Moderator: Luke Painter
Panelists: Lisa Bulawsky, Deborah Caplow, John Hitchcock, Stefan Hoffmann
Location: Signy & Cléophée Eaton Theatre, Royal Ontario Museum

Printed images and texts have had a long history of display and dissemination for the use of communication in our public environments. In the 20th century many artists, writers and theorists dubbed a particular type of site-specific artwork “Interventionist.” With roots in subversive political statements, performances and actions, this art making has taken on different permutations including sanctioned and non-sanctioned activities in public spaces. This panel seeks to explore issues around public space in relation to contemporary print practices.

Panel Moderators

Luke Painter is an artist, educator and researcher living and working in Toronto. Recent exhibitions of his work include: Revival-esque at Angell Gallery in Toronto (solo 2009) and Par Nature at Bonneau-Samames Art Contemporain in Marseille, France (solo 2009). Luke is Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at Ontario College of Art and Design and is represented in Toronto by Angell Gallery and Bonneau-Samames Art Contemporain in France.

Lauren Nurse is a transplanted Québecer, living and working in Toronto, Ontario. She holds an MFA in print media and sculpture from York University, a BFA in print media from Concordia University, and is currently pursuing a degree in horticulture from the University of Guelph. She teaches in the Art and Art History department of Sheridan College, and the Print departments of both the Ontario College of Art and Design and York University. Lauren likes to make prints about things that trade chemicals with the air, like plants, animals and humans.

Panelists

Lisa Bulawsky is a print geek and inspired generalist. Her installations, public projects, and works on paper exploit the strengths inherent in the printed mark and the vulnerabilities inherent in human existence. She is the founder of Vertigo Press, an umbrella organization that carries out a variety of public projects, and Blindspot Galleries, a mobile exhibition space using print technology and magnetic vinyl. Lisa resides in St. Louis, Missouri and teaches Printmaking and Drawing in the College and Graduate School of Art at Washington University.

John Hitchcock is an Artist and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he teaches screenprinting, relief cut, and installation art. He earned his MFA in printmaking at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. He uses the print medium with its long history of commenting on social and political issues to explore his relationships to community, land, and culture. Awards include a Jerome Foundation grant, Minnesota; American Photography Institute Fellowship at New York University; Vermont Studios Center Fellowship; Vilas Associate Grant, University of Wisconsin, and artist in residence at Proyecto’ace, Buenos Aires, Argentina and the Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, Belgium.

Deborah Caplow is an art historian at the University of Washington, Bothell, specializing in Mexican art, nineteenth and twentieth century art and art and politics. She is the author of Leopoldo Méndez: Revolutionary Art and the Mexican Print (University of Texas Press, 2007). She has been photographing graffiti in Mexico for a number of years.

Stefan Hoffmann was born in Germany and lives and works in Rotterdam and Dresden. Using water-based inks, Stefan screenprints directly onto various surfacesincluding windows, walls and billboards. Drawing upon imagery includingpictograms, medical illustrations and 17th century emblem books, he alsoincorporates visual elements sourced from each working location. Everyproject involves a gradual evolution of imagery through the combining ofnew and existing screens, allowing the public to follow the creativeprocess over time. Recent projects include ANALOG 2.0 conference, TheHague, NL, Sept. 2010; Hot Plate, Phoenix, Brighton, UK,July-Aug. 2010; Artist Image Resource, Pittsburgh, PA, Feb/March 2010;Haagse Kunstkring, Den Haag, NL, Jan. 2010. He will also be creating special site specific installations around Toronto for Printopolis.

Moderator: Tara Cooper
Panelists: Joscelyn Gardner, Liz Parkinson, Monica Petzal, Brenda Rix
Location: Signy & Cléophée Eaton Theatre, Royal Ontario Museum

For the collected object, the exceptional is not found in the singular, but in the multiple. A state dependent on time and accumulation. Within the broader spectrum of printed matter, this panel sets out to investigate the collecting impulse. Topics include: Lost and Found: The Recovery of Wonder, The Colonial Caribbean Archive and The Private Collector and The Public Museum. The panelists will share compelling narratives and insights into the curious habits of the collector.

