MARIA WHITEMAN and IMRE SZEMAN

 

Maria Whiteman and Imre Szeman propose a project titled, Critical Peripateticism which is a practice that explores through text and photographs spaces that are not usually intended for walking but meant to be bypassed on the way to more lucrative appealing visual landscapes. By walking through structured spaces of contemporary urban derivatives such as freeways, business parks, commuter routes, strip malls, etc this collaborative group plans to create a photo-essay from walks along freeways through Banff, residential developments in Canmore and urban trails and industrial parks in Calgary. These photo-essays intend to explore the relationship between nature and industry in accordance to experiences of space.

Artists biographies:

Maria Whiteman (B.A., North Carolina, M.F.A., Penn State) is an artist, photographer and writer based in Hamilton, Ontario. She has taught Multimedia and Studio Art at McMaster University, and beginning Fall 2007 is teaching Cultural Studies at the university. She has exhibited recently at Transit Gallery (Hamilton), McMaster University Museum ofArt, Art Gallery of Hamilton, and Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum (Helsinki). In addition to writing several catalogue essays (on artistssuch as Robert Cadotte and Peter Kirkland), she has published in Resources for Feminist Research, contributed the entry on “Visual Culture” to the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2005) and is an associate editor of Politics and Culture.

Imre Szeman is the Senator William McMaster Chair of Globalization and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His research and writing focuses on the status of culture in the era of globalization, with a special focus on forms of visual culture. He is author of Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism and the Nation (2003), co-author of Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (2004), and co-editor of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2005), Between Empires: The Canadian Cultural Studies Reader (2007) and Global-Local Consumption (2007), among other works. He has written several essays on contemporary art and globalization.