Canadian-Croatian visual artist Cindy Blažević is serving this winter as Osgoode Hall Law School’s inaugural Artist in Residence.
During her residency she is working with a group of Osgoode students to research and create a legal and historical narrative for photographs she has taken of the vacated interior spaces of Kingston Penitentiary.
Photographing the interior of Canada’s most famous prison, which closed its doors September 30, 2013 after 178 years, was “an opportunity to shine a light on the incredible erosion of civil liberties and the prison industrial complex gaining ground in the Canadian penal system,” said Blažević, who has exhibited and taught both in Canada and Europe.
She was awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council to cover the technical and logistical costs of the Osgoode project.
Under Osgoode’s Artist in Residence program, the law school will annually bring in an artist, from any artistic discipline, to work on projects focused on interpreting legal history, examining law’s realities today, and imagining law’s future, whether in Canada or elsewhere in the world.
Osgoode Dean Lorne Sossin recently announced that the Call for Applications for Osgoode’s 2014-15 Artist in Residence is now open, with an application deadline of Friday, Feb. 28. Details can be found on the Artist in Residence webpage.