This program is generously supported by Michael F.B. We are pleased to welcome Grace Deveney, Lillian O’Brien Davis, and Shalaka Jadhav as the program’s inaugural visiting curators. Through a significant mentorship component, it aims to foster strong new voices in this discipline. It gives students, faculty, and other community members meaningful opportunities to engage with curators charting bold new trajectories in their field. The Visiting Curator Program is a catalyst for international-calibre exhibitions and aims to play a vital role in defining contemporary art and its attendant discourses in the Prairies. Launched in Summer 2021, this initiative supports curatorial research, exhibitions, events, and publications by emerging and established guest curators alike.

The Performance of Shadows is the second of three exhibitions presented as part of the School of Art Gallery’s Visiting Curator Program. Meaning and significance cannot be fully experienced through objectivity alone – the artists in The Performance of Shadows nurture intuitive practices that expand our perception of the world. Objects and materiality function as transmitters for memory, experience, and consciousness. Process is key to the works in the exhibition all three artists embrace various manifestations of intuitive intelligence, working to connect with what lies beyond our immediate experience of reality. The divine feminine is a consistent presence in DeFreitas’ work, a connective energy passing through space and time. DeFreitas explores the miraculous as a way of considering that which is beyond our comprehension by bearing witness to testimonies of visions of the Virgin Mary. Whiten’s practice is informed by a deep generosity, connecting to others through the experience of his work.Įrika DeFreitas’ practice emphasizes process, the body and paranormal phenomena, using primarily lens-based media focused on feelings of love and loss. Whiten investigates consciousness and its role in the meaning constituting process.

Tim Whiten bridges material and spiritual experience that encourages “sensing” over “reading”. Saar uses assemblage and found materials that link history and experiences- emotion and knowledge travel across time and back again. In Saar’s work, time is cyclical, linking the artist and viewers of her work with generations of people who came before them.

This exhibition considers the expansiveness of three artists’ understanding of existence through various approaches to concepts of phenomenology, spirituality and political engagement.īetye Saar’s assemblage work, which was increasingly influenced by her rising political consciousness beginning in the 1960s, consists of objects carrying their own history and meaning and are selected for their “ancestral, ritual, autobiographical, nostalgic and historical” aura. The Performance of Shadows explores intuition as a condition of consciousness.

The way of shadows