Welcome to new faculty
The Faculty of Fine Arts community wishes the warmest of welcomes to new Faculty of Fine Arts dean Rebecca Duclos, who joined Concordia as dean for a five-year mandate in August 2015.
Fine Arts also welcomes three new faculty members in 2015-16 – Rilla Khaled (Design and Computation Arts), Joshua Rager (Music) and Angelique Willke (Contemporary Dance).
Homecoming
Every autumn, alumni return to Concordia for reunions, lectures, tours — and to connect with friends, old and new. Join Faculty of Fine Arts faculty and alumni on September 26 at a cocktail and screenings of the film “The Abenaki - People of the Dawn” by Scott MacLeod, BFA 03, MA 13, and Design and Computation Arts Professor Jason Edward Lewis’ TimeTraveller™ videos. Register now!
Saluting faculty members of distinction and award winners
Two Fine Arts faculty members, Eleanor Bond and Erin Manning (both from Studio Arts), were inducted into the Provost’s Circle of Distinction on June 9. The Circle of Distinction recognizes faculty members and librarians who have gained academic or professional accolades from prestigious external groups and organizations.
At the same celebration, Edward Little (Theatre) was recognized for his work in the area of the in first-year experience. Earlier that week on June 2, Catherine MacKenzie (Art History) received the President’s Excellence in Teaching Award for Full-time Faculty.
Faculty research news
On September 15, Sandeep Bhagwati (Music and Theatre) commemorated the 70th anniversary of composer Anton Webern's accidental death by staging a durational performance at Concordia’s matralab. More
Yehudit Silverman (Creative Arts Therapies) and her award-winning film, The Hidden Face of Suicide, will be featured on Mountain Lake PBS Television. The film will be broadcast on September 18 at 9 p.m. and September 20 at 12 p.m. The recorded interview about her work will premiere at September 18 at 8 p.m. and be repeated on September at 19 at 1 a.m. and 7 p.m., and again on September 20 at 5:30 a.m. and 10 a.m.. The interview will also be available online. More
A paper entitled “Briser les paradigmes : arts électroniques et actions humanitaires” by Ricardo Dal Farra (Music) will be published in an upcoming issue of Circuit - Musiques contemporaines on September 24. More
An exhibition of new work by Kathleen Vaughan (Art Education) entitled Tissus urbains / Urban cloth will be on view Centre culturel Georges Vanier
until September 27. This exhibition showcases four recent works from Vaughan’s ongoing series of textile maps of walks in urban woods and green spaces of Montreal and Toronto, addressing questions of political ecology and personal experience. More
Techniques et technologies du cinéma. Modalités, usages et pratiques des dispositifs cinématographiques à travers l’histoire, co-edited by Martin Lefebvre (Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema), was published this summer. The book extends the work presented at the conference The Impact of Technological Innovations on the Historiography and Theory of Cinema that was held at the Cinémathèque québécoise in November 2011. More
A retrospective work by Geneviève Cadieux (Studio Arts), Voilà le meilleur portrait, que plus tard, j’ai réussi à faire de lui. Passages vers l’abstraction, curated by Vincent Bonin, will open at the Musée d’art de Joliette on October 2 and run until January. The exhibition encompasses the last 27 years of Cadieux’s esteemed career. More
Joanna Berzowska (Design and Computation Arts) is one of the judges for WearHacks Montreal (October 2 to 4), the biggest wearable hackathon in North America. Wearhacks promotes innovation, entrepreneurship, and education in the Internet of Things and Wearables space. More
Carey, a work by Janet Werner (Studio Arts), was recently acquired by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Carey joins Aging Ballerina Waving Goodbye, a canvas previously donated by the artist, in the museum’s permanent collection.
The 2016 edition of the Body-Mind Centering Association’s annual conference will be held at Concordia, in collaboration with the Department of Contemporary Dance. Submissions for presentations on the subject of evolving pathways in somatics will be accepted until September 30. More
The 6th edition of the Media Art Histories conference, hosted by the Hexagram international network, will be held in Montreal in November. In tandem with this conference, a committee of students is organizing a one-day pre-symposium for international and local emerging researchers who wish to attend the main conference, while having an opportunity to present their research and practice, to exchange ideas with peers and receive feedback from experts in related areas. More
Student and alumni news
Paul Hardy, MFA 13, John Player, BFA 08, MFA 14, Megan Hepburn, MFA 10, and current student Cindy Phenix were named as finalists in the 2015 RBC Canadian Painting Competition. The winner will be announced on November 18at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. More
Samantha Bitonti, a student in the Department of Theatre, is the latest recipient of the Developing Artist Grant, a $10,000 bursary issued by the Hnatyshyn Foundation. In an effort to foster excellence in new talent, the foundations assists the most promising young Canadian performing artists enrolled in their final year of a post-secondary educational or training institution program. More
The 13th Annual BMO 1st Art! Invitational Student Art Competition announced its winners this summer, and Fine Arts’ undergraduate student Erin Skelton conquered Quebec as the provincial winner. The invitational competition honours visual arts excellence in post-secondary institutions from coast to coast. Skelton will be awarded $5,000 and have her work showcased from October 22 to December 18, 2015 at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto. More
Devon Hansen, an electroacoustics studies student in the Department of Music, is one of the winners of this year’s Jeu de temps / Times Play (JTTP) competition—Canada’s highest profile emerging electroacoustic composer contest. JTTP is organized by the Canadian Electroacoustic Community. More
Recent Cinema graduate Ari Soulikias (BFA 2015) won the prize for Best Animation prize at the Cannes Short Film Festival for his film Last Dance on the Main. More
La Rentrée events
The Faculty of Fine Arts (FOFA) Gallery kicks off its 2015-16 season with a performance-installation by Goa-based artist Nikhil Chopra in his first Canadian exhibition.
Chopra's new site-specific work La Perle Noire will occupy the FOFA Gallery's main space and Montreal's Parc Jarry (September 18 to 20). La Perle Noire is a 57-hour drawing performance inhabiting multiple spaces, and exploring questions of identity and difference, exoticism and the everyday.
MFA students Anchal Malhotra’s Remnants of a Separation and Yoshimi Lee’s La femme maison will also be on view in the York Corridor Vitrines and Black Box spaces of the gallery. The exhibitions run until October 23.
Other upcoming back-to-school and autumn events include:
- The POP Montréal festival, from September 16 to 20, will be "bridging the gap between academia and the creative community" and will feature presentations and work by students, alumni and faculty.
- Contemporary Dance’s Studio 7, a month performance and gallery series feature emerging student-artists in an experimental setting, on September 25.
- A lecture by Department of Music professor Christine Beckett to launch this year’s Music Research Talks series September 29.
- Chantal Pontbriand, renowned curator, in a talk as part of the Conversations in Contemporary Art series on October 1.
- À partir d'aujourd'hui ... Reconsidering Postphotography, an international conference organized by Concordia University in partnership with Université du Québec (UQAM) and Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal that will explore at the changing role of images on October 1, 2 and 3.
- Montreal’s South Asian Film Festival, organized in collaboration with the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, October 2 to 4.
Visit the Fine Arts news page for information on these, and other, events.
This bulletin is distributed to all Fine Arts full-time faculty and staff. Department administration: please forward to your part-time faculty and staff, and graduate students.