Richmond BC, Canada #richmondartgallerybc
Guest curator Michael Dang leads a panel discussion with artists Christos Dikeakos and Paul Hess, and curator Christine Conley to discuss Theodore Wan’s contribution to the Canadian performance art scene of the 1970s. The panel will focus on questions of creativity within the social climate of that era, and explore some local art history within the early days of Canadian artist-run culture.
This session was recorded as a live webinar on June 27, 2024.
About the Presenters:
Christine Conley (PhD) is an Ottawa based art historian and curator with a long term interest in issues of gender, cultural difference and armed conflict. She curated the exhibition “Theodore Wan” with Dalhousie University Art Gallery in 2003 (Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver); the international performance art exchange “Crossings” in 2010 with the Belfast collective Bbeyond and Indigenous Canadian artists (Belfast+Ottawa); and “Terms of Engagement: Averns, feldman-kiss, Stimson” in 2014 with artists in the Canadian Forces Artists Program (Halifax, Kingston, Calgary). Book chapters and journal essays include Joyce Wieland, Christiana Pflug, Mary Kelly, Rebecca Belmore, Faye HeavyShield, Maria Hupfield, Charlotte Salomon, Jeff Wall, Ed Pien and May Chan.
Michael Dang (he/him/his) is a curator, filmmaker, writer and second year MA candidate in the Critical and Curatorial Studies Program at the University Of British Columbia, where he also received his BA degree majoring in Art History. Dang was the recipient of the SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship Master’s Award in September 2022 and the Audain Foundation Graduate Fellowship of that same year. Dang has also received awards for his directorial and screenwriting work including the short Brother Mary (2021) which has been selected for over fifteen international film festivals and was the recipient of the Best Script award at both the Toronto Indie Filmmakers Festival and the Seoul International Short Film Festival. His curatorial practice is research and archival-based, with a special interest in historical curation, and sociopolitical contextualization, broadly focusing on mid-century conceptualism. He is based in Vancouver on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish nations.
Since the late 60’s to the mid 70’s Christos Dikeakos’ photographic practice has played an important role in the development of conceptual photography in Vancouver. His 80’s and 90’s photographic projects Sites and Place Names works, of Vancouver, Saskatoon, Athens and Berlin engage in the memories, histories and urban typologies within contemporary urban habitations. More recently Dikeakos has produced a traveling exhibition for the McMaster Museum of Art, which combines drawing, collage, sculpture and photography unpacking a 40-year work and thoughts on French-American artist Marcel Duchamp. His most recent exhibition in 2023 was a retrospective held at the Museum of Photography in his birth city of Thessaloniki, Greece. Christos Dikeakos currently lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Paul Hess was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1954. He studied at the University of Guelph and completed his Master of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1978. Hess has been exhibiting his paintings and photographs across Canada since 1974.
He has been the recipient of art grants from the Ontario Arts Council, B.C. Arts Council, and the Canada Council. He has taught at several universities across Canada, from 1987 to 2008 was an Associate Professor and Dean of Media Arts at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In 2008, Hess was appointed Director of the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. He currently maintains studio’s in Vancouver and Niagara on the Lake.
