How does culture and representation shape personal identity?

November 14, 2011

To complement the exhibition Barroco Nova: Neo-Baroque Moves in Contemporary Art, McIntosh Gallery has organized a speakers’ series. On Sunday November 20th at 2:00 P.M., at von Kuster Hall in the Music Building, Dr. Juan Luis Suárez of Western’s Department of Modern Languages and Literatures will discuss his landmark project The Hispanic Baroque: Complexity in the First Atlantic Culture. A multi-disciplinary, international research project initiated funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, it involves 35 international researchers from an array of disciplines—art, anthropology, architecture, computer science, geography, history, maths, music, literature, sociology—who are studying the origin, evolution and transmission of Baroque representation and behaviour in the Hispanic world.

Suárez will discuss the emergence of the Hispanic Baroque and its development with emphasis on cultural technologies, conflicting identities and representation. Following his presentation, McIntosh Gallery members are invited to a private reception at the Gallery, where they will have a unique opportunity to learn more about the Hispanic Baroque project and to visit the Barroco Nova installation at the gallery with Dr. Suárez.

The installation Foe, 2008, by Western grad Brendan Fernandes (MFA 2005) was widely praised when it recently showed in New York at the Guggenheim Museum. Now at McIntosh as part of Barroco Nova, Foe draws upon the artist’s complex personal identity for its subject matter. Born in Kenya of Indian heritage, Fernandes arrived in Canada in 1989. After completing his MFA at Western, during which he exhibited at McIntosh, he completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007). Fernandes’ artist talk, Neo-Speak, co-presented by McIntosh and the Department of Visual Arts, is on Thursday November 24, 8:00 P.M. at the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, room 100.

For more information, contact James Patten at jpatten2@uwo.ca

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