2023 MacKay Lecture Series: Our Aesthetic Possibilities (lecture 1) featuring Prof Natalie Loveless
Natalie Loveless is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory in the Department of Art & Design, and Associate Dean, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the University of Alberta (ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ /Amiskwacîwâskahikan, Treaty Six territory and Métis Region 4), where she also directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists), the author of How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Duke UP 2019), editor of Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation (University of Alberta Press 2019), co-editor of Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem (Intellect Press 2020), and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Performance Art. (www.loveless.ca)
Time
Location
Scotiabank Auditorium, Marion McCain Arts and Social Sciences Building, 6135 University Ave, Halifax
Cost
Free and open to the public
Additional Information
The three lectures in this year's MacKay Lecture Series will explore academic and artistic perspectives on what cultural production means in our current moment. Taken as an umbrella term, “art-making” refers to cultural production from across multiple fields of practice, from literature to performance art, from music to painting, from screenwriting to memoir and the essay form. As the conditions for making art are continually shifting under the weight of different pressures, be they local or global, today’s artists are also working under a changing mixture of technological, social, cultural, health, and economic conditions that are rapidly re-shaping the ways we make and consume art and culture. In these shifting conditions, space is needed to form and articulate our understandings of the politics and poetics of how cultural production comes to make meaning—how art makes incursions into the conditions of its own making. This lecture series means to explore cultural production in our current moment while allowing a forum for understanding the political and social implications of that production alongside an exploration the role of art in our ever-complicating lives.
The annual MacKay Lecture Series features up to four lectures given by internationally renowned speakers, addressing subjects related to the liberal and performing arts. Three of the lectures revolve around a common interdisciplinary theme chosen each year by the Faculty's Research Development Committee from a selection of faculty proposals. The fourth lecture is on a broadly based historical theme, in recognition of the generous donation funding the lecture series that was given by Gladys MacKay in appreciation of the education that her husband, the Reverend Malcolm Ross MacKay, received at Dalhousie as a B.A. student in History (1927).
Visit this page for more information about the MacKay Lecture Series
Contact
Erin Wunker, English department and Gender and Women’s Studies program
erinwunker@dal.ca
Bart Vautour, English department and Canadian Studies program
bart.vautour@dal.ca