Abstracts are listed alphabetically in order of the first presenter’s last name.
Liminal spaces: emotional engagement with nebulous places in creative writing
Lexie Angelo (University of Edinburgh/University of Calgary)
Abstract: In this presentation, I delve into Mundell’s research on the use of site visits in crafting liminal spaces, specifically long roads and highways that span farmland, indigenous reserves, and natural areas. As a Canadian writer, these liminal spaces may be overlooked by researchers in favour of more significant settings, despite being a significant element of navigating place. Using Mundell’s POET framework, a process-based model of literary place-making, this paper will examine how site visits to liminal places function as an immersive and a writer’s emotional engagement with place.
Mundell, Meg. “Crafting ‘Literary Sense of Place’: The Generative Work of Literary Place-Making.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature : JASAL, vol. 18, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1–17.
Lexie Angelo is a PhD researcher in creative writing at the University of Edinburgh where she is studying postcolonial settings in Canadian and Scottish crime fiction. Her work has appeared in Gutter Magazine, The Selkie, and Neon Books. She is a two-time recipient of the Sir James Lougheed Scholarship, and was shortlisted for the New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2024. She is a member of the Writer's Union of Canada, Society of Young Publishers, and Crime Writers of Canada. She teaches creative writing at the University of Calgary and owns Radical Bookshop and Press. Visit www.lexieangelo.com
Learning History Through Making: Ceramic Practice, Citizenship, and Critical Pedagogy in Progress
Nurgül Balaç (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: This works-in-progress presentation approaches ceramic making as a durational method for learning history, citizenship, and belonging. The project unfolds as an evolving installation of wheel-thrown porcelain vessel forms representing the passing years of Canadian Confederation. Through serial repetition, material labour becomes a way of moving through historical time – not as a stable narrative, but as a field of fractures, continuities, and unfinished meanings. The installation reflects an ongoing studio practice shaped by encounters with Canadian multiculturalism, migration, and the search for place.
Text-based surface interventions (ceramic decals and metallic lusters) draw from the Discover Canada Citizenship Study Guide, engaged here as both pedagogical tool and critical artefact. Working with its language reveals how civic knowledge is shaped through inclusion and omission, visibility and erasure. From the situated perspective of a racialized immigrant artist and citizen, making becomes a form of reflective study where national narratives are read, questioned, and materially re-inscribed.
During the exhibition, artist-in-presence sessions activate the vessels as interactive learning points, transforming the gallery into a shared pedagogical environment. Dialogues will gather around the evolving discourse of the citizenship guide, shifts in the language of otherness and visible or invisible minorities, and the implications of Truth and Reconciliation for citizenship practices such as changes to the Oath ceremony. These conversations insist that colonial histories remain central to civic learning for newcomers and new citizens.
Remaining intentionally unresolved, the project proposes ceramic practice as a critical site where making, memory, and citizenship converge — inviting viewers to inhabit the gallery as a space for collective reflection on belonging, responsibility, and the future imaginaries of Canada.
I am a Turkish-born artist, educator, and researcher based in Calgary, Canada, currently a PhD candidate in Education at the University of Calgary and a sessional instructor at AUArts. My interdisciplinary practice spans ceramics, performance, video, and socially engaged art. Through my work, I explore questions of migration, belonging, memory, and materiality. I often work with locally sourced clay bodies as a way of engaging tactilely with land and place, approaching ceramic practice as an embodied and sensory way of knowing. My projects frequently involve collaborative and community-based processes, particularly with immigrant and racialized women artists, where art becomes a space for dialogue, reflection, and collective knowledge-making.
The Exchange Project
Ashleigh Bartlett and Sarah Nordean (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: Ashleigh Bartlett and Sarah Nordean will discuss their “Exchange Project,” which investigates collaborative practice as a form of generative constraint and visual response. Bringing together two different studio practices, the ongoing project examines how the artists explore process, slowness and abstraction. Beginning in winter 2025 with two initial paintings, Bartlett and Nordean pass their works back and forth, responding to one another in turn. Each iteration bends backward and forward, pulling previous gestures into new configurations.
The exchange embodies a form of slowness in how attention is stretched and reshaped by the process of dialogue. To collaborate is to enter into another’s logic, to sit inside the ambiguity of partial understanding, to be interrupted and redirected. The process is an opportunity for slow looking, a reflection into another artist’s artwork, and a slow process that reveals the strangeness of time.
Ashleigh Bartlett’s art practice is informed by a fascination with abstraction and questions that arise from the historical trajectory of painting. Her process begins with paper; layering colours, overlapping forms and drawing with a knife. The simple activity of cut and paste creates a system yet allows for an experimental framework. She investigates painting’s ability to be slow and performative through quotation, scale and translation. Bartlett has exhibited internationally and across Canada. She is represented by Trépanier Baer Gallery and teaches at the Alberta University of the Arts.
Sarah Nordean’s interdisciplinary art practice, spanning painting, drawing, collage, and papermaking, uses biomorphic abstraction as speculative analogues for ecological and geological systems. Through material-led inquiry and a methodology grounded in productive unknowing, she builds dense, colourful networks from the relentless repetition of discrete, indexical marks, where slowness, scale-based temporality, and small accumulative acts generate strange emergent forms. She teaches drawing and painting at the Alberta University of the Arts.
Website: http://sarahnordean.com/exchangeproject
Serious Storytelling: A Pracademic’s Guide to Using Storytelling in the Classroom (Workshop)
Michele Braun (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: This workshop will combine research with action, leaving workshop participants with a set of models and frameworks they can use to craft communications within the classroom and beyond.
The workshop will begin with theory: narrative theory will explain story structure and models that storytellers use in different context and cognitive theory will explain the neuroscience that makes storytelling a powerful tool for persuasion.
The models, framework, and research will then be used to guide participants through their own story development. We will not be writing fiction or trying to entertain. We will be using the principles presented to tackle a challenge in the classroom context and effectively communicate with or persuade students through storytelling.
Participants will identify a problem or situation that can be solved through story and then guided through framework selection, narrative element development (e.g. character, setting, dis-equilibrium, agency), and framing to create the draft of a story that will serve their needs within the classroom context, or even beyond.
Dr. Michele Braun is a contemporary popular culture scholar working in science fiction novels, film and narrative theory. Her dissertation, Cyborgs and Clones: Figuring Citizenship and Redefining Humanity in Contemporary British Literature, explored the relationship between technology and notions of representation and inclusion as they emerge in early twenty-first century literature. She also researches narrative theory and the structures of storytelling. Michele holds a PhD in Contemporary British Literature from Northeastern University and graduate degrees in English and Business from the University of Calgary. She teaches at AUArts and serves as a consultant in workplace competency strategy and development.
Art in Action: Redefining Research through Community Practices
Alishau Diebold (Mount Royal University)
Abstract: In 2023, the Roots to Rise Youth Engagement Initiative demonstrated how research can transcend traditional academic boundaries to activate social change through the integration of arts-based methodologies. This initiative engaged Black, Indigenous, and Racialized (BIR) youth in a series of leadership and educational development workshops by establishing pathways to create a more equitable community. The youth were positioned in the research as co-creators of knowledge and civic protagonists. The program evaluation for this initiative consisted of three visual knowledge dissemination tools: 1) a visual representation of the program’s vision and anticipated outcomes, 2) a brief video of the program activities, and 3) a collective mural designed and created by the youth. These tools were used to advocate for improved social services for BIR youth and for the enactment of more programs to support youth in achieving their educational and leadership goals. This program evaluation applied a constructivist and intersectional analytic which gave rise to two major themes which included collective futurity and youth civic leadership. Through this analysis, activism and research were united to achieve tangible outcomes such as enhanced belonging between youth, a strengthened network of community practitioners, and broader contributions to social justice movements through positioning the visual knowledge dissemination resources as advocacy tools. The initiative also revealed the tensions which emerge between scholarly and activist engagement, which required implementing a balance of methodological precision and adaptive research approaches prioritizing community needs. This presentation offers valuable lessons on how to weave activism into arts-based research approaches.
Dr. Alishau Diebold, PhD, RSW, is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Mount Royal University in the Faculty of Health, Community, and Education. Her qualitative arts-based research in violence prevention and gender-based violence is grounded in social work practice and guided by the principles of community-driven change. Built on foundations of interdisciplinary academic and professional training, Dr. Diebold's research advances violence prevention by implementing upstream approaches or responses to address pressing challenges in health, social, and legal systems. This research is propelled forward by her commitment to establishing cross-sector partnerships and centring the communities most impacted by our systems.
Collage as Everyday Mise en Scène: Fragmentary Bodies, Objects, and the Waking Sensual World
Megan Dyck (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: As a painter preoccupied with deconstructed depictions of the body, I am fascinated by fragmented, spliced, and super-imposed figurative imagery. In my current studio research, I’m investigating surreal film sequences where shots of the human face are juxtaposed with inanimate objects as an extension of my interest in visually portraying the incongruousness of desire. This “shot/reverse shot” method of cinema editing, known as the Kuleshov Effect, establishes psychological meaning from viewing a shot of an isolated human face with a neutral expression intercut with shots of an object. As with figurative collage, the Kuleshov Effect relies upon the ordering of divergent, seemingly arbitrary images of body and object in succession in order to create a highly charged recursive semiotic exchange generative of various psychological associations, from indifference to seduction.
