Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture

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Authentic Landscapes: lecture

If you’ve loved the way that Maria Whiteman’s photography traces the lines between art and science, take a look at this lecture this afternoon Monday at the Royal Alberta Museum:

Artist Jea­nine Break­er has been award­ed a se­ries of UK re­search grants from the Lev­er­hulme Trust, British Coun­cil, and Arts and Hu­man­i­ties Re­search Coun­cil, and is cur­rent­ly artist-in-res­i­dence at the British Ge­o­log­i­cal Sur­vey (BGS) fund­ed by a Lev­er­hulme Trust Re­search Fel­low­ship and the Na­tion­al En­vi­ron­ment Re­search Coun­cil….

…Break­er al­so cre­at­ed six short films to ac­com­pa­ny her large-scale art­works. One film us­es slow mo­tion of the footage from the field­work in Hol­land to re­veal the time­less el­e­gance of Earth Sci­ence field­work. The mys­te­ri­ous­ly dis­tort­ed sounds and shad­ows of the ge­ol­o­gist against the soil pro­file is a dis­til­la­tion of time and evo­lu­tion that speaks to the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of Earth at our hands. An­oth­er is a fast-paced film us­ing footage from a 3D CCTV ‘spin­ning cam­era’ low­ered down a 90-me­ter bore­hole dur­ing field­work on a pri­vate es­tate in the UK’s spec­tac­u­lar Peak Dis­trict. This last film hints at work to come us­ing a range of cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy gen­er­ous­ly made avail­able to her through her on-go­ing part­ner­ship with the BGS.

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UPDATE: This talk has been postponed to Monday the 19th—so if you thought you missed out, you’ve still got a chance to catch it

Evolution is a Four Letter Word

This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term from April to September. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.

On Saturday I found out that it’s possible to create a museum exhibition about natural selection without making direct mention of the word evolution more than twice.

 

Over the past couple of years, the media and visual culture have been telling stories of Darwin to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth. My requisite lawn-mowing podcast, CBC’s “Ideas”, has recently been presenting a multi-part series on the evolution pioneer. Two years ago, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) exhibition “Evolution Revolution,” was presented without the aid of the museum’s regular corporate sponsors and found their turn with the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition instead funded by the Humanist Association of Canada and the United Church of Canada.

 

Last Saturday I was catching up with a friend while on a visit to the AGA. She told me there was a show about natural selection at our Royal Alberta Museum. Who knew? After reading the paragraph about the show on their website, I knew something was amiss, and suddenly my previous ignorance of the exhibition’s existence began to make sense:

 

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