The Ambassadors
SCA MA Symposium
December 7, 2022 | 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre
SFU Goldcorp Center for the Arts, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver Graduating
MA Cohort: Shauna-Kaye Brown, Christophe Devos, William Latham, Tamara Lee, Allison Mander-Wionzek, Silas Ng, Andrea Rideout, Moroti Soji-George, Nina Stoiber, Carina Xu.
The Graduating 2022 MA Cohort wishes to invite you to this year's SCA MA Symposium.
Each one of us has been squirreling away, becoming a minor authority in our own odd field. We now wish to represent to you our findings.
Our objects of study cover a wide range, including everything from artist management, critical cataloging, and wikipediology, to philosophy, movement image studies, and art history.
Our research is not united by any particular theme or medium, however — much like the anamorphic skull that occupies the bottom portion of Hans Holbein's painting The Ambassadors — we have each developed a unique perspective on our respective objects of study. It is these unique perspectives which we wish to impart to you, as we part ways with the programme.
(We would like to thank the ever kind Laura Marks from whom we are borrowing this anamorphosis metaphor.)
Schedule
- Christophe Devos: Queer Kids and the Queen of Pop: The Queerness of Childhood in Popular Culture and Music Video
- Silas Ng: The Power of Text in Audio-Visual Films
- Carina Xu: TBA
- Allison Mander-Wionzek: Migration to Stable Ground: Trance and Wandering in the Films of Stacey Steers and Caryn Cline Through the Lens of Bruno Latour’s New Climactic Regime
- Shauna-Kaye Brown: Recognizing the “Art” in Artist Management: An analysis of Artist Management as an Artistic Practice
BREAK
- William Latham: Nasal-Gazing: An Auto-ethnography of the Other
- Moroti Soji-George: Black Gods and Martyrs: The Spectacle Of Visualizing and Perceiving The Black Male Body In The West
- Nina Stoiber: An Analysis of Keith Haring’s Crack is Wack Mural and the effects of digitization on his work (
- Andrea Rideout: TBA
- Tamara Lee: Queer Artmaking and Future Schema: Explorations in Queer Cataloguing Practices and Art Documentation
Biographies
Christophe Devos
Christophe (He/They) believes that analyzing music videos calls for some boldness, requiring analysts to address the minuscule effects and affects that derive from audio-visual experiences of it, namely in terms of music, lyrics, the image (moving bodies, cinematography, editing) and the relations among them. At its core, Christophe’s extended essay project is about representations of the queer child in Madonna’s video (Open Your Heart, dir. Mondino, 1986), and recuperating critical discourse around music videos that is historically significant for queerness and LGBTQ+. As a queer person committed to the study of visual and popular culture, there is both something personal at stake as well as lived experience to draw upon.
Silas Ng
Silas Ng (He/Him) is an emerging multi-disciplinary artist based on the unceded territories of Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. He holds his Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography from Emily Carr University. He is currently in the School of Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, and he explores his identity of deaf and Canadian-Chinese. These identities shape his perception of the socio-cultural environment from languages and cultural space. The purpose of his research is to analyze audiovisual films and how they shape the viewer’s relationship with and understanding of their culture. His emerging research of deaf studies has focused on media and multisensory learning from the sense of sight and touch to reveal how audiovisual films shape his understanding of sound in immersive experience. After completing his graduate studies, he hopes to develop his studies, artistic skills, and art media for a future career as an art educator.
Carina Xu
The centre of Carina Xu’s research concerns the potential of combining experimental documentary and video installation to convene a public sphere for people of colour to process the memory of ethnic diaspora and cultivate a public memory reflexive of their intersectionality. It also explores how public spaces can be mediated by community media and personalized media to engage those who share common sentiments of immigration, migration, and eviction to envision a place of belonging.
Allison Mander-Wionzek
Allison Mander-Wionzek (she/they) is a queer, neurodivergent & MAD artist, writer, curator and first generation scholar. She’s mad about a lot of things and looks to her practices of making and writing as sites of resistance and imagination for a hoped future for all. During her time at the SCA, she has delved deeply into Indigenous pedagogy and land stewardship and is eternally grateful to the many people - Indigenous and otherwise - who have helped her to better understand what overcoming the climate crisis and achieving communities of care where safety and love are centred might look like. Allison is the former Director/Curator of a project space called Black & Yellow, former Board President of Access Gallery and former Manager of Buschlen Mowatt Art Galleries. She has also been a career development practitioner for nearly a decade, where she spends her time coaching others to overcome their unique barriers in order to pursue what matters most to them. Allison is a printmaker and also makes books and functional sculpture. You can find her @wereall_ears @studypracticelearn and @allisonmander.