In transposing these factors into the realm of painting, my new combinatorial studies investigate how imagery merging familiar objects with isolated face and body fragments can become visual proxies for the turbid mental realm of romantic longing. Harkening semi-trance states such as daydreaming, where a computer mouse may fleetingly be conflated in the subconscious imagination with visions of an earlobe or breast, these experimental hybrid images posit un-monumental objects as emblems for yearning and infatuation, signaling both unease and arousal, intimacy and alienation. Looking to filmmakers such as Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943), Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (The Red Shoes, 1948), and Ingmar Bergman (Persona, 1966), I examine the use of the Kuleshov Effect and other cinematic tactics such as direct gaze, double imagery, and repetition as key visual motifs.
Bio: Megan Dyck is an artist and educator living and working in Calgary, AB. She received her MFA from the University of Victoria, and holds a BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts. In addition to her studio practice, Megan teaches painting and colour theory at AUArts. In her figurative imagery, she investigates the ubiquity of photography and aesthetic qualities of fragmentation that occur in cinema as metaphors for psychological isolation, loneliness, and desire. Holding a reverence for the phenomenology of colour perception, Dyck’s painting practice also integrates colour-field abstraction as a mainstay query within her studio research.
Website: www.megandyck.com
Each Mouthful Dripping in its own Rich Creamy Goodness
Ian Fitzgerald (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: Can advertising slogans spark poetry? Can their familiarity be capitalized on and steered in new poetic directions? I’m working on a collection of poems, all stemming from known advertising slogans. There is little disputing the claim that advertising is a major cultural force. Among its foremost elements is the familiar slogan (from the Gaelic ‘slaughgaiirm’, meaning war cry). Deployed through mass media to influence consumer attitudes and behaviour, some of these phrases have proven especially durable due to their precise word choices, their lyricism, and their capacity for multiple interpretations, i.e., their poetic qualities.
This project will shine new light on familiar slogans, to neither criticize or glorify these slogans that have lived in print, on billboards, TV screens, websites and storefronts (some for decades). The goal is to riff on them, to explore what the words could mean, how the sounds could play, where the language could go. The book of poems aims to de-stigmatize advertising in the view of poetry readers and de-mystify poetry in the view of advertising consumers.
Many of these slogans have been marinating in my consciousness since I started in advertising over 40 years ago. What makes them tick/stick? Obviously, sizeable advertising budgets provide frequency of exposure and that’s part of the answer but there must be more. This project creates poems to kick-start reflection about familiar ad slogans and their role and importance in popular vernacular. The poems may feature a playful tone, but their intention is real: make readers pause and ponder, even for a moment. Performative readings, with visuals and props add liveliness, another key element of advertising.
Bio: Ian FitzGerald spent 30 years as an advertising copywriter and creative director, including writing for TV and radio plays. Poetry was a sideline. In 2020, the first poem he ever submitted for publication was accepted. Now, he’s hooked. A book-length collection of poems stemming from advertising slogans (write what you know!) is his current project. The book’s title is Each Mouth Dripping in its own Rich, Creamy Goodness from which the chapbook Each Mouthful Dripping … is excerpted. He is an Assistant Professor (Advertising) at Alberta University of the Arts, Calgary.
“Terhpi Thâkthâja: Stoney Nakoda, Catharine Whyte and her Museum” (Film Screening and Panel)
Jarret Twoyoungmen (Filmmaker/Storyteller, Founder of Nakoda AV Club)
Giona Smalleyes (Filmmaker/Artist)
Cheyenne Bearspaw (Filmmaker/Artist)
Amanda Foote (University of Calgary)
What might improved relationships between museums and Îethkabi look like? What could they potentially yield? These were the inquiries that led to the foundation of the Woyuha Hnebi Bathûtabi – a collective of mostly Îethka (Stoney Nakoda, with one settler/white person) – who have been visiting museums and the belongings of the Îethka community.
What emerged from this visitation was relationships. Connecting with belongings opened potentials for reasserting historic connections between Indigenous neighbors, relearning ways of making, and rekindling ties within the Îethkabi community. It also led to new relationships, with museums and their staff, with Indigenous people engaging in museology across the continent, and with those who are caretakers of lands where the belongings are held today.
This multimodal project has been ongoing in various forms, since 2017. The group members maintain arts practices in story, but also other forms. In this session, members of the group present a short film: Terhpi Thâkthâja: Stoney Nakoda, Catharine Whyte and her Museum. This film (25:13) explores the work of building relationships and the complexities this entails through a local example, the Whyte Museum. After the film the group members will share some experiences of visiting with museums.
Bio: Jarret Twoyoungmen is a storyteller and filmmaker whose passion is improving the lives of Indigenous youth through language and culture. He co-founded the Nakoda AV Club, a collective of artists based on the reserve at Mînîthnî (Morley, Alberta) which has been thinking and working in story together for more than a decade. Jarret’s first language is Îethka (Stoney Nakoda). He has made films with the collective that have screened at VIFF, ImagineNATIVE, and Māoriland among others around the world.
Giona Smalleyes is a cultural practitioner and storyteller who is inspired by the landscapes of Mînîthnî and the everyday beauty of the reserve. Her first film, Wîyamî Îpanumîtha (Women Drum Singers), was screened at festivals across North America. Her work in Woyuha Hnebi Bathûbi (museum belonging project) was on view as a mural at Banff’s Cave and Basin historic site. Her family is an enormous influence on her life and her art, and she performs and dances in their collaborative productions. She is currently preparing new work for an exhibit at the Whyte Museum mentored by Joseph Sanchez.
Cheyenne Bearspaw’s dream is to connect with people in a deep way through story. She does this though film, regalia making, as well as mediums such as paint, photography, and collage. A graduate of the Earth-Line Tattoo School, Cheyenne has a traditional tattoo practice grounded in her Nakoda traditions and shared Indigenous knowledge of ink and lines. She believes in the importance of creating space for tattoo art forms outside the commercial structures and supporting women and trans artists and artists of color. Cheyenne’s visual arts practice has been featured throughout the bow valley and beyond.
Amanda Foote is active in community-based settings and works with heritage and culture through museums towards justice and community building. They utilize diverse media, such as film, art, and music, as part of their professional practice and are passionate about the responsibility we all have to youth and community. They are currently a student at the University of Calgary, contributing to the Woyuha Hnebi Bathûtabi project through analysis of the ways museums in Canada have taken up policy and guidance written by Indigenous people. Amanda is white, and is of settler colonizer background.
Gathering
Natalie Gerber (Artist)
Abstract: In Matter and Memory, French philosopher Henri Bergson describes the body as central to experience — a conductor connecting us to the world. Architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa builds on this, positioning the body as the centre of perception, thought, and consciousness. In The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, he emphasizes touch as the sense that most fully integrates our experience of ourselves and our surroundings.
Gathering, an exhibition showcasing works from the AFA Art Collection, emerges from these ideas, presenting the body as a site of perception, relation, and shared meaning. At a time when digital forms of interaction increasingly shape daily life and isolation often accompanies online engagement, the exhibition foregrounds embodied experience as a means to reconnect — with oneself, with others, and with place.
Gathering positions the body as both the tool and the site of learning and expression. The exhibition explores how materials and processes carry meaning, inviting reflection on how the body perceives, interprets, and connects with the world. Building on my creative and curatorial practice, which centres community and embodied experience, Gathering cultivates connections between visitors, artworks, and the broader cultural landscape, emphasizing the body as a site of perception, understanding, and shared human experience.
Presented as a research project in progress, this lighting talk reflects on the development of the exhibition and considers how embodied approaches to curatorial practice can shape exhibition-making and audience experience.
Bio: Born in South Africa (Durban), my studies began at The Natal Technikon, in Fashion Design. After immigrating to Canada my interests in textiles developed while studying at The Alberta College of Art + Design, and later through post-graduate studies at the London College of Fashion in London (England). Following a decade focused on a design practice in textile printing, I earned an MFA in Craft Media from the Alberta University of the Arts.
My artistic practice addresses the intersection of craft and design, explored through interdisciplinary experimentation and research.
Lens/Mirror/Plate – Intersections between Glassmaking and Photography
Leia Guo (Independent Artist)
Abstract: “Lens/Mirror/Plate” explores how innovations in glassmaking have contributed to the development of modern photography, and in turn, how photographic processes can inspire new ways of thinking about glass. As an emerging artist who can speak as both glassmaker and photographer, this lecture is an opportunity to share the research I have conducted in the intersection between craft and light-based processes with the AUArts community.
The first part of this scholarly paper focuses on the historical role of the glassmaking technology in cameras and other photographic equipment through the themes of “Lenses”, “Mirrors”, and “Plates”. Camera lenses are made with glass, of course, but glass was also essential in developing the very first photographs. As a non-permeable, transparent surface, glass was ideal for making photographic negatives and positives before the invention of modern plastic film. The quality of glass plates and mirrors also continue to have a major role in image creation today with digital cameras.
The second part of the paper will showcase 2-3 artworks I’ve created because of my research and the questions that remain in my practice as an interdisciplinary artist. What are the potentials of thinking about photography through a glassmaker’s lens, or vice versa? Is a photograph a vessel? A time machine? A physical manifestation of the ephemeral? How can I create a body of work that reconciles the instinctual craftsperson and the methodical photographer within me?
