Anxious Documents of Great Precision
Craig Campbell
October 14 - 28, 2022
Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
A Studio Intensive workshop exploring the shared taskscapes of ethnography, documentary photography and contemporary art.
This event is part of the Global Ambassador program at the University of Saskatchewan and it is co organized with Clinton Westman (Department Head, Archaeology and Anthropology) and jake moore (Director, University Art Galleries and Collections) with support from Jennifer Crane (Photography) and PAVED Arts.
Parallel Programming
Friday the 14th: 4:30pm, Keynote lecture by Craig Campbell; followed by reception
Sunday-Friday the 16th - 21st: Studio Ephemera: a flexible-schedule week of events!
Monday the 17th: 11:30 – 1:00 pm Paul Seesequasis, Reclaiming The Gaze: Reframing the archival photographic image ONLINE with projection setup in galleryPAUL SEESEQUASIS is a Willow Cree curator, writer, editor, and journalist residing in Saskatchewan. He is the author of the award-winning 'Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun' (Knopf) in 2019. His next book, 'Gaze,' (Knopf) will come out in 2023. He curated the first-ever exhibition of James Brady's photographs, 'Enclosing Some Snapshots' and has published extensively. He is the founder and curator of the online Indigenous Archival Photo Project.
Tuesday the 18th: 11:30 – 1:00 pm
jake moore, Proof and its Narrative Structure: The Anthropologist, the Artist, and the Icon
jake moore is an artist that works at the intersections of material, text, and vocality, a PhD candidate in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill and Assistant Professor/Director of University Art Galleries and Collection at the University of Saskatchewan. Her primary medium is space and its production towards a methodology of listening.
Wednesday the 19th: 1:30 – 2:30pm
Tour of Anna Plesset, Various Records, led by curator, Leah Taylor.
“Various Records, comprised of painting, video, drawing, and sculpture produced between 2013 and 2019, focuses on locations, objects, and disparate moments in time to examine the construction of history, knowledge, and memory. Central to this work is a 24-minute video, in which her grandfather, Lt. Col. Marvin R. Plesset, documented his experiences serving in World War II as a division psychiatrist. … Illustrating an active and continued effort to not just recreate a moment, Various Records instead highlights the myriad ways we connect with the past and present through images, objects, and places we encounter and considers how these experiences mediate our perception and understanding of history and memory.”https://artsandscience.usask.ca/galleries/exhibitions/2022/anna-plesset_various-records.php
Thursday the 20th: 11:30 – 1:00 pm
Jennifer Crane, Artist’s Talk
Jennifer Crane is an artist who joined the Department of Art and Art History in 2005. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Photography/Digital Imaging Area. Crane’s studio art practice explores the relationship between the body and the lens in both historical and contemporary photography using a combination of experimental, analogue and digital photographic processes. Through the creation of stereographic imagery, book works, video, and fictional photographic archives her work engages with themes of memory, place, narrative, documentary and archival practices. Her work has been exhibited widely both nationally, (including Gallery44, La Central Powerhouse, Dazibao, The University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Eastern Edge, The Floating Gallery, Mann Art Gallery, PAVEDArts, The Yukon Art Centre) and internationally (including Houston Centre of Photography, USA, Singapore International Photo Festival, Gallery Lichtblick, Germany, The National Society of Fine Arts, Lisbon, Portugal, MOMA,Tbilisi, Georgia, Gallery Zall, Wuhan, China, and Centro Colomba Americano in Medellin Colombia. She is represented by AP Gallery in Saskatoon and her work can be found in private and public collections including The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Crane has received funding from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
Friday the 21st: 11:30 – 1:00 pm
Max Posposil: The Voice of the Caribou
Saturday the 22nd: 12 - 5:00pm
Craig Campbell: Anxious Documents of Great Precision
Exhibition opens! Artist Talk will start at 1:00pm.
About
The central premise of the workshop is that photographs are anxious documents of great precision. The reference to documents, documentation, and documentary photography is at the heart of this project, which is inspired directly by the traditions of expanded documentary (cf. Aperture 214) that have sought to unravel documentary’s realist claims amidst a thriving world of intermedia images. Unravelling this mythology pulls into tension anxieties of truth in representation with the phenomenological experience of photographic precision, and the near alchemical roots of photographic practices. This assembled tension at the heart of photography is what makes it such a compelling techno-social practice to think with. This also helps to define documentary photography’s shared taskscapes.
By claiming and defining a taskscape, however ephemeral, I propose an analytic tool that helps us to appreciate shared ideas and operations, their points of intersection, convergence, and defining differences. Looking at the shared taskscape of photography exposes how the camera coordinates behavior, how the lens disrupts and animates the imaginary, how we labor in the frame of photography’s agency, and how the gallery becomes a space of encounter with the potential for remediation and reparative actions.
Participants and Exhibition Credit
About the Artist
Craig Campbell is the University of Saskatchewan’s Incoming Global Ambassador and visiting professor from the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches in anthropology and design. Dr. Campbell is one of the founders of the Ethnographic Terminalia curatorial project and has over a decade of experience as a curator, instructor, artist, writer, and researcher. His work focuses on principles of thinking through making within an ethical framework that foregrounds curiosity and reciprocity. Follow along with his practice on his website.
