Stonecroft Symposium: Materiality and Embodiment Artist Conversation
The launch of "The Baroness Elsa Project" with participating artists Dana Claxton, Wit López, Sheilah ReStack and Cindy Stelmackowich. These artists layer diverse materials in their sculptures, photographs and installations, variously exploring embodied experiences of gender, identity and sexuality.
The Stonecroft Symposium: The Baroness Elsa Project is the fourth in a series of free annual symposia hosted by CUAG, held over the 2018-22 period. The series is made possible with a generous gift from the Stonecroft Foundation for the Arts.
CUAG acknowledges with sincere gratitude the Stonecroft Foundation for the Arts, which promotes education in the visual arts and fosters the public’s appreciation of the visual arts.
Participants
Dana Claxton (Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux)) works in film, video and photography, investigating beauty, the body, the sociopolitical and the spiritual. She is Department Head and Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Art at UBC and winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Photography Award.
Wit López is a disabled, gender non-conforming / nonbinary trans performer, visual artist, scholar and independent curator of African American and Boricua descent. Through fibre, performance and imagery, López explores hairiness, accessibility, queerness, gender identity, Blackness and Latinidad, while also fully embracing absurdity and the macabre.
Sheilah ReStack (born in Caribou River, Nova Scotia) lives and works in Columbus, Ohio, where she is currently Associate Professor of Photography and Video at Denison University. ReStack creates photography-based, multimedia installation, performance and video works that present conceptual considerations of the body within the bewildered paradigms of maternal and familial structures.
Cindy Stelmackowich is an Ottawa-based artist, curator and professor. Integrating practice and theory in meticulous and rigorous ways, her fields of interest span visual culture, rare books, history of science and medicine, scientific artifacts, biomedicine, gender issues and museum culture.
Image: Wit López, "Don’t Talk to Me or My Sons, Pt 1, “ (detail) 2021, digital photograph and digital quilt, courtesy of the artist.