Lee Rodney
Graduate Program Coordinator
Miscellaneous engagements with public art: Barbara Hepworth, De Young Museum (2006)
Lee Rodney is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture in the School of Visual Arts. She teaches in contemporary art theory and visual culture. Dr. Rodney holds a PhD in Historical and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. She has published articles on the changing cultural perceptions of time and identity in media culture, and has written on contemporary art, cultural theory and visual culture in several publications including Parallax, Canadian Art, Parachute, VISIO: The International Review of Visual Semiotics and the Journal of Visual Culture.
In 2008 she was a Fulbright Visiting Research Fellow at Arizona State University (2008), where she began research on the fragmented cultural geography of border regions in North America that have resulted from the contradictory pressures of trade, migration and security. This year she launched the Border Bookmobile Project as platform to explore border issues in a local context
.
.
Jennifer Willet
2009 Graduate Seminar Leader
InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies - Performance and installation at the Art Gallery of Alberta (2008)
Jennifer Willet is an internationally successful artist in the emerging field of BioArt. She teaches printmaking and reproductive media in the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally including: Ars Electronica, Austria (2008), EnterMultimediale festival, Prague (2007), FOFA Gallery, Montreal (2007), ISEA San Jose, USA (2006), Biennial Electronic Arts Perth Perth, Australia (2004), The European Media Arts Festival Osnabrück , Germany (2003), amongst others.
.
.
Bill Law
2008 Graduate Seminar Leader
Bill Law received his BFA from the Atlanta School of Art in 1968 and his MFA in 1970 from Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Bill is keenly interested in a variety of new practices and has recently been investigating such elusive media as light, sound and [inter]activity. Previous work has consisted of constructed sculptural objects and large drawings of small (imagined) spatial interactions. He believes that art is an outrageous adventure, a way of making and being. Bill has been a major contributor to the School’s development over the last thirty years and he continues to reflect on and engage in innovative pedagogical practice that is responsive to the vagaries of the contemporary art world.
.
.
Brenda Francis Pelkey
Director, School of Visual Arts
Brenda Francis Pelkey was born in Kingston, Ontario. She moved to Saskatchewan in 1980, and became involved with the art community through venues such as Blackflash magazine and the Photographers Gallery. In 1994, she completed her MFA at the University of Saskatchewan where she worked as an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History until 2003. Brenda Francis Pelkey is now with the University of Windsor and is the Director of the School of the Visual Arts. Francis Pelkey has exhibited throughout Canada as well as Scotland, France, Germany, Checzkoslovakia, Finland and England. Her works appear in numerous collections such as the MacKenzie Art Gallery, the Mendel Art Gallery, the Art Bank, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Dunlop Art Gallery, Confederation Centre for the Arts, and The National Gallery of Canada. Since completing The great effect of the imagination on the world in 1989 she has had a number of solo exhibitions: Dreams of life and Death (1994), Momento Mori (1996), Oblivion (1999) , As if there were grace (2000), Haunts (2001), Hierophony (2003) Spaces of Transformation (2004) and most recently Threshold (2005).
.
.
Susan Gold / Smith
Susan Gold / Smith is a practicing artist, currently working in painting and mixed media installation. Her Trophy Room project recently completed a tour of public galleries in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta. Her exhibit, Looking at Nature Looking Back, was installed in The Natural History Museum in London, England in 2000. Both solo exhbitions received Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council support. Prof Gold / Smith experiments with alternative art economies and practices. She has organized the Nobel Peace Project working with correspondence art practices and she is cofounder of Windsor Artists for Social Justice. Professor Gold / Smith has served on the University Senate, on Faculty Association Executive Council. In the 1980s she was the Director of the School of Visual Arts and was recently the Coordinator of the School of Visual Arts MFA Programme.
Susan Gold / Smith is dedicated to artist run culture in Canada, currently serving on the Board of CARFAC Ontario. Her dedication to social justice is evident in several aspects of her professional activity. She is an extraordinary professor who helps and supports students in and out of the classroom.
.
.
Cyndra MacDowall
Cyndra MacDowall is an artist photographer who has shown across Canada, the US and the UK in artist centres and public galleries. Her work is in important public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada — Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs & International Trade, the University of Toronto Fraser Rare Book Collection, the Toronto Photographers Workshop Contemporary Canadian Photographs Collection, the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Community Archives Collection, and the Art Gallery of Windsor. Her photographs are published in: Blackflash; Faking Death: Canadian Art and the Canadian Imagination; Site Specific: Lesbians & Representation; Photo Communiqué; Bed of Roses; The Body Politic; Xtra!; Fuse magazine; Parallelogramme; Mix magazine; Rites magazine; Noir D’Encre; Parachute; C magazine; Now; Vanguard; The Mirror; Hour; and many others.
She has a number of projects currently in production and was recently awarded an Ontario Arts Council Senior Visual Artists Grant to continue work on her camouflage project. This work concentrates on how camouflage patterns function to disrupt our perceptions of the visible and invisible as how these patterns can relate to issues of difference, community, and identity.
She completed her MFA in Photography at Concordia University, Montreal, in 1995 and her BAE (Bachelor of Art Education) at Queens in 1977.
.
Rod Strickland
Rod Strickland has exhibited sculptural installation and digital imagery throughout North America. Research themes address; nature, industrial development, urban sprawl, community, environment, interdisciplinary creative practice, public creativity, and complex technologies. These themes are explored through various collaborative art, curatorial and community based projects. Most recently, the Green Corridor an interdisciplinary community based project involving over two hundred participants. This art, science, educational, environmental project re images the busiest international border crossing between Canada and the United States. Curatorial projects include, “Stolen Moments, Borrowed Time”, members of the industrial workforce were brought together for an exhibition of creative works completed “on the job” with materials acquired from their employers. This project showcased the subversive creative activities that help laborers get through the monotony of production line employment.
.
Sigi Torinus
Sigi Torinus is an artist creating hybrid, new media works with an emphasis on performance and site-specific installation. Her research explores perceptions of space, time and materiality as they meet or collide in the virtuality of digital space or physicality of a geographic location. She holds an MFA from the Braunschweig Art Institute, Germany, and San Francisco State University in California. Her works have been exhibited in the US, the Caribbean, Europe, Australia and Canada.
