Materiality and embodiment / gathering and conversation

October 7, 2021

1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Artists explore embodied understandings of gender, sexuality and identity

Join us to launch The Baroness Elsa Project with participating artists Dana Claxton, Wit López, Sheilah ReStack and Cindy Stelmackowich. These artists layer diverse materials in their sculptures, photographs and installations, variously exploring embodied experiences of gender, identity and sexuality.  

We’ll convene on Zoom; you can register here.

Wit López will lead the group in a short participatory activity to draw out some of these themes. Exhibition co-curator Heather Anderson will then facilitate a conversation with the artists on their work, and its connections with Baroness Elsa.  

This conversation is presented as part of Stonecroft Symposium: The Baroness Elsa Project. 

Participants

Dana Claxton (Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux)) works in film, video and photography, investigating beauty, the body, the sociopolitical and the spiritual. She is Department Head and Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Art at UBC and winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Photography Award. 

Wit López is a disabled, gender non-conforming / nonbinary trans performer, visual artist, scholar and independent curator of African American and Boricua descent. Through fibre, performance and imagery, López explores hairiness, accessibility, queerness, gender identity, Blackness and Latinidad, while also fully embracing absurdity and the macabre. 

Sheilah ReStack (born in Caribou River, Nova Scotia) lives and works in Columbus, Ohio, where she is currently Associate Professor of Photography and Video at Denison University. ReStack creates photography-based, multimedia installation, performance and video works that present conceptual considerations of the body within the bewildered paradigms of maternal and familial structures. 

Cindy Stelmackowich is an Ottawa-based artist, curator and professor. Integrating practice and theory in meticulous and rigorous ways, her fields of interest span visual culture, rare books, history of science and medicine, scientific artifacts, biomedicine, gender issues and museum culture.  

Related exhibitions

The Baroness Elsa Project

Check it out