The Community-University Research Alliance (CURA) presents a free public lecture by visiting artist and artist-researcher Professor Craig Freeman on Wednesday, March 8th from 5:00 to 6:30 pm in room 1611 of Thompson Rivers University’s Old Main building. A wine and cheese reception will precede the talk.
“During the Artist Statement: Artistic Inquiry and the Role of the Artist in Academe Workshop at Thompson Rivers University in November, I presented my art project “Imaging Place” and spoke about this work in the context of artistic research and the artist statement,” said Freeman.
“While in Kamloops, I began work on an “Imaging British Columbia” addition to the “Imaging Place” project,” he explained.
“I traveled to the western outskirts of Kamloops along the Thompson River with fellow workshop participants Michael Jarrett, Danyel Ferrari, Georgia Kotretsos and Shawn Berney. We spent the day shooting the panoramic images and video necessary to add the location to the larger project.”
Freeman’s Wednesday talk will focus on “Imaging British Columbia: A proposal for Research, a Public Lecture, and Fieldwork Production,” an exciting new project he has proposed for the Mapping Quality of Life and Culture of Small Cities CURA.
Freeman uses digital technologies to produce place-based virtual reality and site-specific public art. Working with monumental, sequential, computer generated imagery and text, Freeman also constructs public roadside installations which can span miles of highway. In some projects, individual images have been as large as 400 square feet.
Using the strategies and forms of media culture in order to explore what happens when emerging technologies are used for artistic expression, Freeman has set out to invent new forms of visual art that address the transition from industrial culture to an information technological paradigm. Recognizing the need to integrate the work of a variety of experts, he has adopted strategies of project based interdisciplinary collaboration. The most recent work titled “Imaging Place” draws on the expertise of cultural theorists, architects, historians, scientist and community leaders.
“The goal of “Imaging Place” is to document sites of cultural significance that for political, social, economic, or environmental reasons are contested, undergoing substantial changes, or are at risk of destruction. This includes historic sites as well as sites of living culture that are being displaced by the collapse of industrial modernism and globalization. The project also seeks to expand the notion of documentary by exploring how place is internalized, mapping place as a state of mind. “Imaging Place” is designed to accommodate interdisciplinary collaboration conducted across institutions and over distances,” he said.
Freeman is currently an Associate Professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston. The focus of his academic activities throughout the last decade has been to integrate computer technology and theory of electronic culture into visual art curriculum and to explore interdisciplinary approaches to education and technology. He is active in the College Art Association and has served on the national board of directors of the Society for Photographic Education. His work has been exhibited internationally, his writing has been published in numerous journals and in 1992 he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
For more information, please contact Will Garrett-Petts at 250-828-5248
For more information please visit: http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/john_craig_freemanor http://institute.emerson.edu/vma/faculty/john_craig_freeman/
