Project(ed) Canadian Identity, creative project by English and Creative Writing major, Tyler Fey

The option of completing a term project with either a standard analytical essay or a creative project is not something that is available to all students on campus, but professor Dan Keyes feels that offering these options allows students the flexibility to leverage their own particular skills and talents.

Dan Keyes teaches a range of courses in English and Cultural Studies that deal with media. This past term he taught a course on English-Canadian Screen Culture, and gave students the option of handing in a final research paper, or producing a creative piece for the final class project with an artist statement explaining how the creative work leveraged the critical material.

“Being in a faculty of creative and critical studies, it seems important to allow students to leverage both modalities to consider how they create knowledge.” says Keyes.

While the standard research essay is a valuable tool for communicating knowledge, a creative option allows students to see that there are other ways to build on prior-knowledge and skills to convey their message or ideas to a wider public who might not read a scholarly article in a scholarly journal.

One of the students in Keyes’ English class this year, Tyler Fey, an English and Creative Writing major, chose the option of producing a creative piece instead of a traditional essay.

“Many classes only offer students the standard essay for their term project, because Dr. Keyes was willing to offer a creative avenue of expression for our research papers, I jumped at the opportunity to produce something creatively.” says Tyler

Tyler’s creative project involved the creation of an unglazed rounded white vase split into two pieces and woven together with sweetgrass and sinew with the help of First Nations friends, who taught him how to work with this material and generously supported the project. Tyler worked with Shelley Isaac, Wendy Huggan (Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation), and Jean-Anne Copley (Cowichan Nation, Vice President of the Kelowna Friendship Society), who provided the vase with its own little medicine bundle as an exercise in cultural healing. Tyler is acutely aware of the politics of appropriation, but sees the necessity of working together to think through issues of decolonization in relation to contemporary and modern national forms.

close up of the maple leaf dream catcher in Tyler’s project

Perhaps the most striking part of the vase is the creation of a dream catcher inside the negative image of the iconic maple leaf, which like the vase itself hints at how Canadian identity is woven together using First Nations culture in a way that should acknowledge various forms of appropriation.

There is etched writing both inside and outside the vase. The outside text contains jingoistic nationalism Anglo white pride texts taken from mass media texts while the inside hidden part of the vase contains etched texts from mass media dealing with outstanding land claims, Canada’s recent 150 celebrations as exercises in national forgetting, residential schools, and murdered and missing aboriginal women.

Tyler writes “Even though the words on the inside are printed plainly, it becomes an effort to see, read, and understand them. In the same sense, I thought of the 2014 Jeff Barnby film Rhymes for Young Ghouls, as it deals directly with residential schools and living on reservations, but we learnt it was not broadly released into Canadian theatre despite its impactful and timely message.”

Tyler wants the vase to serve as a metaphor for how some screen texts that challenge decolonizing forms of cultural productions are hindered and hidden while other exalted white forms of popular entertainment like Labine’s Mountain Men (2016) available on Netflix offer examples of unfettered and exalted whiteness. The vase with its negative maple leaf image woven together with a dreamcatcher woven out of sinew serves as a metaphor for Canadian identity, the outside being what is projected to the world through dominant mass media and the inside being issues that are largely ignored by the media.

“Over the years, I have developed this assignment, I have seen students leverage this assignment to graduate and pursue careers in journalism, or documentary film making, “ notes Keyes, “I am astounded by the work and effort students apply to this assignment, which tends to attract a particular student keen to reveal their critical and creative vision.”

From left to right: Arden Boehm, Mat Glenn, Patricia Leinemann, Myron Campbell & Katherine Pickering

BFA students recognized for their academic and artistic achievements

More than 350 guests attended a gala reception this past weekend for the students graduating from the BFA program this year.

The exhibition, 20, includes a wide variety of work from the artists including sculpture, photography, drawing, painting, digital media and printmaking.

Each year, the top students in the graduating class are recognized for demonstrating outstanding academic and artistic achievement over their final years in the BFA program, with a number of donor funded and faculty and university awards.