The original 1hr lecture was presented at the international Glass Art Society (GAS) 2025 Conference in Fort Worth, Texas and is a scholarly article in the GAS Journal for glass artists.
Bio: Leia Guo (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of analog photography and contemporary glassmaking. Her interest in glass lies in its ability as an optical material to displace and refract light in photo-sensitive processes, including silver gelatin and cyanotype. She holds a BFA in Glass and a BDes in Photography from AUArts. Leia was the winner of the ACC Early Achievement Award 2023, a finalist for the 2024 Canadian RBC Award for Glass. She has been featured in national and international exhibitions, including at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, Exposure Photography Festival, and the Tacoma Art Museum.
IG: @leia.guo
Coover in the Manosphere: Allegory and Misogyny in “The Hanging of the Schoolmarm”
Stephen Guy (City University, Seattle, Calgary Campus)
Abstract: Robert Coover’s short story “The Hanging of the Schoolmarm” was published in the New Yorker in 2016, just two weeks after Donald Trump defeated Hilary Clinton in the US presidential election. The story strikes a note of perfect ambivalence in capturing performances of gender in a register familiar from Coover’s best known works. The immediate topical analogues are less characteristic of his satires, and less characteristic of the scrambled postmodern allegories of peers like Donald Barthelme or Thomas Pynchon.
When the men in the story decide to kill the Schoolmarm for “her cruel ways” (banning alcohol, shooting someone for swearing), she responds with reason, which irritates and bores the men and seals her fate. She cannot help but offer philosophical observations, appealing to eternity as she prepares to hang. The men acknowledge her wisdom but do not care for it, instead applauding the male Sherrif for his “incomplete stupidity.”
The story predicts the dangerous rhetoric of contemporary conservative politicians across jurisdictions and the vile misogyny of contemporary digital media culture. The male characters in the story long for homosociality and abhor the insistence on civility embodied by the title character, even as they repeatedly and paradoxically acknowledge the Schoolmarm’s wisdom, fairness, and value. Exposing the meanness and violence of 21st century men, Coover has written one of the definitive fables of our era.
Bio: Stephen Guy is the coordinator of the Canadian Academic Writing Centre at City University's Calgary campus. He has been teaching writing in Calgary for 10 years, usually at SAIT, Bow Valley College, or UCalgary Continuing Education. He bikes, skis, writes, reads, and makes music.
The Digital and the Home: Domesticity, Interface, and Craft
Yukun Hao (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: This talk examines how in-home digital technologies—from early desktops to mobile devices—shape our understanding of home. Drawing on personal experience and a series of enameled works, it argues that computers and mobile devices are not merely physical objects within domestic space, but gateways that extend the experience of home beyond physical space. While we borrow the language of domestic life—such as “desktop”, “window”, “homepage”—to describe the digital environment, born-digital objects and the increasing integration of digital technologies into everyday routines challenge the binary narrative between the physical and the digital. The second half introduces “digital craft” through Malcolm McCullough’s Abstracting Craft and Yukun’s own practice—including QR code crochet, scanned-texture asset-making, and 3D-scanned prints — as sites where digital and physical experiences come together to embody stories and memories of home.
Bio: Yukun Hao (she/her/hers) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores everyday and domestic objects—both physical and digital—and how they shape daily routines, memorymaking, and perceptions of home. Working across crochet, metal enameling, and digital craft, Hao currently focuses on in-home, internet-dependent technologies such as computers and mobile devices, treating them as active inhabitants rather than passive tools. Her practice moves between physical and digital forms through wearables derived from interfaces, scanned material textures, crocheted QR codes and websites that function as navigational portals.
Feminine and Masculine Motifs in the Islamic Design Legacy: Identifying Gendered Patterns to Address Historical Misattribution
Xahra Hafeez (Alberta University of the Arts) with co-author, Sana Hafeez
Abstract: This project investigates the contributions of affluent Muslim women in Islamic art and design. Focusing on patterns and motifs found in Islamic architecture; it compares designs commissioned by female patrons with those by men to uncover gendered differences and address the historical marginalization of women’s contributions. Stimulated by feminist scholarship, the research highlights a clear difference between stylistic choices of female patrons in comparison to the males, offering insights into historical social dichotomies that resonate with contemporary gender issues. Islamic art and architecture, renowned for intricate motifs and geometric patterns, have historically been analyzed from male perspectives. This study addresses that gap by exploring how women’s patronage shaped Islamic aesthetic traditions.
Women patrons often integrated patterns, reflecting themes of fertility, renewal, and serenity, distinct from the monumental and geometric focus of male-driven designs. Historical figures like Nur Jahan of the Mughal Dynasty exemplified how women overcame societal limitations to contribute to monumental art, yet, historical records often obscure their contributions, favoring male patrons’ projects. The research employs a comparative framework, analyzing gendered contributions across dynasties. The project aims to illuminate women’s enduring influence in Islamic art, challenging traditional narratives of invisibility. The interdisciplinary research combines expertise in modularity in design and the intersection of gender, patronage, and architectural history to reveal a clear visual analysis of feminine design characteristics through their hidden blueprints underneath. Using archival research, fieldwork, and computational tools, the study spans the Islamic Golden Era across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, offering a nuanced understanding of gendered patterns in design providing fresh perspectives on its legacy.
Bio: Xahra is a design researcher and educator whose work reads architecture as an archive mining its patterns, motifs, and spatial logics for what they reveal about gender, culture, and material knowledge and translates these findings into the domain of product and communication design. Her research sits within the broader field of gender studies & design, investigating how cultural constructions of the feminine and masculine are materialized and perpetuated through the built environment. Rather than studying architecture as built form, she approaches it as a repository of encoded cultural meaning; one in which the geometry of a jali screen, the modularity of an ornamental grid, or the craft logic of a carved threshold in South Asian architecture, each encode assumptions about visibility, access, and identity that extend far beyond their physical context.
With over twelve years of post-secondary teaching experience, Xahra has held roles as Director of Studies and Assistant Professor. Her teaching spans foundational Design courses to Advanced Design Communication, and Design Innovation; disciplines through which she continues to develop design as a method of cultural and spatial inquiry.
Living in the Time of Dying
Gail Hinchliffe (Founder of United Active Living/Artist-Scholar)
Abstract: How do we live in the time of dying? This question, for me, leads to two separate but adjoining paths. First – breaking down the belief that humans have a right of domination over the land which has led to socio-economic structures encouraging extraction of resources and an economy based on materialism and consumption – the myths of progress. It is now evident that the earth’s bounty is not renewable, and we have tipped the point of sustainability. Second, the importance of dislodging prevalent societal constructs of ageism which creates barriers for the active participation of older adults.
The method of inquiry for my photography practice is supported by four areas of research which interact and provide a supportive base: Biophilia, Phenomenology, Relational Aesthetics, and Spiritual Ecology. Humans are innately attracted to nature but our separation from the natural world has occurred in parallel with technological developments resulting in our changing interaction with nature. Phenomenology acknowledges the subjectivity of our experience of the world and its objects – the individual lived experience. Ecological renewal and sustainability depend upon spiritual awareness and an attitude of responsibility. An art practice which forms community through engaged interaction among participants provides an opportunity to discover commonality from diverse perspectives and experiences. The presentation will elaborate on my contemplative photography practice through community.
We have a troubled cultural model of aging which sees it as a time of diminishment and often a burden. This stage of life, however, can offer possibility with an opportunity for reflection, contemplation, and the creation of space for renewal. A curated life of curiosity where we reach into the wise and grateful part of being and can express these knowings. I will advise on a new research program undertaken by the University of Calgary that seeks to understand ageism within Canadian arts institutions and develop models for anti-aging policies and procedures to support professional Canadian artists throughout their lifespans.
Bio: A rewarding career as Founder, President, and COO of United Active Living provided direct observation on the important role of art for people to continue growth during their elder years. Wanting to apply these attributes to my own life led to completing a BFA in 2022 and MFA in 2024 at 79 years of age. My research and practice explore the connection of ecology, culture, and spirituality through contemplative photography and writing. In addition, my experience as an elderly student and practicing artist is applied to breaking down the barriers of ageism. Creativity does not get old.
Queer Curatorial: Meaningful Engagement with Material Culture
Bailey Horton (Athabasca University)
Abstract: Queer Curatorial: Meaningful Engagement with Material Culture is a lightning presentation on 2SLGBTQIA+ material history in Central Alberta. As a queer woman artist and emerging museum professional I am developing this research out of an interest in inclusive museum practice. The presentation will consider how queer materials are shaped by their social movement history and how that affects collections. There are questions around access, inclusion, and what constitutes queer history. It will consider the difference between symbolic curation versus historical representations of queer history through analysing the Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery’s previous exhibitions. Finally I will discuss how contemporary interpretation can change how we engage with 2SLGBTQIA+ material. The goal of this presentation is to invite artists, museum professionals, and institutions to reconsider the interpretation of queer collections. The future of queer curatorial projects is collaborative, intersectional, and in conversation with both history and contemporary realities.
