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Symposium
About Us
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2025 Symposium Archive
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Symposium
About Us
Archive
2025 Symposium Archive
Conversations with the Moon: How Anishinaabe Artist Caroline Monnet Challenges Settler Time with Film
Canvas 12/3/25 Canvas 12/3/25

Conversations with the Moon: How Anishinaabe Artist Caroline Monnet Challenges Settler Time with Film

Caroline Monnet’s IKWÉ embodies the reciprocities of care between Indigenous women’s bodies and the Earth’s land and waters, entrusting viewers to engage with intergenerational knowledges that endure beyond linear settler time.

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The Oppositional Gaze and the Undoing of Colonial Optics: Dayna Danger and Nona Faustine
Canvas 11/24/25 Canvas 11/24/25

The Oppositional Gaze and the Undoing of Colonial Optics: Dayna Danger and Nona Faustine

By weaponizing self-portraiture and opacity, Dayna Danger and Nona Faustine turn the camera back on colonial power, transforming the image into a site of refusal, resistance, and self-authorship.

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The Skin of the Orient: Representation of the “Oriental Woman” in Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Odalisque, Enslaved Woman, and Eunuch
Canvas 11/13/25 Canvas 11/13/25

The Skin of the Orient: Representation of the “Oriental Woman” in Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Odalisque, Enslaved Woman, and Eunuch

Transforming textiles into a second skin for the "Oriental" woman, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Odalisque, Enslaved Woman, and Eunuch epitomizes nineteenth-century French Orientalist ideologies, both exoticizing and eroticizing her.

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“Ephemeral” Art with Lasting Impact: Pat McGuire’s Untitled Drawing in Understanding “Canada” through Art
Canvas 11/2/25 Canvas 11/2/25

“Ephemeral” Art with Lasting Impact: Pat McGuire’s Untitled Drawing in Understanding “Canada” through Art

Transforming a mere scrap of hotel paper into a striking commentary, Pat McGuire's drawing boldly challenges perceptions of Indigenous identity and resilience in the colonial landscape of 1960s Canada.

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Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, and the Undefinable Self: The Use of the Viewer in Constructions of the Queer Self through Zen Worldviews
Canvas 10/6/25 Canvas 10/6/25

Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, and the Undefinable Self: The Use of the Viewer in Constructions of the Queer Self through Zen Worldviews

Reading the works of Agnes Martin and Robert Rauschenberg through the lens of queer identity, Zen Buddhist thinking and practice was tied to the visual language of queer artists during the mid-20th century in New York. 

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“The House with the Ocean View”: Isolation as a means of resistance in the work of Marina Abramović
Canvas 4/27/25 Canvas 4/27/25

“The House with the Ocean View”: Isolation as a means of resistance in the work of Marina Abramović

Isolation can be a powerful tool to establish profound relationships and to promote solidarity. In a postmodern, technology-obsessed world, it also becomes a way to challenge a superficially connected landscape.

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Timoh Garcia’s Reimagined Waste: “Art et Écologie” and the power of creative sustainability through street art
Canvas 4/26/25 Canvas 4/26/25

Timoh Garcia’s Reimagined Waste: “Art et Écologie” and the power of creative sustainability through street art

Montréal-based street artist Timoh Garcia transforms waste into a powerful ecological critique. Former L’Original intern Anne-Lise Mocanu gives us the scoop on how.

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Private Ritual to Public Spectacle: Contemporary Perspectives on the Rise of Coquettes, Cosmetics, and the Blurring of Gender and Class Identities in François Boucher’s Toilette Scenes
Canvas 3/24/25 Canvas 3/24/25

Private Ritual to Public Spectacle: Contemporary Perspectives on the Rise of Coquettes, Cosmetics, and the Blurring of Gender and Class Identities in François Boucher’s Toilette Scenes

François Boucher's toilette scenes explore the complex gender and class anxieties that connect the hyperfeminine aesthetics of the Rococo style and its modern counterpart, the coquette aesthetic. 

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Sensing the Past: Early Modern Apothecaries as Proto-Sensoria and their Influence on Contemporary Retail Environments
Canvas 3/19/25 Canvas 3/19/25

Sensing the Past: Early Modern Apothecaries as Proto-Sensoria and their Influence on Contemporary Retail Environments

In cultivating a multisensory environment of sounds, scents, and sights, the early modern apothecary functioned as a proto-sensorium not dissimilar to contemporary immersive retail spaces.

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Haunted Blueprints: Unveiling the overlook hotel’s role as the most dynamic character in “The Shining”
Canvas 1/18/25 Canvas 1/18/25

Haunted Blueprints: Unveiling the overlook hotel’s role as the most dynamic character in “The Shining”

In Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, The Overlook Hotel is more than an inanimate structure. Rather, it is a malevolent presence with a mind of its own, emerging as one of the film's most compelling characters. 

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Navigating Practicality and Aesthetics: Byzantine floor coverings challenging our estrangement from late antique material culture
Canvas 1/15/25 Canvas 1/15/25

Navigating Practicality and Aesthetics: Byzantine floor coverings challenging our estrangement from late antique material culture

Weaving together affective, visual, and social power, Byzantine Floor Coverings demonstrate a rich artistic tradition which underpins the craft of modern rug-making. 

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“Cybernetic Guerillas”: Engagement of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional with “Culture Jamming” 
Canvas 12/10/24 Canvas 12/10/24

“Cybernetic Guerillas”: Engagement of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional with “Culture Jamming” 

The EZLN’s struggle reveals how creative media are re-appropriated to denounce and disrupt the status quo, illustrating the possibilities for political mobilization in the new age of communication.

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Decay and Desire: Analyzing queer narratives in Alvin Baltrop’s “The Piers” (1975-86)
Canvas 12/3/24 Canvas 12/3/24

Decay and Desire: Analyzing queer narratives in Alvin Baltrop’s “The Piers” (1975-86)

Baltrop’s photographs capture and preserve the beauty and secrecy of queer experiences that took refuge within the decaying architectural milieu of Manhattan’s piers in the 1970s and 80s.

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Commodifying Fibre and Flesh: Guinea Cloth and the Dutch Slave Trade
Canvas 11/22/24 Canvas 11/22/24

Commodifying Fibre and Flesh: Guinea Cloth and the Dutch Slave Trade

Dutch artists contributed to the commodification of Black bodies in colonial Brazil by employing cotton as a visual signifier of enslaved status

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A Postmodern Defamiliarization from Time in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Theaters”
Canvas 11/18/24 Canvas 11/18/24

A Postmodern Defamiliarization from Time in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Theaters”

Sugimoto's photographs disrupt perceptions of linearity by conjuring nostalgia for a bygone era of American cinema.

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“Fath ‘Ali Shāh at the Hunt” and on the Ceiling: Visual reappropriations from Qajar Iran to modern India
Canvas 11/14/24 Canvas 11/14/24

“Fath ‘Ali Shāh at the Hunt” and on the Ceiling: Visual reappropriations from Qajar Iran to modern India

The painting affixed to the ceiling of India’s Rashtrapati Bhavan holds a complex history of hidden meanings and reappropriations over time.

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Fashioning Holland: The hidden language of clothing in seventeenth-century Dutch portraiture
Canvas 11/13/24 Canvas 11/13/24

Fashioning Holland: The hidden language of clothing in seventeenth-century Dutch portraiture

Dutch portrait artists in the seventeenth century carefully selected clothing as a statement of class and social attitudes to reflect the nation’s ideals.

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