Panel Moderator

Working within the realm of creative non-fiction, Tara Cooper’s practice combines fieldwork and footwork moving from the amateur ornithologist, to the idea of north, to her most recent study involving the language of weather. Cooper received her Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2008, specializing in the disciplines of print, film and installation. She teaches in the print department at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

Panelists

Joscelyn Gardner is a Caribbean/Canadian visual artist. Her practice focuses on her (white) Creole identity from a postcolonial feminist perspective. International exhibitions include many printmaking biennials and the Brooklyn Museum, International Print Center, New York and the National Art Gallery, Barbados. She currently teaches in the School of Contemporary Media at Fanshawe College, London, Ontario.

Liz Parkinson lives, works and collects in Port Hope, Ontario. She is interested in the collection, categorization and display of representations of the natural world, as well as the language used to describe them: botanical, familiar, alien, native, naturalized,domestic, wild, field. In 2006, a Canada Council Research and Development Grant supported further study into public and private collections of the natural world.

Monica Petzal has a diverse career as an artist, academic, critic and curator and is the owner of Printroom—a London, England-based gallery and consultancy dealing exclusively in contemporary prints. In 2008, she was a selector for the 7th British International Mini Print Exhibition and for Originals 09. She is a Trustee of the Print Makers Council and an FRSA. From 1992-2006 she co-founded and directed the Foundation for Women’s Art Project. A freelance critic and broadcaster, she is an interviewer for the British Library/Tate Archive Artists Lives.

Brenda Rix is the assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Recent curatorial projects include: Käthe Kollwitz: The Art of Compassion and Rembrandt/Freud: Etchings from Life. She was a board member for the Print Council of America from 2004-2007, and has been on the Program Advisory Committee for the Art and Art History Program, UTM/Sheridan College, since 2002. She has published widely, including exhibition catalogues and essays in anthologies. In addition to her curatorial duties, Rix also supervises the programming in the Marvin Gelber Print and Drawing Study Centre, a state-of-the-art resource facility. Her experience with the collection at the AGO spans more than 25 years. bio coming soon.

Moderator: Richard Sewell
Panelists: Sheila Butler, Alan Dunning, Dana Tosic
Location: Library Theatre, Ryerson University

With sympathy for the shaped surfaces of early cave painters, with admiration for the groovy cylinders used by Alexander Graham Bell, and with awe for the edited sounds of the truck-stop diners by Glenn Gould, this panel moves on to consider: what is a print? Is it a verb, a noun, an object or an attitude? And what role does the human body play in both the making and now the viewing of a printed image? Accepting that printmaking is no longer just hands-on but now also scans-on, no longer just flat (was it ever?) but now also 3-D, no longer RTP but now PET, this panel projects and guides our journey in a Garminesque way, through some of the current contexts we transverse in the making of and the viewing of the recorded, retrieved and displayed images, still affectionately known as print. And, at the same time, we articulate through deed and word, a new regard for the physical person as an integral element, a living subject, and a mover in the circus of retrieval that is contemporary print.

Panel Moderator

Since 1970, Richard Sewell has been an active participant in the Canadian cultural landscape as an exhibiting artist, artist collaborator (in dance, music and performance), printer, publisher and arts administrator, and as a broad-based educator teaching at the Ontario College of Art and Design, the Alberta College of Art and Design, the University of Saskatchewan and Sheridan College. In 1970, Mr. Sewell co-founded Open Studio. In 1982, Mr. Sewell joined the Art and Art History Program at Sheridan College and has worked with a generation of students in the areas of printmaking, drawing, painting, sculpture, and performance, teaching at all levels. Mr. Sewell’s current work; geoplasticimage and where, is part theory and part dimensional work and is a consideration on the entwined nature of: location, observation, and emotion. Mr. Sewell lives in Grand Bend, Ontario; is Professor Emeritus at Sheridan College, Oakville; and teaches one day a week in the Art and Art History Program, a joint program with the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Panelists

Sheila Butler is a visual artist exhibiting in Canada and abroad. Since 1969, Butler has worked with Inuit artists from Baker Lake, Nunavut. Butler taught at the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg, moving to the University of Western Ontario until she retired from teaching in 2004. Butler’s work is grounded in representational drawing/painting. Her practice is characterized by solo exhibitions, and by collective work with other artists, especially in relation to activist art projects relating to feminist and aboriginal issues. Butler’s work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, and the University of Toronto, among others.