Bio: Bailey Horton is a multidisciplinary artist and emerging museum professional with a focus on community engagement. They are interested in how communities can use art to understand and tackle local issues collectively. Currently her research engages with contemporary museum theory and how institutions can meaningfully engage with queer communities. She is working on her Bachelors of Professional Arts in Communications through Athabasca University with a focus on museum studies. Their artistic practice ebbs between curatorial, educational, and personal practice. Their medium is often informed by their research, but primarily draws with print and textile approaches incorporated in. Her current body of work explores ideas of catharsis and mapmaking.
Set, Setting, Sound: Failures & Emergent Methods (Workshop)
Ada Jaarsma (Mount Royal University) with Guy Obrecht, Eli Buechler, Brenden Ormandy
Abstract: This hybrid workshop will pair a new performance-piece with inquiry into research-creation. Our research group, made up of two students, a musicologist and a philosopher, has been exploring the somatic significance of creative practices, from choreography and improvisation to pedagogy; our broader work-in-progress involves finding ways to track this import under the terms “placebo” and “nocebo” effects. These terms are useful, despite biomedical associations, because they get at the entangled connections between bodies and minds, senses and concepts, research and artmaking. They’re useful as signposts of the specificity of artifacts and designs that prompt embodied responses. (This specificity leads to fascinating findings: placebos differ across cultures, for example, and what serves as a placebo for one person might be a nocebo for another, summoning harm rather than well-being). Guy Obrecht will perform a new composition, “Pressure Switch,” described below. This piece brings together performance, sound and simple technology and explores the silent ubiquity of devices like switches and the meaning of pressure as a physical and psychological phenomenon. Our workshop will engage the piece as research-creation, opening up questions about the line between performance and pedagogy and about feedback loops between arts-based research practices and embodied effects.
Pressure Switch (2026) Performance: ca. 9 minutes
Pressure Switch is a piece that has a pressure switch at the centre of an acoustic ecosystem. When activated by air pressure, negative or positive, the switch triggers a tiny fan that blows into tissue paper. The paper and fan are monitored by piezo elements that send their sonic results to a computer that parses out key frequencies and maps them onto variables in a synthesizer. The piece attempts to continually increase the cascading effects of the initial sense of pressure on the switch, creating a kind of momentum and inexorable direction. It is a switch for building pressure.
Bio: Ada Jaarsma is professor of philosophy at Mount Royal University. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming collection with Duke, “Feminist Making, Doing, and Sensing: Experiments in Philosophy,” which explores research-creation and arts-based approaches to feminist philosophy. This past fall, she designed a new course around Disability Arts which featured two MFA students from AuArts and culminated in a student-led art exhibit and event. She’s interested in continuing to find ways to collaborate, in the city, with artists and arts-based researchers, especially in relation to pedagogy and teaching. https://www.dukeupress.edu/feminist-making-doing-and-sensing
Guy Obrecht (PhD, UC San Diego) grew up in the small town of Wakefield Quebec. At the age of eleven he attended the National Ballet School of Canada before turning to music studies at the Conservatory of Music in Gatineau Quebec and a range of programs in composition (Ottawa), music theory (University of Toronto), and musicology (UC San Diego). He teaches sound studies and music at Mount Royal University. In addition to theoretical research in music and perception, Guy's practice includes creating environments that allow for the exploration of sound. He works with electronics and musical instruments to create pieces that invite observers towards a curiosity for the nature of the sonic world and the role of the body in its sounding.
Eli Buechler is 5th year psychology major at Mount Royal University. He’s a lifelong hobbyist artist whose main practice is digital and analogue ink illustrations. Recently, Eli has turned to exploring research-creation as an alternative knowledge-making practice that harnesses the affective, focused, deeply intellectual power of art making to articulate the depth, rather than the breadth, of human experience. This is itself a work-in-progress, encompassing research, events, and his own private work. Eli has been a research assistant for Ada Jaarsma for the past two years.
Brenden Ormandy is a 4th year Informations major at Mount Royal University. He is also a sound artist and sound engineer, as well as the founder and manager of a large recording studio in the city. As a research assistant for Ada Jaarsma, he brings this background in creative industries together with his own research interests in pedagogy and the impacts of design in spaces like classrooms. His own work-in-progress art includes a new short film, as well as creative approaches to the production side of audio and sound.
Damask Herbarium: Banff
Mackenzie Kelly- Frère (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: “Damask Herbarium: Banff" is a research/creation project initiated by Mackenzie Kelly-Frère. European damask is a luxury textile with centuries of history as a signifier of wealth and privilege. This project interrogates the nature of the imagery depicted in these textiles and its relationship to colonial histories and signifiers. Many if not all plants and animals depicted in this cloth offered an Orientalist vision of far-off places – often the same colonized places generating the wealth that enabled the production of luxury goods like Damask cloth. To develop imagery and motifs for this project, Kelly-Frère is working with historic samples collected by Canadian botanist John Macoun before the opening of Banff National Park in 1885, along with live versions of the same plants found in and around Banff in 2026. The choice of the Macoun samples is intentional as the botanist’s legacy is linked to the westward expansion of Canada in the nineteenth century and the subsequent devastation of prairie grasslands. His collection of samples, now housed in the herbarium at the University of Calgary pre-dates the opening of the park and was displayed for its opening. Histories of plant collection and its relationship to conquest and the displacement of indigenous peoples are a key focus of this research. Working on a single-unit drawloom (a precursor to the contemporary digital Jacquard loom), Kelly-Frère intends to produce a damask cloth enmeshed with images of 140 year-old botanical specimens and their ancestors. “Damask Herbarium: Banff” examines how the visual language of damask design may be re-deployed to weave a (re)collection of plant specimens or woven herbarium, that speaks to the histories of Treaty Seven territory where the stewardship of irreplaceable ecologies is urgent.
Bio: Mackenzie Kelly-Frère is an artist and educator. His research focuses on collaboration with material that considers our co-evolution with the plants and animals who provide the fibre that we use to make cloth; and the communities and relationships required to sustain this activity. He is currently Director and Associate Professor in the School of Craft & Emerging Media at the Alberta University of the Arts. Mackenzie lives in Mohkinstsis (Calgary), Canada, with husband, Kristofer, and daughter, Elizabeth. https://mackenziekellyfrere.com/
The Drowning of an Artist
Mitch Kern (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: The invention/discovery of photography is often seen as a singular breakthrough, but in reality, it evolved over centuries, culminating in a flurry of activity in the early 19th century. Drawing upon visual examples, this talk examines its historical framework and context, details what 19th century inventors were trying to achieve, and reveals how power, influence, and institutional authority, as much as innovation, shaped whose work was recognized and whose was ignored. Ultimately, it shines a light on one key artwork that stands as a testament to the history of photography as a contested and curated story.
Bio: Mitch Kern’s work examines relationships between society and the environment using photography, video, sculpture, and performance. His current research explores how constructed and artificial representations of nature influence social belonging and shape human identity. He holds an MFA in Photography from Penn State University and a BA in Visual Art from the University of Maryland.
ArtforCoralReefsinCrisis
Eveline Kolijn (Artist)
Abstract: The rapid loss of coral reefs is a pressing socio-ecological crisis, threatening ocean biodiversity and coastal livelihoods. Because reefs are below the ocean surface, they remain out of sight and abstract to many people, including policymakers and stakeholders, which can worsen the impacts of exploitation and climate change. Scientists are increasingly collaborating with artists in a desperate effort to harness the power of art to raise awareness and inspire meaningful action for coral reefs.
Rooted in my long relationship with Caribbean reefs—snorkelling and diving since the 1970s and returning regularly since the 2000s—my practice responds to both the beauty and decline of coral ecosystems. Earlier projects, including Ocean Inside (2017) and Tidalectics (2020), combined marine science with printmaking.
Building on this foundation, the Coral Reef Ark & Virus Capsid Project (2024) emerged through collaboration with marine virologist Dr. Forest Rohwer of San Diego State University and biophysicist Dr. Antoni Luque of the University of Miami. For this project, I created digitally printed and laser-cut paper sculptures inspired by phage geometry. Shared as open-source PDFs, these tactile, buildable models communicate key virology concepts and coral reef dynamics, inviting audiences to learn by making while engaging with complex ecological processes.
I will discuss not only the artistic strategies involved, but also the practical considerations essential to effective art-science outreach: identifying target audiences, selecting suitable venues, building networking and knowledge-sharing into the creative process, and planning funding.
Bio: Eveline Kolijn is a Calgary-based printmaker and multimedia artist whose work connects art, science, and ecology. She holds an MA in cultural anthropology from Leiden University and a BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts, where she received the 2019 Alumni Legacy Award. Her practice includes international exhibitions, residencies, community engagement, and collaborations with scientists. An Energy Futures Lab Ambassador, she promotes energy literacy and has edited the award-winning book “Reimagining Fire: The Future of Energy” (BPAA Regional Book of the Year 2024). Her solo exhibition “Ecologies” opened at Nickle Galleries in Calgary in 2025.
Groundwork: A Creative Approach to Environmental Data
Andrea Lau (Artist)
Abstract: Groundwork is an in-progress art project rooted in developing a conversation about the relationship between soil and the environment. Through research, skill-sharing and creative exploration of our soil, the environment becomes the amplified focus. This project uses local ecological research from 10 soil-diverse locations in Calgary. Groundwork invites the public to be direct contributors through immersive papermaking workshops.
