Sigi Torinus
Graduate Program Chair
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.
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Lee Rodney
Professor of Art History and Visual Culture
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.
Lee Rodney is on Sabbatical for the Fall 2011/Winter 2012 semesters.
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Jennifer Willet
Professor, Printmaking and Bioarts
InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies - Performance and installation at the Art Gallery of Alberta (2008)
Dr. Jennifer Willet is an internationally successful artist in the emerging field of bioart. She teaches Printmaking, Intermedia and Bioart in the School of Visual Arts. From 2000-2007 Willet and Shawn Bailey collaborated on an project called BIOTEKNICA. She taught in the Studio Arts Department at Concordia University from 2000-2007, and completed her PhD in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at the same institution. Her work has been exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally including: Arnolfini Museum, Bristol UK (2010), 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. In 2009 she opened a bioart research and teaching lab called INCUBATOR: Hybrid Laboratory at the Intersection of Art, Science, and Ecology at the UofW. In 2011 she hosted a residency at The Banff Centre called BIOARTCAMP where 20 artists, scientists, and students built a portable bioart laboratory in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.
http://www.jenniferwillet.com/
http://www.incubatorartlab.com/
http://bioartwindsor.blogspot.com/
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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).
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Susan Gold / Smith
Professor, Painting & Drawing
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.
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Cyndra MacDowall
Professor, Photography
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.
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Rod Strickland
Professor, Sculpture & Green Corridor
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.
Kim Nelson
Professor, Film
Kim Nelson is originally from Vancouver and a graduate of the film production program at UBC and holds a graduate degree in film with a specialization in screenwriting from York University. Nelson is a filmmaker with an interest in documentary and writing. Her feature length documentary films have screened at the Rhode Island International Film Festival (Berliner, 2010) and DocuFest Atlanta (Metazombie, 2011). She has also published work in the journal Public, with SoVA colleague Dr. Michael Darroch, and The Windsor Review.
Her current projects include a documentary about local feminist and activist tour-de-force Pat Noonan and a documentary project that will compare the colonial histories of Germany and Canada from the late 19th through the Second World War. She is working on these films with several colleagues at the university and a team of current and former students.
Karen Engle
Professor, Professor, Cultural History & Theory/Visual Culture
Research interests: The intersections of visual cultures, cultural history, and “theory” with American history and memory. Her first book, Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination (2009), traces historical echoes found in imagery that resonated during the initial aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. It explores how the work of mourning was conceptualized at the national level, and how certain images were deemed unfit for purposes of commemoration while others were held up as icons of American strength.
Current work:
• the photography, writing, and histories of Lee Miller - one of the first women accredited as a front line photojournalist during World War II
• the built environment of Windsor/Detroit and its affective histories with a particular focus on photography, anxiety, and the post-apocalyptic technological sublime
http://web.me.com/karenengle/Home_Unheimlich
Michael Darroch
Professor, Cultural History & Theory/Visual Culture
Michael Darroch received his PhD from McGill University’s Department of Art History & Communication Studies. He holds an MA in German Studies from Université de Montréal, and has also attended Universität Konstanz and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is Director of IN/TERMINUS: Centre for Art, Media and Urban Ecologies, a Co-Investigator for the Visible City Project + Archive (York), an External Research Associate of the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies (York), and a member of the Centre de recherche sur l’intermédialité (UdeM).
Dr. Darroch’s research explores Canadian and German theories of media and materialities, with a focus on practices of media and art in a variety of urban contexts. He has published on the intersections of media, digital technologies, theatre and performance, language and voice, sound, and translation. He is co-editing the anthology Cartographies of Place, an interdisciplinary collection that situates different historical and methodological currents in urban media studies. His current SSHRC research explores the history of Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter’s Culture and Communications Seminar and Explorations journal at the University of Toronto in the 1950s. He has also translated a range of scholarly publications as well as theatrical and cinematic texts from German and French.
Ken Giles
Adjunct Associate Professor
Ken received his B.A.A in Photography from Ryerson University in 1990 and completed an MFA from the University of Michigan in 1992. In 1992/93 was artist-in-residence at the Staatliche Academie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1993 relocated to Canterbury, England and spent 10 years teaching at several UK Universities (University of Kent at Canterbury; University of Sunderland; Brunel University, London) and exhibiting his photographic work. Ken received his Doctorate in the History of Theory of 19th and 20thC Photography from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1997. Having numerous teaching and guest lecturing appointments in North America, Ken has recently taught at the University of Alberta, School of Art and Design and has just returned from a Banff Centre art residency in Alberta.
“Seeing art as a language my work is continually exploring how the photograph, as the in-media res (the middle) point of a narrative, can be seen as an isolated moment of a larger unfolding dialogue. This fascinating idea of visualizing a narrative in still photographs has been central in my artwork and writing. By reviving and utilizing old photographic processes such as pinhole, chrono-photography and slit photography, these processes offer-up imagery that speaks to the perceptual narrative phenomenon embedded in the still photograph. They also offer an aesthetic, which slows the viewer’s eye into seeing beneath the clichéd surface of “the photograph” as simple recorded moment in history. I create work to ask the viewer to enter into the dialogue of what the photograph records and how its own unique visual expression, its perceptual narrative, is a key fragment of larger unfolding story which reaches simultaneously outside and inside the framed content”.
