News, February 5, 2025

Lecture: Monday, February 10, 2025 at 4:00 pm
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (located on the lower-level), RM 1B20

Artist, writer and curator Julie Poitras Santos’s transdisciplinary work connects ecological thinking and earth science disciplines with immersive experience and community engagement. Her site-specific work includes video, installation, and public projects. The relationship between site, story, and mobility fuels a range of research and production, investigating the relationship between natural histories and individual story; walking as a form of listening to site; and material agency in an age of climate change.

Link to more information about Julie Poitras Santos

Lecture: Monday, February 17, 2025 at 4:00 pm
Visual Arts Complex Auditorium (located on the lower-level), RM 1B20

Jonathan VanDyke's work reflects on the unfolding of art objects in dynamic relationship to the passing of time. He seeks a reclamation of the sensorial realm, with an emphasis on modes of attention and embodiment. Manifested through installations, paintings, videos, sculpture, writings, collaborative projects, and live and durational works featuring performers from the queer community of which he is a part, VanDyke's work prioritizes slowness, pauses, subtexts, and doubt.

The artist's object-based work is often the result of "piecing": the base for his complex paintings, for example, are textiles that have been worn by friends and companions, then painted and stained through slow processes of accumulation, cut into shapes and patterns, and sewn together. The resulting double-sided works, which are often shown in sculptural and architectural installations, are conceived of as tools for long looking. His durational performances have stretched for as long as 48-hours, such as The Patient Eye, in which he asked The Columbus Museum to center itself around a collection of historic quilts, made primarily by anonymous women and most of which had never been on public view: he observed these works silently for 7 days, joined throughout by community members.

Link to the Spring 2025 Lecture Series

Lecture: The Buddha Image and Ecology in Modern Oblivion
Thursday, February 27, 2025 5pm to 6pm
Norlin Library, Center for British & Irish Studies (room M549)

The historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama (Shakyamuni) is arguably one of the most reproduced Buddha figures in the world. Our understanding of his representations, however— from the “aniconic” to “iconic”— remains intensely debatable. Is the Buddha image considered to be a portrait of the founder of this world religion? If not, how are we supposed to experience and to interpret his images? This talk examines the ontology of the Buddha image and ecology. Moreover, it takes a transhistorical and ecological approach to understanding his image: What is the power of the Buddha body? What relationships does it have to the environment? What can the Buddha body tell us about ecologies of belief and about gender? By looking at the corporeal genesis of Shakyamuni Buddha, this talk argues that the natural and ecological similes embedded in Buddha images shed light on the interrelationships between being and non-being and between dream and reality.

Born in the cosmopolitan village of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Boreth Ly is an associate professor of Southeast Asian art history and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She coedited with Nora A. Taylor, Modern and Contemporary Art of Southeast Asia (2012). In addition, she has written numerous articles and essays on the arts and films of Southeast Asia and its diaspora. Academically trained as an art historian, Ly employs multidisciplinary methods and theories in her writings and analysis, depending on the subject matter. Last, she authored, Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide (University of Hawai’i Press, 2022).