Arthur M. Sackler Research Fellowship in Washington, DC.

I was invited to Washington, DC to be an Arthur M. Sackler research fellow at the National Academy of the Sciences!

Read my review of one of the conference sessions here. 

Keynote Presenter at Intersections|Cross-sections Conference

So excited to announce that I will be the student keynote presenter at Intersections|Cross-sections Graduate Conference and Art Exhibition!

Treva Michelle Legassie is a PhD candidate and Adjunct Professor in the department of Communication Studies at Concordia University and the Assistant Director of the Speculative Life Research Cluster atMilieux Institute. Legassie’s work borrows from interdisciplinary methods and her background as a researcher, curator, artist, and ethnographer.

Her writing has been published in PUBLIC Journal, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, Open Cultural Studies, The Senses & Society, InterARTive, and AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples. She has also curated new media based exhibitions such as #NATURE (2016) and Influenc(Ed.) Machines (2015). Legassie holds an MA from OCAD University in Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories, with a focus in new media, and a BFA from OCAD University majoring in Art Criticism and Curatorial Practice.

Her keynote is titled: “Mangles and Intersections: Feminist art-science laboratories and the ethics of care”.

Exhibition Review: Teresa Margolles 'Mundos' in PUBLIC Journal

My review of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’ first Canadian solo show Mundos ("Worlds") was recently published in PUBLIC Journal. 

Mundos, Teresa Margolles at the MAC, Montreal.

"The incredible thing about Margolles’ work is that she makes the dead visible and present through simple materials: water, bubbles, cloth, string. I was not seeing the dead as anonymous figures. They were inside and around me, affecting me. Margolles truly made me feel. During my time spent with Mundos, my body was controlled by emotion. Yes, Margolles presents powerful, political dilemmas and social criticisms but in a way that made real through feeling. The visual beauty of her work is enlivened and made affective through the accompanying stories. For me, her work moves beyond the mind and in to the body. In this way, Mundos is so effective in brining to the fore the realities of pain, death and destruction in parts of Mexico and the world. Mundos is vivid and disturbing and incredibly powerful, an ode to the deceased and the disenfranchised." -Treva Michelle Pullen, PUBLIC 56.

PUBLIC Journal: Attendant A to Z

BioCare: feminist labs and the ethics of care

This poster was presented at the RE:TRACE Conference 2017 in Austria.

Exploring practices of care and maintenance conducted by bioartists, my research addresses and celebrates the intimate and meaningful interactions occurring between these artists and their semi-living subjects/muses/collaborators. Caring for semi-living entities (the term semi-living as defined by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr to describe transgenic beings that occupy an in-between status as living creatures that rely upon outside forces to stay alive) requires an excess of emotional, physical and intellectual labour on the part of the artist. 

The regimented masculine (a term that amplifies the popular imagination of scientific research as being objective rather than subjective [Bondi 2005; 233]) lab protocols are broken and reframed through the eyes of artists, such as Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (of Tissue Culture & Art Project [TC&A]), WhiteFeather Hunter, Nicole Clouston, KathyHigh, and Tarsh Bates, who allow themselves to celebrate their maintenance activities, engage with nonhuman bodies and feel empathy towards their specimens. In the laboratory, during the work’s production, and, through the maintenance and pedagogical practices of public display, feminist bioartists impart their knowledge of scientific processes and their caring empathy for nonhuman life.