Context: What can our soil tell us? How can art contribute to a meaningful conversation about our environment? Groundwork is a creative approach to research and exploration of site-specific soil health data within the context of papermaking and printmaking. With its ability to absorb and store carbon and provide protection from flooding and drought, our soil is of high importance—yet often overlooked. Groundwork is an invitation to consider a deeper relationship to this life sustaining ecological system with importance placed on discovery of organisms with the soil.
Research Method:
1.) Collect soil from 10 locations in Calgary (farm, garden, landfill, construction site, backyards, recent grassfire areas, riverbank and more).
2.) Work with a local soil specialist and lab to provides soil analyses, microscopic imagery and additional environmental consultation.
Artwork Influence:
The handmade paper will be dyed in colours representing their attributes, and soil will be directly added to handmade paper pulp. Organisms and data will be creatively interpreted and printed on the handmade paper to produce the final work.
Findings & Outcome:
Soil samples are currently being analysed, organisms have been photographed.
Artwork and handmade paper are still being created, the final outcome has not yet been determined. Groundwork is expected to be completed and exhibited in fall 2026.
Bio: Andrea Lau is a multidisciplinary artist based in Calgary AB. Growing up she spent quiet summers exploring the landscape of the St. Lawrence Forest, forming a life-long affinity and curiosity of the natural world. Her current studio project: Groundwork is an exploration of soil health data and papermaking. Lau earned a BFA from The Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD University) with a specialization in printmaking and papermaking. Her work has received recognition from various organizations including the Calgary Arts Development, Open Studio, and The Japanese Paper Place in Toronto.
The Failure of Beginning
Kurtis Lesick (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: What is the beginning of art, philosophy, or being itself? This paper begins from a point of refusal. Not a refusal by the author, but a refusal of the world itself to grant stable structures, identities, and truths. A beginning does not ground thought, art, or being; rather, it iterates as a paradox—at once necessary and incomplete. It proposes itself, it fails, and in its collapse reveals the conditions of its own possibility. What appears as instability is not a defect to be corrected, but the operative condition through which form emerges. The beginning is never simply first. Instead, it is always already implicated in what exceeds it.
From this perspective, philosophy and art no longer describe the world but participate in its unfolding. The world is encountered as speculative process: not a field of fixed identities and meanings, but an ongoing re-articulation of relations. Such a world demands a discipline of attention: gathering that exceeds any singular voice; thinking and a materiality that must remain within their own movement—allowing what emerges to determine itself; listening that becomes a practice of restraint. Yet this openness is not without limit; relation is constrained, situated, and ethically inflected. Not everything can be taken up or known.
This reading of philosophy and art is put to the test in a consideration of Raphael’s The School of Athens. Here, despite the interventions of the western canon, the engagement of the image itself draws both philosophy and art to resist totalisation and unfold instead through fragmentary encounter. Meaning emerges through movement, interruption, and juxtaposition. At its centre, a precarious inkpot introduces a subtle instability—an opening that unsettles the canonical order and returns us, once again, to the beginning.
Bio: Kurtis Lesick’s installations, media works, performances, and writing explore the limits of materiality, knowledge, and themes of indeterminabilty. Lesick’s practice draws heavily on his experience in archaeology, anthropology and philosophy, as well as both his love and disdain for technology. He is Associate Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts, has held an adjunct professorship in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the OCAD University (Canada), has been visiting faculty at the Banff Centre (Canada) and the University of California at Irvine (USA), and was a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol (UK).
Kurtislesick.com
Hair as metaphor for female subjectivity
Ziya Lin (Artist)
Abstract: This 7-minute Lightning Talk will share my ongoing artistic exploration of line as a visual language and my approach to translating abstract concepts into tangible visual forms. The talk will introduce the conceptual framework of my drawing series Tamed and how it directs my next mixed-media drawing project.
Tamed is a series of charcoal pencil drawings that use hair as both subject and metaphor to explore self-expression and female subjectivity. The works are created on the scrolls of Chinese painting paper, a material choice that carries cultural and feminine associations. Rather than presenting the artworks in a conventional manner by mounting the scrolls on the wall, the scrolls are suspended from the ceiling and reach to the floor. This spatial arrangement transforms the two-dimensional works into an installation, granting the paper scrolls a human-like presence and a personified stance.
This artistic exploration will extend into my next proposed drawing project, which combines brushstroke line drawing, hand-stitched mark-making, and texture rubbing. This approach is intended to produce layered works on paper that further investigate line as a visual language. The proposed work will continue to frame paper as an embodiment of cultural identity, as well as a metaphor for the body and skin. By rubbing textures from urban surfaces and layering them with the motifs of classical Chinese garden rockeries, the proposed artworks revolve around themes of diasporic identity, cultural hybridity, and adaptation.
Bio: Ziya Lin is a Calgary-based Chinese artist working in drawing and mixed-media installation. Her practice explores identity, female subjectivity, diaspora, and belonging. She holds a BFA from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (2014) and an MFA from the University of Calgary (2017). Selected drawings from the "Tamed" series were archived in Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry (2016). Lin furthered her artistic exploration through the RBC Emerging Visual Artists Residency at Werklund Centre and the Alberta Society of Artists’ Artist in Residence program. She has also participated in community-based creative initiatives, including "Chinese Civic Engagement", a collaboration with Mao(Kun) Chen and Chris Savage as part of Calgary Arts Development’s "Creating Our Calgary" program, and recently led workshops in Chinatown supported by the City of Calgary’s Chinatown Activation Microgrant.
Website: https://www.instagram.com/ziyacreations_/
Skiff: Tracing Memory, Ritual, and Passage
Patricia Lortie (Artist)
Abstract: This presentation explores Skiff, a ceramic installation, currently in development, that investigates memory, ritual, and transformation through the recurring form of the boat. Developed alongside the Liquid Abstract series, Skiff takes shape as a wall-mounted river composed of 300 small ceramic vessels. Each eight-inch skiff shares the same structure yet is individually glazed, creating a field of subtle variations that evoke both repetition and singularity.
The work draws from personal and cultural histories. The word skiff references modest fishing boats common across Canada and tied to my childhood experiences navigating rivers and lakes in Quebec. More recently, this form became central to a family ritual: I created a series of hand-crafted cardboard boats, sealed with beeswax, to carry my parent’s ashes along the Saguenay River. This gesture, both intuitive and collective, revealed the skiff as more than an object; it became a vessel for grief, memory, and continuity.
In this talk, I will reflect on how this lived experience shaped the conceptual framework of the installation. The ceramic boats extend the ephemeral ritual into a durable, spatial form, where accumulation suggests both a river’s flow and the passage of time. The installation will invites viewers to move along its contours, encountering a suspended current of gestures that oscillate between the intimate and the universal.
Skiff also engages broader symbolic traditions in which boats signify transition between worlds; life and death, presence and absence, past and future. By situating personal narrative within these enduring metaphors, the work opens a space for shared reflection on loss, lineage, and transformation.
As a work in progress, this project raises questions about material translation, repetition, and the role of ritual in contemporary art practice.
Bio: Patricia Lortie (Oo’Ks’pain’aakii) is a Quebec-born, Calgary-based artist working in painting, sculpture, installation, and community art. Trained in industrial design and business in Montréal, she later studied fine arts at the Alberta University of the Arts. Her immersive, contemplative environments explore our physical, emotional, and ancestral relationships with the natural world. Solo exhibitions include Liquid Abstract (2025), The Keepers (2021–2024), and Fluid State (2022). She represented Alberta at the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad. A co-founder of DEVENIR, Alberta’s francophone visual arts collective, Lortie has received the Prix Envol and the Linda Knight Prize.
Being and becoming in the design studio: Practicing a practice, practicing for practice, and practicing a shared life (work-in-progress)
Naoko Masuda (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: Postsecondary design education is largely taught through the pedagogical method known as the design studio, in which students and teachers engage in activities that simulate a professional design practice. Its aim is for students to learn with and from one another to experience (Erfahrung) being a designer while engaging in the design process. Through this, they learn to research, ideate, iterate, discern, and create artifacts to visually solve practical problems. In the process of this doing, students practice the “design practice” while also practicing for a future professional practice as a “designer”. My observation from over 15 years teaching in the design studio is that such learning is most enriching when students (and educators) are prepared to engage in meaningful dialogue with peers, their work, and the discipline itself. In such an ideal, students are also — perhaps unknowingly — practicing a shared life. Recently, preparation for such learning seems less evident than in the past, often for reasons beyond our control. In Truth and Method, Gadamer presents three different conceptions of the I-Thou relationship and their effect on understanding: 1) Thou viewed as object, much as in the natural sciences; 2) Thou as something akin to a projection of I in a “form of self-relatedness” (TM367); and 3) Thou as a true and equal Other who can participate fully in conversation and understanding. Based on these different I-Thou encounters to understanding, I explore the possibilities and limitations of the 21st Century design studio as a site for practicing a practice, practicing for a profession, and perhaps even for practicing a shared life. (A final version of this paper will be presented in June 2026 at the Canadian Hermeneutics Institute.)
Gadamer, H. G. (2013). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Bloomsbury. (Original work published 1960).
