Close
Thesis
Documentary and its Afterlives | California in Catastrophe
Documentary and its Afterlives: California in Catastrophe examines documentary work in the regional context of California. Built around four case studies of the work of key photographers in the region - including Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, Mike Mandel, Larry Sultan, John Divola and Anthony Hernandez - the dissertation investigates how photography, both materially and allegorically, produces a catastrophic imaginary. Cold War paranoia, the oil crisis of the 1970s, natural disasters and race riots figure in the work and its analysis. Documentary and its Afterlives is an interdisciplinary study, measuring the complexity of documentary work in the 1970s alongside the larger cultural and political terrain of the period, including fiction and film. This is a project dedicated to the weird, the obscure and the comic in documentary practice, all of which has been overlooked by our current histories of documentary taking the East Coast as its frame of reference. The underlying thrust of the dissertation is to show how the artwork's eccentricity and pathos operates as a distinctive mode of social criticism.
Research Interests
19th & 20th Century Photography, Documentary, Modern Art, Contemporary Art, Experimental Film, California Art and Culture
Conference Presentations
"You speak of things that haven't happened yet in the past-tense," York University, November 18, 2016
"Los Angeles: A Speculative Fiction," Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo Norway. November 10, 2016
"Proust and Illumination," Proust Project Conference, UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL History of Art, June 11, 2016.
"End of Days (On the photographic work of John Divola)" Slade School of Fine Art, Materials/Discourse Project, December 10, 2015
"Figuring Disaster, Prefiguring Catastrophe | The Case of Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan," Historical Materialism 12th Annual Conference, The old is dying and the new cannot be born: states, strategies, socialisms, November 5-8, 2015.
"Perceptual Glitch," Terra Foundation Doctoral Research Seminar, July 30, 2015.
"Valences of Destruction: Allan Sekula and the Comic," Crash and Burn: Destruction in American Art, Courtauld, June 5-6, 2015, organized by Terra Post-Doctoral Fellow, Helene Valance and Alex J. Fletcher.
"Working Worlds," in Working Worlds, University College London, May 16, 2015. Speakers included: Pamela M. Lee, Briony Fer, Michael Newman, Isabelle Cornaro, Sam Dolbear, Emilia Terracciano, and Alex Fletcher.
"Dead Labor," 41st Annual Association for Art Historians Conference, East Anglia, panel: 'Death, between Sublimation and the Real.' April 9-11, 2015.
"Necrology," Slade School of Fine Art, PhD Forum, organized by Haley Newman and Sharon Morris.
"Art in the Age of Real Abstraction," in Art in the Age of Real Abstraction, University College London, May 10, 2014. Speakers included: Sven Lütticken, Briony Fer, Tamara Trodd, Jo Applin, Catherine Spencer, Byron Peters, Marina Vishmidt, Moran Sheleg, and Stewart Martin.
"Riots, Strikes and Mass Mobilization: A Contemporary Account of the 'Conflict Image,'" Visual Cultures in Crisis, York University, UK, May 11, 2013.
"Mapping the Everyday: Community demands for the Future," Facilitated the Wednesday Night School (SFU Audain Gallery, Vancouver), Nov. 2011 - Feb. 2012.
"Drawing at the hour of its shortest shadow," Contemporary Histories - Intersecting Pasts and Futures | 30th Annual UBC Post-Grad Art History Conference, 25 Feb 2011
Publications
"To Dwell in the Contradictions," Oxford Art Journal, Special Issue on Paul Strand, Review of David Campany's Walker Evans' the Magazine Work (2014), and the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art's Paul Strand: Master of Modern Photography (2014).
"The Vancouver Art Gallery and the Eviction of a Political Idea, Part II," themainlander.com, July 28, 2013.
"The Vancouver Art Gallery and the Eviction of a Political Idea, Part I," themainlander.com, July 13, 2013.
"Fabricating the Creative City," themainlander.com, 3 Jan 2012
"The Vanishing Cause of History," themainlander.com, 2 Nov 2011
"Recessional Aesthetics: An Exchange" October, Vol. 135 Winter (ed. David Joselit, Hal Foster and Yve-Alain Bois) [mitpressjournals.org/october]
Conference/Event Organizer
Working Worlds, co-convenor with Rye Holmboe, University College London, May 16, 2015. Speakers included: Pamela M. Lee, Briony Fer, Michael Newman, Isabelle Cornaro, Sam Dolbear, Emilia Terracciano, and Alex Fletcher.
Art in the Age of Real Abstraction, co-convenor with Rye Holmboe, University College London, May 10, 2014. Speakers included: Sven Lütticken, Briony Fer, Tamara Trodd, Jo Applin, Catherine Spencer, Byron Peters, Marina Vishmidt, Moran Sheleg, and Stewart Martin.
Right to the City - VIVO Media Arts Centre | 6-7 Nov 2010, organized and moderated a two-day conference on Housing Politics and the "Right to the City"
11th Annual Signal & Noise Media Arts Festival | VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver) | 23-27 June 2011, Program Assistant to Curator Amy Kazymerchyk