Upheaval - Long form

July 2021

“Upheaval is my favourite word in the English language. I remember the first time I heard it and the countless times I have googled it since, looking it up in dictionaries and on etymology sites. As it lacks a literal translation into my mother tongue, its full meaning still escapes me to this day. However, I am starting to think that just might be the whole point of it. The word itself is unstable, churning over disoriented and distorted according to the context it is uttered in. Is “upheaval” a negative or positive instance?”

SAD Magazine No.31: Lost, page 14-15.

Bread and Butter: The Subtle Art of Grocery Lists

April 2021

“If a year ago we were told our one and only social activity was going to be grocery shopping, many among us, if not everyone, would have found it appalling. Not me though; I revel in grocery shopping. No activity has the ability to galvanise and simultaneously appease me as much as grocery shopping does. I know it is a fairly unpopular opinion; there is chaos, there is an overabundance of colours, surprisingly unflattering lighting, and sudden temperature variations. Not to mention people; a lot of them, usually.”

The Skinny Magazine, Issue 183: page 28-29.

The Subtle Affect of Grocery Lists: Researching the Empathic Charge of Faceless Portraits in Times of Distance

5-6 February 2021

Academic talk presented at Empathy / Empathie.

The Art History Graduate Student Association Conference, Concordia University, Canada.

The Balcony as Agent of Reciprocity

30 July 2020

“My grandparents lived on the top floor of a four-story building in the periphery of Florence, just outside the old medieval walls. The neighbourhood was part of a city-wide postwar urbanisation project. A series of anonymous-looking ochre apartment complexes with green shutters, dark red roofs and strings of balconies faced the interior courtyards. Each time we visited them, after having settled in, my brother and I were summoned by my grandmother onto the balcony, with a simple yet ambiguous: “Come here! Say hi!”

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Everything this Changes.

Holly Schmidt: It All Started with a Cashew

30 April 2020

“During these days of physical distancing and deserted campus spaces like the gallery, the lab, the farm, we find ourselves recalling the strength of collaborations over the past year and ways we might reimagine them in the context of an emerging new reality. Last fall 2019, Shelly Rosenblum, Belkin Curator of Academic Programs, Holly Schmidt, Belkin Artist in Residence and Brett Couch, Senior Instructor in the Departments of Botany and Zoology worked together to create novel pedagogical experiences for students in a third year biology course on Mycology.”

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vegetal Encounters.

Missing Pieces: Curatorial Iconoclasm in Sonia Boyce’s Takeover of Manchester Art Gallery

13-14 March 2020

Academic talk presented at Economies of Dispossession.

The Ontario College of Art and Design Graduate Conference, University of Toronto, Canada.

Film and Lecture Series: The Rage to Live

30 January - 2 February 2020

This programming was created in partnership between the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver. The film and lecture series The Rage to Live: Queer Film Legacies and the Work of David Wojnarowicz and Marlon Riggs considered themes of queerness, visibility, mortality and political activism as they relate to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. It engaged with films and video art by Wojanrowicz and his many collaborators as well as showing Riggs’s short films which further complicate these themes by introducing the additional complexities of race relations in the US. Guests speakers elaborated on their personal and professional experiences within the arts sector and academia, and the lasting legacy of this historically and culturally important moment in art and film.

Aberdeen - Dispatch

January 2020

“The weeks leading up to my undergraduate graduation were torturous. My plan was to move to a bigger city, armed only with unrestrained and rocambolesque hopes. But in the meantime, all I could do was wait as life beyond university simmered in all its chaos. To lose my support system and start over alone was something I had done before but forgotten, numbed by the ease of university routine. Desperate for comfort, I looked for and opened a letter that had waited for me since the end of my first year. ‘Dearest,’ it began — a familiar address in a familiar handwriting.”

SAD Magazine No.28: Future, page 10.

The Manifold Versions of Mary Richardson’s Affect

24-25 January 2020

Academic talk presented at World Making: Materiality, Social Culture and Visual language.

Visual Impetus, 23rd Annual Art History and Visual Studies Graduate Conference, the University of Victoria, Canada.

Florence - Dispatch

June 2019

“I think of Florence as frozen in time. The epicentre of my childhood can be located in one single building of the Tuscan city. My grandfather and his brothers, all moved in its four flats with their respective wives. Since then all events, discoveries, falls, and rebirths of humanity seem to have happened there. In my memory it is also perpetually summer: the staircase forever beaten by the sun, immersed in a haze of still, heavy heat.”

SAD Magazine No.27: Nostalgia, page 54.