Bio: I am an assistant professor in the School of Communication Design teaching design foundations, graphic design, information design, and professional writing. As a design practitioner and educator, I believe that communication and conversation are at the heart of design. My research takes a hermeneutic approach to understanding relationships in the design classroom. Specific topics of interest include relational ethics, curriculum and assessment, friendship, critique as conversation, and bereavement in higher education.
Lines of Action: Exploring Figure Drawing as an Experimental Ethnographic Method
Leah Naicken (University of Calgary)
Abstract: Figure drawing is a foundational artistic practice, with depictions of figures found as far back as 51,200 years ago in the Sulawesi caves of Indonesia. In the Western tradition of art, the training method of observing and drawing figures from live models was formalized during the Italian Renaissance in the 1500s and maintained relevance well into the Academic art movement of the 1800s. However, with the development of the camera, interest in realistic artistic depictions of the human form declined and shifted towards abstract, imaginative, and fantastical approaches.
This technological shift also shaped the discipline of anthropology. In the 1800s, European and American anthropologists used hand-drawn illustrations, drawn themselves or by their research collaborators, to document the people, places, and things that they encountered during their expeditions, which would be printed in books and disseminated to the public. In the early 1900s, photography subsumed this approach, as the medium was deemed more objective and truthful. Drawings were now hidden away in researchers' private field notebooks, diaries, and journals.
Following the postmodern and reflexive turn of academia in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars in both art and anthropology found a renewed interest in drawing as a methodological tool for social and cultural research by emphasizing its subjective nature and the intentionality required to observe and depict the world in this way, challenging the meandering and so-called objective gaze of photography and film.
My master’s project continues this tradition by examining contemporary figure drawing practices as an ethnographic research site and method. I will host a series of figure drawing workshops with participants of varying artistic skill levels to investigate their challenges in accessing this training, how this practice shapes and develops their observational and interpretive drawing skills, and how these workshop spaces cultivate intersubjective knowledge production, collaboration, and community building.
Bio: Leah Naicken is a master’s student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Calgary. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Alberta (2018) and a Bachelor of Design from the Alberta University of the Arts (2023). Her research explores the intersections of art and anthropology, with a focus on figure drawing as an experimental ethnographic research method and how accessible art training facilitates cultural continuity and community.
https://www.instagram.com/leahnaicken/
Reading Chinatown’s Water System through Print
Phoenix Kefei Ning and Yilu Xing (ING Group)
Abstract: From April to August 6, 2026, this project engages the public through hands-on outdoor relief printmaking using Chinatown’s stormwater infrastructure. It explores urban water systems by translating research into accessible, educational visuals, culminating in a public exhibition.
The project unfolds through four phases: (1) research into Calgary’s stormwater infrastructure; (2) development of public-facing communication and educational materials; (3) six hands-on, interactive public printmaking sessions; and (4) reflection through a month-long duo exhibition and the production of 40 hand-printed zines. These phases move the work from observation to action, and from individual inquiry to shared public experience. Research, creation, and engagement are interwoven throughout.
As a collaborative artist duo, Yilu Xing and Phoenix Kefei Ning (ING Group) work at the intersection of communication design, printmaking, and public engagement. Together, they bring complementary skills, shared experience, and an established collaborative relationship, positioning them to carry out this project effectively, responsibly, and with meaningful impact in Calgary’s Chinatown.
Bio: Yilu Xing is an artist-educator with a BFA from AUArts and a MFA from the University of Alberta, currently working in a non-profit art gallery in Calgary. She has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for her research on culinary traditions within immigrant families and how food nurtures connection and belonging. Her work explores food, care, and cultural memory through print, installation, and community-based projects. Xing’s practice emphasizes hands-on processes, collaboration, and the ways art builds community and shared learning.
https://www.yiluxing.ca/
Phoenix Kefei Ning is a Calgary-based graphic designer, illustrator, and emerging artist. She graduated from AUArts in 2026, majoring in Visual Communication Design. She explores the interplay of colour and shape to create visually engaging work, and her practice is inspired by her personal aesthetics and her relationship to the world around her. While she primarily works in digital formats, she continues to explore traditional, hands-on techniques, often working across the boundary between digital and craft. She contributes to numerous community-based and public art initiatives across Calgary, with a focus on making art more accessible and joyful for the public.
https://phoenixning.myportfolio.com/ and https://phoenixning.com/
From Thinker to Sage: Art Historical Wisdom, Skill, and Teamwork in a Complex Relational World
Troy Patenaude (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: Art has often been a source of meaning-making for humans in turbulent times, whether in spiritual crisis, social and political upheaval, revolution, war, or environmental disaster. Much has been wondered and said about the role of art and artists in these instances, but less on the contingently integral role of art historians and art thinkers, despite their depth of dialogue with art and their influence on public imaginaries about art in our world.
This paper is a movement of thought considering how art history and discussions about art can be better strategized so that they can do some of the things they do for art, while also helping humans live in relational, sustainable, and flourishing lives with and in complex, turbulent times today. Themes touched upon include art and complexity, decolonial art-historical practices, cross-cultural approaches to art, and art and story. Some early findings related to art discussions in Blackfoot territory, along with hunches for future directions, will be shared to spark conversations that could help refine or develop this project further.
Bio: Troy Patenaude, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts. He teaches in the fields of Indigenous Studies, Art History, Cultural Studies, and Canadian Studies, including special courses on decolonization and curatorial practices. He is also a hiking guide and has professional experience in museums and national historic sites, as well as in land-based education with Indigenous elders and communities across Western Canada. His research focuses on ways the arts prepare societies for flourishing futures, 18th- and 19th-century European and trans-Atlantic art histories, and Canadian and Indigenous art histories and ecologies, especially in cross-cultural contexts.
Myths and Flesh: Remapping this Monster of Kin
Narges Rezaian (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: This ongoing interdisciplinary, research-based art project develops a nuanced framework for artistic practice by integrating narrative therapy and quantum psychotherapy as methodological lenses. Grounded in postmodern critiques of metanarratives, the project prioritizes narrative meaning-making over a singular truth, positioning storytelling as a primary source of agency, identity formation, and intentional living. Narrative therapy provides the theoretical foundation for re-authoring lived experience, emphasizing narrative modes of cognition and the active reconstruction of personal meaning. Alongside this, the project engages the concept of quantum psychotherapy, where insights from quantum physics are integrated into analytical psychology, inviting reflection on how a quantum perspective may reshape understandings of human experience, subjectivity, and the search for meaning.
These psychotherapeutic frameworks inform the project’s engagement with Iranian mythology. Mythological concepts such as the tripartite nature of the human (Farrah, Fravashi, and the physical self) are reinterpreted as narrative structures that foreground choice, purpose, and agency. This investigation engages with Iranian mythology simultaneously as a collective metanarrative shaping cultural identity and as a flexible system through which individual stories can be articulated. In other words, using narrative therapy and the concept of quantum psychotherapy as interpretive frameworks, inherited myths and symbolic imagery are critically re-read and reauthored to reflect personal lived experience while remaining connected to their historical roots. The project ultimately functions as an active process of meaning-making and identity reconstruction for an Iranian artist working in a diasporic context, where artistic practice becomes a site for negotiating cultural memory, personal narrative, and existential inquiry.
Bio: Narges Rezaian is an assistant professor at AUArts with over a decade of experience in education and twenty years of practice as an experimental filmmaker and animator from Iran. Her interdisciplinary research explores philosophy, psychology, cinema, and fine arts. Her practice centers on the concept of body as a site of meaning-making, resilience, and transformation. Her current research investigates the integration of narrative therapy with Iranian mythology, using a hermeneutic methodology to develop a nuanced approach to the symbolic language of Iranian literature, bridging lived experience with cultural heritage and historical roots in the reshaping of identity and meaning.
https://nargesrezaian8.artstation.com/
Mapping Student Journeys to Accessing Mental Health Networks
Milena Radzikowska (Mount Royal University)
Abstract: Mount Royal University's Wellness Services partnered with information design researchers on a project to better understand how students’ access and navigate on-campus mental health services. Participants were asked to create a journey map of their experience in accessing or attempting to access such services. A journey map is a design research tool that helps visually show the steps a person takes when moving through a service or system, including key moments, service touchpoints, and how they may feel throughout the process. Once completed, participants' journeys are mapped against the formal system as understood and executed by Wellness Services to help the researcher team identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities for improving access.
Bio: Naureen Mumtaz PhD, MDes, Assistant Professor of Information Design, Faculty of Business, Communication Studies and Aviation
Naureen Mumtaz is an Assistant Professor of Information Design in the Faculty of Business and Communication Studies at the Mount Royal University, Calgary. She holds an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Design Studies and Education, and a Master of Design in Visual Communication Design from the University of Alberta. Her research areas are at the intersections of critical design and teaching and learning in higher education. She employs design-based participatory research methods for informing community-responsive curricula and their relation to complex social justice issues, such as intercultural understanding and cultural pedagogies in higher education communities.
