Please join the UBC Art History Students’ Association and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory for the 18th Annual Art History Undergraduate Symposium.
Wednesday, April 6
5:30 PM (PST)
Online (Zoom)
RSVP to ubcahsa@gmail.com for link
The Art History Undergraduate Symposium fosters a supportive environment for art-historical research and critical reflection at the undergraduate level. At the annual event, student scholars present their research to peers and faculty members, receive feedback on their work, and prompt lively discussion on a range of historical and contemporary issues in the field.
Join us on April 6 for presentations by Jamie Lewis, Fred Oliver Beeby, Maisie Westerman, and Michael Dang. Read the full abstracts below!
We acknowledge that the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. We are grateful for the work and the learning that we do here.
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Contemporary Indigenous Art: Traversing Temporalities and Plural Points of Resistance
Jamie Lewis, Diploma in Art History
The year 1992, or the quincentennial anniversary Columbus’s arrival to the Americas, represented cause for both celebration and tension depending on which side of the Indigenous or non-Indigenous parallel histories one belonged. As a counterpoint to Columbus’s celebration, the INDIGENA project, an exhibition and publication of nineteen contemporary Indigenous visual artists and eight writers, grew out of a “concern that indigenous peoples would be the recipient of a five-hundred-year hangover without ever having attended Western civilizations party.” Borrowing from Michel Foucault’s theories on resistance, the paper explores intersections of temporality and resistance within INDIGENA and Indigenous resistance not only in the form of ruptures or direct conflict, but also as a web of slow-moving resistance with rhizomatic movement between the past, present, and future.
Visual Technologies of Translation: The Personal Slide Viewer in the Twentieth Century
Fred Oliver Beeby, 3rd-Year Bachelor of Media Studies Major, Art History Minor
The handheld slide viewer was a visual technology ubiquitous throughout the twentieth century, with examples such as the View-Master becoming a household name. Many of the slides for these devices depict scenes of our planet—from landscapes to outer-space images. In this essay, I argue that the personal slide viewer evidences two paradigms of visualizing the earth that collide in the mid-twentieth century: an anthropocentric vision that emerged in the Early Modern period but reached its acme in the nineteenth century; and an encroaching Anthropocenic vision in which the human is not a surveyor upon the planet but inseparable from and immersed in it. By looking at mid-century advertisements for the handheld slide viewer, contextualized by analyzing other “earth-observing” images of this period, we can understand personal slide viewers as media technologies of translation between these two visual modes.
Nude Bathers
Maisie Westerman, 2nd-Year Art History Major
In this paper, I examine The Bathers (1937) by Group of Seven affiliate and Beaver Hall member Edwin Holgate. Taking the genre of landscape painting to be a manifestation of state-sponsored cultural creation in twentieth-century Canada, Holgate’s piece, which combines landscape and its opposite, portraiture, reveals tensions around national identity, art, and gender. Further analyses of nude paintings from the same period, such as Prudence Heward’s Hester (1937) and Lilias Torrance Newton’s Nude in the Studio (1933), introduce an alternative to the white, masculine, colonial character of Canadian national identity peddled by the Group of Seven and the state in the early twentieth century.
Eat Your Power
Michael Dang, 4th-Year Art History Major
Feminist artist Anita Steckel’s self-assertion of her identity, in the painting New York Landscape #5 (Eat your power…) (1970–80), is dependent on her erotic imagery that mobilizes the erect male phallus. While other self-described feminist artists of the 1970s were interested in sterilizing the charge from the phallus, Steckel asserted her identity as a heterosexual Jewish woman through her evocations of “pornography” as seen in Eat your power. Steckel can be seen as utilizing the phallus motif two-fold: to both criticize the dominance of the phallocentric order but also to assert her own subjectivity and desires. This essay argues that Steckel’s brand of unabashed eroticism anticipates many third-wave feminisms of the 1980s and 1990s, that celebrated myriad and messy female desire or jouissance, and thus her work has often been excluded from retrospectives of second-wave seventies feminist art.
