The Dr. John Archer Library & Archives is hosting a free public symposium on Wednesday March 6, 2024 from 1:00-4:30pm to help celebrate the donation of Pat and Rosemarie Keough's privately published tome, Antarctica. This in-person and live-streamed event will be held in the Regina/Wascana Rooms LY 107.32/107.33 (main floor of Archer Library). Registration is required for those wishing to attend remotely. Please click here to register and watch the symposium's live stream. Note that the symposium will be video recorded and archived online. Attendance at the symposium assumes implied consent to be recorded.
The symposium will include a presentation of the tome Antarctica (Nahanni Productions Inc., 2002) by photographers and tome publishers, Pat and Rosemarie Keough, streamed remotely from their home in Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. They will also share their experiences while visiting the continent numerous times over a two-year period in order to produce the stunning photographs which are found in their tome.
The symposium will also have presentations about the polar regions of Antarctica and the Arctic by University of Regina faculty members Lindsey French, Dr. Risa Horowitz, Dr. Samantha Lawler & Dr. Karla McManus.
For more information about the symposium, please contact Michael Shires at Michael.Shires@uregina.ca
The Keoughs have been exploring the world as professional photographers and book publishers for 39 years. International awards for their art include World's Best Photography Book, Nature Photographers of the Year, and Outstanding Bookarts Craftmanship. They are Medalists and Fellows of The Explorers Club, Medalists of Britain's Royal Geographical Society, and Fellows of Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Both are honored with Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medals. Articles about the Keoughs have been published by The Economist, Time, Forbes, and Smithsonian. Yale University maintains an extensive archive documenting their work in the bookarts, reaching back to a booklet Rosemarie made whilst in Kindergarten!
Discussion will include the Keough's Antarctica experiences over a span of 20 years, why they chose to travel there, changes observed over the years, what's happening currently in Antarctica, followed by a brief review of the tome.
Lindsey french (they/she) is an artist, educator and writer whose work engages in multi-sensory signaling within ecological and technological systems. They have shared their work nationally in museums, galleries, screenings, and diy art spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and the International Museum of Surgical Science (Chicago), Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York), the Miller Gallery for Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh), and Lease Agreement (Lubbock). Recent publications include chapters for Olfactory Art and The Political in an Age of Resistance (Routledge), Why Look at Plants (Brill), and poetry for the journal Forty-Five.
Lindsey earned a BA through an interdisciplinary course of study - Environment, Interaction, and Design - at Hampshire College, and an MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Newly based in the prairie landscape of Treaty 4 Territory in Regina, Saskatchewan, she teaches as an Assistant Professor in Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina.
Presentation Title: Embodied Learning and Climate in Artistic Research Practices
French will be speaking about embodied artistic research practices and how it relates to climate change.
Dr. Risa Horowitz has lived and worked in seven Canadian provinces as an artist, educator, writer, and gallery programmer. Her work, which includes photography, video, painting, drawing, performance, electronics, installation, and writing, has been exhibited across Canada and abroad. Horowitz has received numerous federal and provincial arts grants. Her works are in the public collections of Global Affairs Canada, the Canada Council Art Bank, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board.
In 2021, Horowitz was inducted as an Academician to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 2020 Horowitz represented Canadian women artists in A New Light, an exhibition at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC that included several paintings from her Trees of Canada series.
In her teaching Horowitz supports students in developing their critical and conceptual practices through lens-based, installation, performance-based, and expanded media.
Presentation Title: Hubris: Svalbard visit number four
Dr. Horowitz will discuss her Arctic photography and the experience of photographing in harsh environmental conditions.
Dr. Lawler is an Associate Professor of Astronomy at Campion College and the Department of Physics at the University of Regina. Her discoveries in the Kuiper Belt and predictions for satellite pollution have been featured by CBC, CNN, NPR, Scientific American, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Wired Magazine, and many other international news outlets. She lives on a farm outside Regina and deeply appreciates the huge prairie skies.
Presentation Title: Satellite megaconstellations changing the night skyworld - even over Antarctica
Antarctica is the site of astronomy research that cannot be conducted from other places on Earth. But future astronomy research worldwide will be more and more difficult due to the commercialization of Low Earth Orbit, currently being spearheaded by the Starlink megaconstellation of satellites. Starlink has launched almost 6,000 satellites in the last four years, and now owns and operates the majority of all satellites in orbit. Dozens of companies worldwide now have plans for a total of one million satellites. These satellites reflect sunlight long after sunset, and are visible as moving stars in the night sky, increasingly disrupting stargazing and astronomical research worldwide. They also produce dangerous atmospheric pollution on launch and re-entry, increase casualty risk on the ground from re-entries, and each launch puts us closer to the runaway collisional cascade known as the Kessler Syndrome. I'll discuss what you can do to fight for regulation and safe use of satellites in orbit.
Dr. Karla McManus is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Regina where she teaches courses on a variety of art historical topics and periods. Her research focuses on the rise of eco-photography and the history of the medium in Canada. Karla's current SSHRC-funded research grant explores how bird photography and its history in print has contributed to ecological knowledge and wildlife species conservation. Her ecocritical writing has been published in Les Cahiers de ARIP, the Journal of Canadian Art History, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, Captures, Figures, thèories et pratiques de l'imaginaire, as well as numerous edited collections and exhibition catalogues. Alongside co-investigators of the Prairie Art Network, Karla was awarded a SSHRC Connections Grant to host Art Under the Big Sky: Prairie Art Institute at the University of Regina in June 2023. For more see: karlamcmanus.com
Presentation Title: Bird Photographs from the Ends of the Earth
Dr. McManus will present her bird photography research.