Dr. Milena Radzikowska, Chair in the School of Communication Studies and Professor of Information Design, Faculty of Business, Communication Studies and Aviation
Dr. Milena Radzikowska is an established researcher in humanities-based data visualization, feminist human-computer interaction (HCI), and interface design for decision support. Her major contributions have been in the development of humanities-based approaches for oil extraction; experimental interface design to help protect Alberta wildlife; and materializing digital tools for content analysis. Since 2005, she’s been the PI or Co-I on over 25 interdisciplinary design research projects, four of those with budgets in the millions, extending over longer periods (anywhere from two to seven years).
Andrea Le, 4th-year student in the Bachelor of Communication, Major in Information Design
Sophie Madsen, 2nd-year student in the Bachelor of Communication, Major in Information Design
Invisible Photographer: Walker Evans, Candid Cameras, and “Vanity”
Annie Rudd (University of Calgary)
Abstract: What are the political stakes of photographers’ efforts to produce their own invisibility, concealing their cameras so that they might photograph undetected? What gendered looking relations might be obscured by the aesthetic and epistemic justifications photographers offer for photographing others without their awareness? Taking these questions as points of entry, this paper critically reevaluates a prominent example of surreptitious photography: Walker Evans’ “subway portraits,” taken between 1938 and 1941. With this project, Evans claimed that concealing his camera was a route to “true portraiture, or the nearest approach thereof.” This claim hinged on a familiar assumption: in making the camera invisible and thereby divesting subjects of the ability to pose, the photographer would be positioned to unveil the inner, hidden selves that would otherwise be concealed beneath a photogenic veneer. Paradoxically, discussions of Evans’ “subway portraits” have tended to treat his invisibility as a marker of his aesthetic innovativeness and his distinct authorial hand. This research argues instead that there is insight to be gained from treating Evans as symptomatic of his cultural surround rather than wholly generative. Reading Evans against the popular photography magazines and men’s humour magazines of his moment, I contend that the self-imposed invisibility he embodied was a defining feature of the popular visual culture of 1930s America. In Evans’ work and in its cultural surround, the trope of the “candid camera” often served to justify and rationalize the pleasures of masculinized voyeurism while framing women’s resistance to nonconsensual capture as mere “vanity.”
Bio: Annie Rudd is associate professor of critical media studies at the University of Calgary. Her research, at the intersection of photographic history and media history, examines shifting popular attitudes toward photography’s capacity to “reveal” its subjects and mediate social relationships. She is the author of Candid: A History of Unposed Photography (forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2027). Her research has also appeared in journals including Photography & Culture, photographies, and Information & Culture.
Evidentiary Aesthetics after the Operational Image
Ashley Scarlett (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: Although contested from the outset, the asserted indexicality of photography has long positioned the medium as a critical means through which to capture, create, and disseminate evidence. Prominent theorists of photography have identified the critical role that evidentiary images have played in exposing the death-worlds of the ‘necropolitical’ (Mbembe 2003), in crying emergency (Azoulay 2008), in spurring moral awakening (Sontag 2003) and in enabling emancipated spectators to begin establishing “different spatiotemporal systems, different communities or words and things, forms and meanings” (Mirzoeff 2008: 102).
Within the contemporary context, wherein the photographic image – now operational (Parikka 2023) – has become instrumental to the throes of computational capitalism (Stiegler 2019), it functions simultaneously as a critical site for the solicitation and collection of evidentiary data for use within platform optimization, machine learning, and AI applications (Hand & Scarlett 2023) while also becoming an increasingly devalued, discredited and unactionable form of representational evidence within legal contexts and the court of public opinion (Rettberg 2023; Uliasz 2022).
Responding to an expanded analysis of the contradictory treatment of photographic evidence outlined above, the following paper will draw from the traditions of analytic and legal philosophy as well as media theory (see for example: Orr and Crawford 2024; Levy 2024; Ciero 2019; Lauer 2011; Achinstein 2010) to frame an explicitly photographic approach to evidence, identifying critical and largely under-examined overlaps between ‘photographic evidence’ and the treatment of data within computational capitalism, machine learning and AI applications. This discussion will make apparent the urgent need for a fundamental rethinking and cultural renegotiation of evidentiary aesthetics and standards of proof where contemporary imaging practices are concerned.
Bio: Ashley Scarlett is an Associate Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta University of the Arts. Her research, which investigates intersections between creative practice and computational culture, has appeared in Philosophy of Photography, photographies, Afterimage, Media Theory, Parallax, and Digital Culture and Society as well as in numerous edited volumes. A forthcoming manuscript (Bloomsbury) charts the role that artists-in-residence have played in spurring innovation and critique across the histories of computation.
Designing Medical Literacy with Multidisciplinary Collaborations
Zoha Shaukat & Joan Tu (MedULingo)
Abstract: Incorporating medical literacy in education may promote self-advocacy, empathy, and socio-emotional development in K to twelve students. However, there is a lack of ageappropriate medical literacy resources. This presentation outlines MedULingo’s ongoing multidisciplinary initiatives to provide accessible resources that enable all learners to develop medical literacy at their own pace.
We begin with our Medical Literacy for Children handbook, which outlines a flexible framework for teachers, educators, and instructional designers, supported by pedagogical learning theories and cognitive neuroscience. The handbook transforms evidence-based, culturally responsive education principles into adaptable strategies for fostering inclusive learning experiences. We also highlight a range of children’s educational resources developed by MedULingo, most notably the A-to-Z medical literacy books. In the Fall of 2025, MedULingo partnered with students from Alberta University of Arts, to design activity books that introduce school-age children to various medical concepts and encourage curiosity, awareness, and critical thinking.
With continued development of age-appropriate educational resources that provide inclusive ways to discuss underrepresented medical conditions, MedULingo hopes to promote health and education equity. We are currently working towards making medical education accessible, and flexible for all children, through ongoing collaboration with diverse stakeholders, including patients, students, educators, and artists. By working together, we seek to empower children and adults with the knowledge and empathy necessary to shape a healthier, more inclusive world
Bio: Joan Tu is an author whose publications include scholarly, educational, literary, and artistic works, which draw from a combination of evidence- and research-based knowledge, lived experience, storytelling, and visual elements. As a former medical student she has developed deep subject matter expertise related to medical education from early childhood to adulthood. After leaving medical training, following a prolonged contact allergy misdiagnosis, she continues to develop the medical literacy ecosystem as well as self-paced patient- and learner-centered resources at MedULingo.com.
Zoha Shaukat holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. Through research and practice she hopes to foster inclusive and equitable communities and drive meaningful change. Her research interests consist of intersectional, community-based research with marginalized populations that may influence the development of culturally inclusive programming and support which can be tailored to the needs of underrepresented populations.
https://medulingo.com/
Landfill: Designing for Low-Carbon Pleasures
Kara Stone (Alberta University of the Arts)
Abstract: This paper will detail the creation of Landfill, a durational deck-building videogame hosted on Solar Server. It is a systems-focused game that aims to reconstruct the deck-builder type of game from common designs like combat to a theme of composting and renewing land. Unlike most deck-builders, the player begins with too many cards and composts them as they play to streamline a unique deck. Furthermore, the game aims to bring players to awareness of real-life weather effects by having in-game changing abilities based on their real-life local weather. We use the geolocation of the player to determine the weather in their area and change ability modifiers for the cards, as one of the goals of Solar Server is to not obfuscate the effects of the climate on our technology.
Though there is theming of land and climate in Landfill, the design takes from Ben Abraham that a truly eco-conscious game is “already aware of its carbon emissions, has already reduced its carbon footprint, has already decoupled itself from the resource extractive aspects of the games industry” (2022, pp. 82). The games’ environmental intervention lies in the modes it is created and shared, leaving a much smaller carbon footprint than most digital games.
Our approach to the game’s design aligns closely with Kate Soper’s concept of post-growth living, which argues that the transition away from carbon-intensive consumption does not have to be framed as sacrifice, but can open space for new forms of pleasure and creativity. Working within the constraints of solar power, limited storage, and small-scale computation allowed us to experiment with an “alternative hedonism.” The game moves towards the idea that low-carbon games can cultivate pleasure, creativity, and engagement without relying on didactic messaging, showing that sustainable practices and pleasurable play can coexist in environmental games.
Bio: Kara Stone is a game designer and scholar. Her work is about the environment, gender and sexuality, and wellbeing. It has been written about in The Atlantic, Vice, The Guardian, and more, and has been exhibited in game festivals and art exhibitions around the world. She is an Assistant Professor at Alberta University of the Arts.
The Weak Politics of Marcel Broodthaers: A Critique of Poetical Economy
Trevor Stark (University of Calgary)
Abstract: The Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers’ brief career as an artist began in 1964 with his abandonment of his prior identity as a poet and his public announcement that he was now an artist seeking to “sell something and succeed in life.” From that moment until his death in 1976, poetry and money were the oppositional forces that governed Broodthaers’ art: poetry, as the figure of an aesthetic form and form of life rendered obsolete by the progress of market society; and money as the abstract measure of value under capitalism and the quantitative substance determining one’s access to the necessities of life. Art, for Broodthaers, would be a funerary monument to poetry’s economically unviable death; and it would also, in the postwar market for neo-avant-garde art, stand as a limit example of the social pressure to remake every sector of life into a commodity for sale on the market. Broodthaers called this latter tendency “reification” and charted the way in which the formerly or at least formally separate sphere of culture was submitted to and optimized for the logic of commodification. Taking poetry and money as its twin topoi, this talk will investigate the artworks that Broodthaers produced on the legacy of nineteenth-century modernist poetry as a means to introduce his critique of reification.
