Art_work

What kind of stories could emerge when Jan Wade’s Yes, a settler colonial whaleship painting, a neoclassical marble sculpture, and part of a Warli painting are put in the same room – what might these works say to each other?

Canonical western art history tells stories of artworks as discrete objects, often separating them from the messy, entangled relationships of their production, study, and display in order to fit them into the linear timeline of western progress. Through an “attentive” approach, this workshop identifies and critiques the languages and tools of art history that discipline artworks in that way, offering art_work as an alternative methodology for the study of art objects.
This workshop invites artists, students, teachers and researchers of art and art history, university instructors, and anyone interested in alternative pedagogies and art histories to join us in exploring the unruly, disordered, and contradictory relationships that illuminate art’s alternate histories.

Workshop Facilitators

Sue Shon, Ph.D. is a scholar-teacher of race and visual culture and Assistant Professor of Critical + Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Her research on the co-development of aesthetic culture, liberal humanism, and biopolitical visual order has been published in Media-N, American Literature, and other venues.

Jo O’Brien is an artist-researcher and Social Science and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellow at the Zentrum Fokus Forschung at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Their artistic research and pedagogical projects explore “confusion” as a queer-crip framework for social and aesthetic practices.