The Graduate Union of the Students of Art (GUStA) at the University of Toronto is pleased to present the Ninth Annual Wollesen Memorial Graduate Symposium in cooperation with the Department of Art History.

In art history, notions of artistic creation, identity, and agency are often underpinned by an anthropocentric framework that hampers critical reflection on non-human actors in the making and circulation of images and artefacts. This symposium seeks to explore non-anthropocentric perspectives to artistic practice by confronting the ‘animal’, ‘inorganic’, or even ‘divine' limits of art-making, and examining the degree to which the works of art both past and present continue to be shaped by agencies and currents of power that resist or exceed human control.

Nonhuman Artists: Challenging Anthropocentrism in Art History will take place over Zoom on March 18 and 19, 2022. All are welcome.

For further details on the symposium and method of registration, please visit: https://gustasymposium.wordpress.com

Program (Eastern Standard Time)

Friday, March 18

10:30 – 11:00 — Land Acknowledgement and Introduction by Rupert Nuttle (PhD candidate, University of Toronto)

11:00 – 12:15 — Panel 1: Departing the Anthropos
Chair: Professor Jennifer Purtle (University of Toronto)

Erin E. Hein (PhD candidate, University of Delaware)
“Collaborating with Chance: Guercino’s Ink-Drip Drawings”

Sarah-Rose Hansen (MA student, Columbia University)
“Web of Fictions: Arachnid Authorship in Tomás Saraceno’s Aria at Palazzo Strozzi”

Katerina Bong (PhD student, University of Toronto)
“Fire’s duality in Sungnyemun gate in South Korea”

12:15 – 1:15 — Lunch Break

1:15 – 3:00 — Panel 2: Walk, Sink, Dig, Decay
Chair: Professor Mark Cheetham (University of Toronto)

Laurie White (PhD student, University of British Columbia)
“The Bookworm: Vermicular Historiography in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project”

Yorick Josua Berta (PhD student, University of Arts Linz)
“Fermenting the Anthropocene: Decaying Art of the 1960s”

Levi Sherman (PhD student, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“Ontography in the Great Outdoors: A New Materialist Reading of Hamish Fulton”

Hae Bin (Dorothy) Kim (MA student, Institute of Fine Arts)
“‘Sinking, Thinking, Feeling’: Infrastructural Topologies in Bruce Nauman’s Audio-Video Underground Chamber, 1972/74”

3:00 – 3:15 — Break

3:15 – 3:25 — Keynote Introduction by Wenyi Qian (PhD candidate, University of Toronto)

3:25 – 4:25 — Keynote Lecture by Professor Rebecca Zorach (Northwestern University)
“An Astonishing Visibility: The Invisible Hand and the Perfection of Police”

4:25 – 5:00 — Closing Remarks and Discussion

Saturday, March 19

10:30 – 10:45 — Introduction by Professor Carl Knappett (University of Toronto)

10:45 – 12:00 — Panel 3: New Materialist Landscapes
Chair: Professor Kajri Jain (University of Toronto)

Estefania Sanchez (MA student, University of California, Riverside)
“Agency in Mexico’s Arte Popular: The Relationship between Amate, the Hñähñu, and the Rest of the World”

Colton Klein (MA student, Columbia University)
“‘Rust-Flavored Air’: Materiality and Ecocriticism in Charles Burchfield’s Hillside Homes”

Alexandra Schoolman (PhD Student, Temple University)
“Rhizomatic Alliances: Interspecies Collaboration in the Decolonial Work of Ala Plástica and Eduardo Molinari”

12:00 – 1:00 — Lunch Break

1:00 – 2:15 — Panel 4: Animals
Chair: Rupert Nuttle (PhD candidate, University of Toronto)

Megan B. Ratliff (PhD student, Virginia Commonwealth University)
“Gelatinized Mammalian Bodies Enduring in the History of Photography”

Dorota Łagodzka (Postdoctoral fellow, University of Warsaw)
“Animal Readymades as Works of Art”

Concepción Cortés Zulueta (Postdoctoral fellow, Universidad de Málaga)
“Bird Art: The Coalescence of Avian and Human Gazes around and within Bowerbirds and their Bowers”

2:15 – 3:30 — Panel 5: Multispecies Bodies

Raechel Root (PhD student, University of Oregon)
“Picturing Animal Urbanisms”

Margaryta Golovchenko (PhD student, University of Oregon)
“Wild Land, Wild Bodies: Violence in Berlinde De Bruyckere’s In Flanders Fields (2000) and Cripplewood (2012-13)”

Joseph Sussi (PhD candidate, University of Oregon)
“Milky Landscapes: Karin Bolender and Aliass’ R.A.W. Assmilk Soap and the Posthuman Consumption of Toxic Geographies”

3:30 – 3:45 — Break

3:45 – 4:15 — Concluding Remarks by Prof. Mikinaak Migwans (University of Toronto)