The Atkinson Faculty of Liberal & Professional Studies’ School of Arts & Letters will launch its new degree program, Culture & Expression, with a festive evening of information, complete with drinks and dancing, tonight at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel Ballroom. The feature presentation of the evening includes a talk by Ottawa artist Cindy Stelmackowich, titled “Envisioning the Body: Between Art and Science”. She will be joined by poet and Atkinson Professor Stephen Cain and other faculty members of the School of Arts & Letters.
The event is open to students and York faculty members who are interested in culture broadly defined and its rich and varied forms of human expression. This new culture studies degree program will offer its first courses in Spring 2006.
Right: Suspending the Laws of Medical Practice (detail), by Cindy Stelmackowich, 2002-2004
The Gladstone Hotel is located at 1214 Queen Street West. The reception begins at 7pm and goes until midnight.
The field of medical and scientific illustration points to the complex web of referentiality which exists between science, art and art history. In locating anatomical imagery in the slippages between disciplinary fields and their regulatory spaces of meaning, Stelmackowich’s conceptual art practice and theoretical engagement with medical imagery analyzes how the interior of the body has become a long discursive series of cultural documents – extraordinary images and privileged texts located at the edge of reason and at the limits of seeing.
Stelmackowich’s initial art training was in Saskatoon, where she received a BFA and a BA (Honours) in Art History. She received her MA from Carleton University in Ottawa, and is currently working on her PhD in art history & theory at Binghamton University, NY.
Left: Sliced, by Cindy Stelmackowich, 2002-2004