Shauna-Kaye Brown
Shauna-Kaye is a third generation Jamaican arts practitioner. Her over 10 years of professional practice has afforded her opportunities to gain experience in both the public and private arts sectors in Europe, North America and Latin America. As an employee, subcontractor or freelancer, she has been an Entertainment Administrator, Director of Entertainment, Music Business Executive, Producer and Project Manager. She has also planned and produced micro, medium and large-scale music events including music festivals. Shauna-Kaye's current research is a materialization of her accumulated vocational experiences. This research seeks to situate artist management as a process driven creative practice.
William Latham
William is a bipedal Pākehā with a serious polyp problem (benign growths that clog the sinuses and sicken the body). Predominantly a student of philosophy, his research interests include poststructuralist metaphysics, continental philosophy, as well as media studies and literature. A recurrent theme of his research is the constitution of the self, and the role relationality plays in this constitution. Currently, this theme is being explored through the tense interplay between totalising systems of social power, and a politics of refusal. What does an ethical sense of self and community look like within a corrupt system? Put otherwise, this research interest might be phrased as an attempt to create benign growths of sociality within the corrupt body politic.
Moroti Soji-George
Olumoroti Soji-George (He/They) is a proud survivor/ victor of SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts MA program. He holds a BA from Simon Fraser University, where he completed a joint major in Arts Performance and Cinema Studies and History. His current research practice revolves around the subjects and themes of Black Contemporary Art History, Performance Studies, Emergence theory, the Black body as a site of resistance and unrest and the dismantling/reconceptualizing of the signs and symbols used to mark the “other” in western art history. Olumoroti is the artistic director/curator at Gallery Gachet and the Curatorial lead at the Black Arts Centre. After the completion of his graduate studies, he plans to continue developing what he hopes will be a successful, esoteric and incredibly profound and political curatorial practice and work as an art educator. Olumoroti currently lives and works as an uninvited Black settler on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples.
Nina Stoiber
Antonina Stoiber Bravo (she/her) graduated from Western University with an Honours BA Double Major in Political Science and Art History and Studio Art. At SFU, she hopes to further blend her passion for fine art with research on the intersection between art history and world politics. More specifically, she plans to focus on the digitization of street art and the challenges presented when ephemeral works are uploaded onto a digital realm. Her current research focuses on the digitization of Keith Haring’s Crack is Wack mural and the different ways in which the meaning of the work develops through embodied experience and affective analysis.
Andrea Rideout
Born and raised in Red Deer, AB (Treaty 7), Andrea Rideout is a curator specializing in contemporary dance, interdisciplinary performance and festival/cabaret programming. Her practice is deliberately interdisciplinary in both form and content, guided by a mix of values, curiosity and pragmatics. Andrea's research interests range from feminist aesthetics and archiving practises to economic dynamics and aesthetics of technology with themes touching on grief, magic, transformation, resistance and spirituality. She spent 3 seasons as Artistic Director of Studio 303's Edgy Women Festival in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke), initiating the Edgy Oral History Project and subsequent collaborations with Art+Feminism wikipedia edit-a-thons. Her curatorial project - This is How Queers Pray - examines experiences of troubling, re-appropriating, and surviving religion as LGBTQ+ diaspora. In a past life, Andrea was an Augusto-Boal-trained Theatre of the Oppressed facilitator, a sound engineer touring with NYC's Circus Amok, a Boston Burlesque Expo debuted dancer and a Bread-&-Puppet-trained puppeteer. She has studied Community Economic Development (SCPA), holds a BFA in Theatre & Development (Concordia), a diploma in Theatre Technology (RDC) and spent 2 summers at the Banff Centre as Practicum Technical Director for Opera.
Tamara Lee
Tamara Lee (she/they) is standing at the threshold of completing an MA from the SFU School for Contemporary Art, and hopes to cross that threshold any day now. She also holds an MLIS from the University of British Columbia iSchool, and a BFA from Southern Oregon University. Her past work and publications have focused on the social-justice potentials of knowledge organization and creating equitable practices in memory work and information services. After completing her graduate studies, she hopes to further pursue her continually mutating art practices in embroidery and handpoke tattooing. She currently works as Director of Development at the Queer Arts Festival / SUM gallery on the sovereign, unceded land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Peoples.