Alan Dunning was born in Teddington, England and has been working with complex multi-media installations and artist books for the past two decades, using the comptuer as a tool for generating textual fields and real-time interactive environments. He has exhibited extensively in more than 100 exhibitions since 1980, including solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Walter Phillip's Gallery, Banff Centre, Banff Alberta, Rutgers University, New Jersey, 4th St. Petersburgh Biennale, Russia where a version of the interactive VR work Einstein's Brain was presented, and at the University of Maryland where his VRML Internet city, The Lost Dimension, was part of the international exhibition The Digital Village. He has had more than 70 essays and catalogues published on his work. Media features have included CNN, The Discovery Channel, and CBC’s underground music show Brave New Waves. Alan Dunning is represented in many collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has received major awards from the Canada Council, La Fondation Daniel Langlois, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Association of Commonwealth Universities. Alan Dunning currently holds the Chair of Media Arts and Digital Technologies at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, AB.

A graduate of the Department of Art at Queen’s University with a specialization in printmaking, Dana Tosic is a member of Open Studio where she has been printing since 2003. She is currently pursuing graduate studies in Fine Art at the University of Calgary, expecting to complete her MFA degree in 2011. This past winter she was selected to participate in the Tim Mara Graduate Student Exchange, working in the Printmaking Department at the Royal College of Art (London, UK), where she researched the application of emerging manufacturing technology (including 3D modelling software and rapid-prototyping) to printmaking. Expanding upon this research since her return to Calgary, she is currently exploring the inherent implications of this technology to the role of the human body in a digital world.

Moderators: Jenn Law and Patrick Mahon
Panelists: Richard Noyce, Lyndal Osborne, Ben Portis, Jeannie Thib
Location: Library Theatre, Ryerson University

This panel explores contemporary print-related practices today, with reference to individual artists as well as counter-cultural movements and trends that creatively engage and combine print strategies in ways that expand the boundaries of the medium. With this in mind, we have employed the subtitle ‘Economies and Ecologies’ as a metaphorical framework for referencing the multiple theoretical, aesthetic and practical worlds that print inhabits. Economies here refer to networks of social, cultural and economic exchange. This includes a consideration of the complex and competing intentionalities behind the production and circulation of contemporary print-based work and the institutionalized contexts within which print continues to be defined, critiqued and valued. Correspondingly, print ecologies may be understood as organic systems subject to evolutionary forces and transformation, incorporating the ways in which environments are modified to meet material and intellectual needs. Printmakers are at the forefront in contemporary art in experimenting with new methods, materials and venues. Print Now is intended to open a space for productive discussion about where the discipline currently finds itself and where it might be heading in the future.

Panel Moderators

Jenn Law is an artist, writer and researcher living in Toronto. She has been involved in Open Studio since 2008, where she works primarily in serigraphy. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from SOAS, University of London, England (2000), a BA in Anthropology from McGill University (1994) and a BFA from Queen’s University (1991). Jenn has worked as a lecturer, researcher, editor and curator in the UK and South Africa, and has published widely on South African contemporary art and civil society. She has received numerous fellowships, grants and awards for her research, including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, the British Council and the British Academy. In May 2010, she was short-listed for Open Studio’s National Printmaking Award and received an Honourable Mention.