“These students were recognized for the excellence of their work and creative output.“ says Marianne Legault, FCCS Associate Dean. “They can be proud of their achievement in the BFA and we wish them the very best in their next artistic endeavors. “

Awards were presented by professors Myron Campbell, Katherine Pickering and FCCS Dean, Bryce Traister to the following students from the 2018 graduating class:

Asper Graduating Prize: Sarah Ellis

DVC Purchase Awards: Kara Sikora, Sarah Kapp, Moozhan Ahmadzadegan

DVC Award for Artistic Excellence: Jill Janvier

FCCS Dean’s Award for Artistic Excellence: Arden Boehm

Creative Studies Service Awards: Jamie Roodzant, Meghan Beyers

Creative Studies Department Award: Mat Glenn

Norma and Jack Aitken Prize in Visual Arts: Patricia Leinemann

UBCO Okanagan Visual Arts Award: Jill Janvier

BMO First Art nominees: Mat Glenn, Arden Bohem, Patricia Leinemann

For the last number of years, works are chosen for an exhibition at the Vernon Public Art Gallery. This year, curator Lubos Cullen chose works from BFA students Mat Glenn, Kara, Arden, Sarah Kapp and Moozhan. The exhibition, Emergence, will be at the Vernon Public Art Gallery from May 24 to July 18.

Imagine a building designed to function like a flower! Imagine a classroom designed by nature and the determination of middle school students! Two documentaries; two inspiring stories.

What: Double Bill Film Screening
Who: Eco Art Incubator featuring Denise Kenney and Shimshon Obadia
When: Thursday, April 12 from 7pm to 9:30 pm
Where: The Innovation Centre, 460 Doyle Ave, Kelowna

As part of the 2018 Spring Festival, the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies and the Eco Art Incubator are pleased to present a double film screening by FCCS professor, Denise Kenney and BFA alumni, Shimshon Obadia.

Two community-based projects have come to fruition and corresponding documentaries telling their stories will be screened at the Innovation Centre on Thursday, April 12; Living Building- The Ethel Lane House and Daylighting the Classroom.

The Ethel Lane House is a documentary by Denise Kenney and UBCO undergraduate students in the Interdisciplinary Performance program. It follows the building of a remarkable 600 sq. foot home from the first stake in the garden to the last energy use test results a year after completion. The building is designed to function as cleanly and efficiently as a flower and is lovingly crafted for a family member with a developmental disability.

Daylighting the Classroom is a documentary produced by BFA alumni, Shimshon Obadia. The film follows Shimshon as he works alongside passionate environment students from École K.L.O. Middle School to restore their schoolyard’s natural environment after finding crushed turtle eggs in their long jump pits. This documentary watches a long ignored wetland see daylight through art and the discovery of the educational resource goldmine that is the natural world.

Daylighting the Classroom was just named “Official Selection” of the Creation International Film Festival and the 2018 Cinema WorldFest Awards!

“Our intention is to bring the communities together that were involved in both projects for the screenings and then to facilitate discussion regarding development practices and ecological issues in the Okanagan.” Says Denise Kenney. “We look forward to sharing these stories with the communities that created them!”

Tickets for this event are by donation, and will be available at the door.

Find out more about the FCCS Spring Festival.

The Faculty of Creative & Critical Studies is pleased to welcome Professor Alison Conway, who joined English (FCCS) and Gender and Women’s Studies (IKBSAS) this past January, after twenty-three years at The University of Western Ontario.

Professor Conway has been the recipient of a number of teaching awards throughout her career and is the author of two books, Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791 (2001) and The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750 (2010), and co-editor, with Mary Helen McMurran, of Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives (2016).

To find out about Professor Conway’s current research project, listen to the podcast recently produced as part of a new season of UBCO’s Library’s Frequencies series, “Faith and Relationships: Novel Reflections”. In this podcast, she explores how issues of interfaith marriage can be understood and contemporized through the 18th-century novel.

Alison Conway with colleague and running partner, Karis Shearer (left)

In addition to being a scholar and teacher, Alison is an active member of Kelowna’s running community and completed her first marathon this April, with a Boston-qualifying time. Academic and running lives are not as separate as they might seem. In her most recent contribution as a guest-writer to the blog, Fit is a Feminist Issue, Alison considers the relationship between reading and running, with reference to Haruki Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Alison Conway at the Toledo Marathon

“I came back to running at age 50 with all the enthusiasm that anyone setting out after years of double-shifting full-time work and childcare brings to her new hobby. Which is to say, a lot. Reading about running is almost as much fun as running itself, with hearing about other people’s running following close behind. Murakami’s prose reads like running shoes hitting the pavement, carefully measured in its pacing, but also graceful, poetic.”

Listen to Alison talk about running, reading, and kinship here:

Previous seasons of Frequencies explored the open access movement and the relationship between science and society. Check out previous podcasts now!