Bio: Trevor Stark is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language After Mallamé (MIT Press/October Books, 2020) and has published essays in venues including October, Critical Inquiry and Art History. https://profiles.ucalgary.ca/trevor-stark
Finding Reciprocal/Collaborative/Converging/Overlapping Processes for Making
Jodie Stevens and Sarah van Sloten (Artists)
Abstract: As artists with disabilities we have come to recognize the benefits of having access to a dedicated peer to provide scaffolding and support as needed on large projects. We are currently piloting a working relationship between a primary artist, who is leading the direction of the project, and a supporting artist to facilitate the completion of a project. Together, we are exploring how to better support each other as artists, and in this process we are realizing the ways in which the greater community of artists, and artists with disabilities, could potentially benefit from this experimental methodology. The peer-relationship we share has allowed for more candid discussion around the subject of our lived experiences with disability.
Through our collaborative research on the subject of disability self-advocacy, we are bringing to light important questions related to supporting artists with disabilities, specifically. During this presentation we will summarize what we’ve learned thus far.
Bio: Jodie Stevens (she/they) is a re-emerging artist working in sculpture, installation, fibre, and video, they are a recent graduate of AUArts (2024), based in Mohkinstsis/Calgary on Treaty 7 Territory. Their interdisciplinary practice explores lived experiences as a queer, neurodivergent individual that is finding ways to shift narratives while navigating the balance of disability pride. Jodie is a member of the Contextural Fibre Collective and is participating in the Rozsa Foundations of Art Leadership 2025/2026.
Sarah van Sloten (she/her) is an artist living and working in Mohkinstis/Calgary Treaty 7 territory. She currently works as a learning strategist at AUArts and sits on the board of the Canadian Writing Centre's Association. Her interest in her professional practice as well as her personal work is in accessibility and inclusion within the disability community based particularly on her own lived experience. She graduated from AUArts in 2010 (BFA) and from the University of Windsor in the visual arts program in 2016 (MFA).
Academia Under the Influencer Creep: Scholarship and “Content”
Christine Tran (Alberta University of the Arts) with Nelanthi Hewa
Abstract: Why aren’t you, as an academic, posting more? This paper untangles the promise and perils of academic labour under the imagined eye of the creator economy. As vanguards of social media reach their cultural nadir (X/Twitter), and newer platforms continue to function as knowledge mobilizers of public scholarship (TikTok; Substack, etc), it has become urgent to interrogate the practices and institutional norms by which many scholars are deputized into performing as their research for the imagined audiences behind algorithms. As alt-right and privatized conservative institutions deputize the language of academia to convey their ideologies on personalized platforms--from Andrew Tate’s Hustler University Discord and the resources of PraguerU--the urgency for academics critique our own relationship to platforms in knowledge mobilization has only accelerated.
We consider academics-as-influencers and influencers who position themselves as pseudo academics. Through media case studies, we theorize upon the contemporary conditions of academic labour in the Global North through Sophie Bishop’s (2025) concept of influencer creep: “a process where strategies developed by influencers are being taken up and used in everyday life”. We take seriously the vocabularies provided by feminist media scholars from emerging “creator studies” to navigate the challenges of precarity raised by the platform institutions’ fickle relation to the university. By configuring how academics experience the creep of optimization and self-branding in their scholarship, we ask what happens when everything becomes “content,” and we consider what “content” as a heuristic for online work expands and what it forecloses.
Bio: Christine H. Tran is an Assistant Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at AUArts. Their work examines the platformization of cultural production by taking seriously the entanglement of Internet cultures, influencer labour, and intersectional feminist gaming in the domestic context. Christine is a cofounder of the Content Creator Scholars Network: an international hub for researchers, practitioners, and policy stakeholders in social media entertainment.
https://thechristinet.wordpress.com/
Today (Performance)
Anna Ugolkova (Artist)
In my performance, I continue my long-standing exploration of the material life of objects and their intimate relationship with the human body. I am currently experimenting with a Playtronica device, which I connect to my sculptures and a human body. This performance is a way to activate the work, to bring the body back into conversation with the objects that mirror it. I plan to create a performance in which I move with, around, or through the sculptural forms. By moving with and around the sculptural objects, I will explore how the body navigates, resists, or merges with them.
My practice is grounded in observing, transforming, and recontextualizing the things that surround us, those overlooked objects that accumulate in our living spaces and, over time, become extensions of our physical and emotional selves. I am interested in the subtle yet profound ways in which objects shape our movements, anchor our memories, influence our inner states, and reveal the fragility and ambiguity of the human experience.
I am currently working to create a dynamic installation and a performance that responds to the space, weaving together sculpture, movement, sound, and an evolving series of experiments with found and fabricated materials. My approach begins with an attention to materiality. I work slowly and intuitively, starting with the textures and histories contained within the objects I encounter. Found objects as fragments of everyday life become starting points for transformation. Textiles, discarded household elements, paper, wire, and small plastic or metal pieces serve as anchors for new sculptural forms. The performance will capture a dynamic, evolving dialogue between the body, the object, and space.
Bio: Anna Ugolkova graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the fi eld of visual art in 2019, presenting a mixed media installation Island. Anna’s research interests include poetry and memory in art, object-oriented ontology studies in visual art and performance, performative objects, installation studies and trauma in art. Anna’s installations consist of a variety of elements: from paintings, sculptures - found and reworked by her or created from scratch - to photographs and video art.
She participated in a solo exhibition in Canada in the Ministry of Casual Living gallery, Victoria and group exhibitions in Deer Lake Gallery, Burnaby and AUArts Residency Exhibition, Calgary.
https://annaugolkova.com/
https://www.instagram.com/anna___ugolkova/
Quilt-Top Roleplay: Creating the Fabric of Community
Jenna Van Buekenhout (Artist)
Abstract: Quilt-Top Roleplay Game (QTRPG) is a social practice textile project that combines quiltmaking with the social production of new communities in tabletop roleplaying groups. The game is currently a blanket of 2-inch squares designed to be a game board that requires players to engage their entire bodies to move game pieces around on. By creating a more physically engaging experience, the QTRPG anchors players in the activity of gameplay. Rather than escaping into imagination, the game asks players to be conscious of their physical interactions. Playing on a textile that could be easily soiled or torn encourages players to be more thoughtful and deliberate, to practice interactions that require care.
Combining a handmade domestic object with games of collaborative storytelling reflects the creation of shared worldviews through everyday social and embodied processes. Individuals participating in shared activities come to shape each other, creating community in the process. What we spend time and effort on matters, and QTRPG facilitates social connection that is aware of the value of the effort it takes to engage.
Bio: Jenna Van Buekenhout is a neurodiverse queer transdisciplinary artist who uses ecological metaphors to examine discrepancies between lived experience, mental constructions, and socially accepted beliefs about reality. Just as repeated firing of a neural pathway causes it to take an increasingly set path, cultural attitudes become set unless alternatives are sought. Examining points of friction between widely accepted attitudes and lived experience creates possibilities for pathways towards a better future. Van Buekenhout holds a BFA from AUArts, and an MFA from Maine College of Art & Design.
Confluence: Mapping myself to the rivers
Geraldine Ysselstein (Artist)
Abstract: Confluence: Mapping myself to the rivers is an arts-based inquiry that mobilizes autoethnography through the medium of tapestry weaving. While autoethnography is a qualitative research method most often used for writing, Geraldine Ysselstein uses her needle and yarn to examine her personal relationship with rivers as a lens for understanding the broader communal impacts of colonization. Drawing on the concept of “confluence”—both as the meeting of waterways and as the coming together of ideas, identities, and experiences—the work positions weaving itself as a material and metaphorical practice of convergence.
Standing at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers in Moh’kinstsis (Calgary), Geraldine explores the intersections of her identities as a woman, mother, settler, artist, and activist in relation to the land and water where she resides. She reflects on her origins near the IJssel River in the Netherlands, connecting ancestral and internal geographies with the rivers of her present environment. Through this layered mapping, the work engages critical questions of place, memory, belonging, and responsibility within a colonized landscape.
Through the act of tapestry weaving, Geraldine brings together arts-based research and lived experiences, generating knowledge about the complexity of colonization through an embodied, material process. The wool she uses - produced through agricultural practices tied to the dispossession of Indigenous lands – also gestures toward cycles of return, as it will eventually go back to the land and waters of where she lives in Treaty 7 territory. Ultimately, the project asks what it means to live in confluence: to hold multiple truths, stories, and experiences - and to consider how these might coexist, intersect, flow, and be woven together – personally and collectively.
Bio: Geraldine Ysselstein (she/her) is a Netherlands-born artist, facilitator, researcher, and consultant based in Mohkinstsis (Calgary) in Treaty 7 territory. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in European Studies, with a focus on art, language, and culture; and has a background in arts management and adult education through professional, volunteer, and academic work. A self-taught weaver since 2023, Geraldine’s current practice explores themes of confluence, identity, and place; drawing inspiration from the Bow and Elbow Rivers. Her work engages textile processes as a means of inquiry into the intersections of personal narrative, land, and water.