Canadian Multidisciplinary Artists Jennifer Willet & Shawn Bailey Team Up for York’s Artist Speakers Series
TORONTO, March 11, 2004 -- Canadian multidisciplinary artists Shawn Bailey and Jennifer Willet team up to headline the Artist Speakers Series in the Department of Visual Arts at York University on March 18.
This midday lecture series gives students and the wider community access to leading visual artists and their work through illustrated talks, providing both personal and "big picture" insight into the contemporary visual arts scene in Canada. The series is coordinated by Visual Arts professor Michel Daigneault.
Bailey works in digital print media, video and installation, exhibiting and lecturing internationally. His research explores notions of authority, control structures, media and international biotech and pharmaceutical policies. A graduate of the University of Calgary and York University, he currently teaches print media at Concordia University and is an artist-researcher with the Hexagram Institute for Research and Creation in Media Arts and Technologies in Montreal.
Willet is a practicing artist who has exhibited and presented her research across Canada and internationally. Her work explores notions of self and subjectivity in relation to biomedical, bioinformatics and digital technologies with an emphasis on social and political criticism. As a doctoral student in the interdisciplinary humanities program at Concordia University, where she also teaches studio art, she applies literary theory to representations of the body and the emerging field of the digital arts.
Together, Bailey and Willet are developing a five year multi-media project titled BIOTEKNICA. It is an evolving artistic research project and critical review focused on the future relationships between emerging biotechnologies and social development. BIOTEKNICA is strictly a dissemination vehicle for works of contemporary art based in reflexive criticism, parody and satire. Any resemblance to existing corporate or industrial institutions is unintentional. It has been presented throughout Canada, Spain, Germany and Scotland and will be presented in Australia, France, Montreal (Quebec) and London (Ontario) in 2004. See www.bioteknica.org
Bailey and Willet’s talk will take place Thurs. March 18 from 12:30 – 2:00 p.m. in Room 214, Joan & Martin Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts, York University, 4700 Keele St. The event includes a post-lecture reception where the public is invited to meet and chat with the artists in an informal atmosphere. Admission is free and everyone is welcome. Info: 416-736-5187 or visarts@yorku.ca.
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Media contact:
Mary-Lou Schagena
Communications, Faculty of Fine Arts
York University
416-736-2100, ext. 20421
