Fine Arts Professor featured in the journal Public: Art, Culture, Ideas
Maria Whiteman, assistant professor of Drawing and Intermedia, presents her photographic series Hiking the Suburbs. The current issue of Public explores the suburbs as dwelling in transition, as utopian vision, a way of life, a built form and as a significant economic and political dimension of the global phenomenon of urbanization.
Public: Art, Culture, Ideas is a Toronto-based journal on art and theory. Since 1988 it has provided an intellectual and creative forum that focuses on how theoretical and critical issues intersect with art and visual culture. In its current issue, editors Steven Logan, Janine Marchessault, and Michael Prokopow have assembled a variety of artists and writers to investigate the phenomenon of suburban neighborhoods. By suggesting transition as an appropriate trope for the critical examination of suburbs, past, present and future, this issue points to changing forms, locations, ideologies, and narratives.
Interspersed throughout the issue are Maria Whiteman's photographs of a lone figure hiking through the suburbs of Calgary. This series of twenty images documents a hiker's journey as he travels from McKenzie Towne in southeast Calgary to Eagle Heights in Canmore. Whiteman comments, "Hiking the suburbs constitutes a form of artistic and theoretical critique." However, far from repeating well-known pronouncements on mass-produced housing, urban alienation and class difference, Whiteman has a more phenomenological approach in mind, which addresses the very concept of urbanity in its conceptual, experiential, and visual aspects.
"This hike enacts three critical maneuvers. First, it attends to and reveals the antinomies in our understanding of the spaces we inhabit and those we don't, which disable our understanding of how we live in the present and how we might approach the future. Second, it draws the different spaces of contemporary Canadian life into relation with one another, navigating the borders between suburban, urban and 'natural' spaces in order to re-cast our sense of each of them, and to see them as interacting, intersecting and less delimited than we might imagine them to be. Third, it locates the function of vision, visuality and aesthetics in demarcating and positioning these spaces in our imagination."
Public is available at booksellers or online. Accompanying Suburbs is a complete 112-page full-colour catalogue for the 2009 exhibition The Leona Drive Project including artist statements and a visual archive of the projects that made up the event.
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