Patrick Mahon works as an artist, writer and teacher/academic; he is currently Chair of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario. His work as a visual artist includes print-based projects that engage with historical and contemporary aspects of printmaking, and involves responding to gallery and museum collections and establishing community-based art initiatives. Mahon’s artwork has been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, including, in Canada, at Museum London, The Art Gallery of Windsor, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery, at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China, in 2005. As a writer and curator, Patrick Mahon publishes and produces exhibitions related to print culture, post-colonialism, and modernist aesthetics. Several of Mahon’s curatorial projects have traveled nationally in Canada, accompanied by exhibition catalogues. The SSHRC-funded collaborative artist’s project, Art and Cold Cash, which involved Mahon and other artists from southern Canada and from Baker Lake, Nunavut, was produced between 2004 and 2008; a book published by YYZ has just been released. Patrick Mahon was in residence for three months at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York in 2007. He lives in London, Ontario.

Panelists

Richard Noyce is a writer and artist, and has published widely on contemporary painting, graphic arts and printmaking, including the acclaimed Printmaking at the Edge (2006). He is also the author of Contemporary Graphic Art in Poland (1997) and Contemporary Painting in Poland (1995), which was awarded the 1996 AAASS/Orbis Polish Book Prize. Noyce is an experienced international competition juror, serving as President of the Awards Jury at the Kraków International Print Triennial, 2003-2009, as well as serving as a juror at the Thessaloniki Print Triennale (2008), the Prague International Print Triennale (2007) and the Wrexham Print International in Wales (2007). His most recent book Critical Mass: Printmaking Beyond the Edge will be released in December 2010. He lives somewhere in Wales.

Lyndal Osborne was born in Newcastle, Australia. She studied at the National Art School in Sydney and received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Since 1971, Osborne has been based in Edmonton and is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta. Her installation work speaks of the forces of transformation within nature, as well as commenting upon pressing issues relating to the environment. Recently, Osborne has focused on an examination of the issues of genetically modified organisms for subject matter. Her work is represented in numerous Canadian collections, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Alberta. Recent exhibitions include Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2010), Dunlop Gallery, Regina (2010), Penticton Art Gallery (2009), Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa (2008) and the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, Waterloo (2008).

Ben Portis is Curator at the MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie. His first exhibition there, Arnaud Maggs: Lost and Found, opens in September 2010. He was recently Guest Curator of Kent Monkman: The Triumph of Mischief at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, February 13–April 25, 2010, and Kent Monkman: The Treason of Images, at Trepanier Baer Gallery, Calgary, February 11–March 13, 2010. From 2002–2009, Portis was Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where he organized many exhibitions and projects, including artists such as Seth, Eddo Stern, Denyse Thomasos, Chris Ballantyne and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Portis frequently contributes to publications such as Canadian Art, Border Crossings and Hunter and Cook. Recent subjects include Jennifer Marman and Danel Borins, David Armstrong Six, John Abrams and Christian Giroux and Daniel Young.

Jeannie Thib was born in North Bay, Ontario, Canada and studied at York University in Toronto. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and participated in artist residencies in The Netherlands, France and Australia. Thib's works are included in the National Gallery of Canada and The Washington DC Convention Center collections among others. Jeannie Thib is represented in Copenhagen by B and K Projects and in Canada by Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto and Ferneyhough Contemporary, North Bay.

Location: Library Theatre, Ryerson University

To complement the panel discussion The Collector's Impulse, we will be screening Herb & Dorothy (2008), a documentary by Megumi Sasaki about Herbert Vogel, a postal clerk, and Dorothy Vogel, a librarian, who managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history with very modest means.

The film screening will be introduced with a short presentation by Heidi Overhill. As an exhibition designer, Heidi Overhill has created permanent galleries for the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Royal Ontario Museum, the National Museum of the Philippines, and the Shania Twain Centre. Now applying formal museum design methodology to the domestic problems of her own house, Overhill has created the Museum of Me. Current curatorial work at MoMe focuses on accessioning the permanent collection: assigning each item in the house a standardized reference number and recording basic data about its identity, medium, location, dimensions and provenance.