Critical Landscape Studies Panel
June 3, 2010, FOFA Gallery, 10 a.m. – 12 p.m., Downtown Campus, EV Building
Over the last year, a group of four scholars and one artist have been meeting to discuss questions of landscape from interdisciplinary perspectives. Under a rubric of Critical Landscape Studies, we have been engaged in a dialogue concerning our work with landscape, and building on research and artistic practices linked to the exploration of place, site, memory, history, and literary and visual representation. While the concept of landscape draws its abiding significance from many disciplinary and institutional contexts—from the figurations of landscape picturing traditions, to landscape as a timely and strategic topic addressed to pressing social and political questions of environment and sustainability—we see the disparate character of these literatures and practices as usefully organized around three problems, or topics. The first pertains to environment, ecology, and site. The second concerns image, and implies the intensification of narrative, story and witness. And the third, archive, addresses the status, security, and preservation of memory as it pertains to specific landscapes. Traversing these topics—site, image, and archive—we will present four papers: Jill Didur (English, Concordia) will address the colonial landscape and the picturesque gaze in the context of Himalayan hill stations through the optic of Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain; drawing on some of Mark Dion’s sculptural work—in particular, his Library for the Birds of Massachusetts—Joanne Sloan (Art History, Concordia) will consider the relations between landscape and the archive of natural history; van Wyck (Communication Studies, Concordia) will address some conceptual and archival aspects of an urban landscape—The Lachine Canal—that is rendered toxic via industrial transformation; Anya Zilberstein (History, Concordia) will offer an alternative assessment of the interpretation of eighteenth century North American colonial landscape writing. Connecting the four papers will be a series of landscape video shorts by Rae Staseson (Communication Studies, Concordia). Shot in Saskatchewan these works trace themes of home, site/place and memory.
Above: A still image from Rae Staseson’s “When Owls Dream.” Image by Rae Staseson.
