and (Un)making
4:00 – 6:00 pm
The Hole is Whole: Broken Ceramic Vessels as Sites of Creation
Lucia Wallace, MA student in Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories, OCAD University
The Heterogeneity of the Moment: Theorising the Plurality of Time and Space in San Yuan Li
Gigi Wong, MA student in Film Studies, Carleton University
Break – 10 minutes
Precarious Possibilities: NYC’s Queer Piers
Maegan Gaudette, MA student in Art History, the Department of Art History, Concordia University
Mending the Past and Minding the Gap: Collage as a Critical Strategy for Social Repair
Marilyn Adlington, MFA student in Criticism and Curatorial Practices, OCAD University
Moderator: Dr. Erin Silver, Assistant Professor, the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, University of British Columbia