Featuring Ray Ellenwood, co-author of
Automatiste Revolution, this discussion explores the resurgence of interest in the work of Jean-Paul Riopelle and the avant-garde Automatiste group. Other panelists are artist and writer Luis Jacob and professor Patricia Smart.
Presented with
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.
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Stephen Cain is the author of four poetry collections, including American Standard/Canada Dry, and is the co-author, with Tim Conley, of The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages. He teaches Canadian and avant-garde literature at York University.
Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at York University in Toronto, Ray Ellenwood is an award-winning translator and author of Egregore: A History of the Montréal Automatist Movement. In 1998, he organized a symposium, exhibition and concert at York University to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Le Refus global, and he continues to write and publish extensively about the Automatistes. A sumptuously illustrated book about Canada’s first avant-garde art movement, Ellenwood’s The Automatiste Revolution – co-authored by Roald Nasgaard – is an accompaniment of the first comprehensive exhibition in English Canada devoted to the Automatistes’ works.
Luis Jacob is an artist and writer living in Toronto and exhibiting internationally. Jacob's recent work has explored ideas of artistic precedence, ritualization, and vitalization. First exhibited at documenta12, Kassel, Germany, his video installation titled "A Dance for Those of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice..." referenced the work of Automatiste artist Françoise Sullivan. Recent exhibitions of Jacob's work include have been organized by Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy, and at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany. In 2010 he will present his work in the exhibition "Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance", at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York. Luis Jacob is represented by Birch Libralato, Toronto.
Patricia Smart is a Distinguished Research Professor of French at Carleton University, and the author of Les Femmes du Refus global (Boréal, 1998), a finalist for the 1998 Governor General's Award. Her feminist study of Quebec literature, Écrire dans la maison du Père (Éditions Québec Amérique), won the Governor General's Award for 1988 and her translation of it, Writing in the Father's House: the Emergence of the Feminine in the Quebec Literary Tradition (University of Toronto Press 1991) was awarded the Gabrielle Roy Prize. She is the author of a number of other books, and the editor and translator of The Diary of André Laurendeau (Lorimer, 1991), a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Translation. She was an editor of The Canadian Forum from 1989 to 1998, was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1991, and received the Order of Canada in 2004.
Joanne Tod is a celebrated visual artist of works that address social issues such as identity, power, racism and cultural imperialism. Her work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal.
