Lorna Brown, Reading, 1990/2015, photographs on mylar, surveyor's tripod, Plexiglas, print on dibond, speakers. Installation view, Audain Gallery, 2015. Photo: Blaine Campbell. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the artist, 2015.
Melissa Salrin on Lorna Brown's, Reading (1990/2015)
Head, Special Collections and Rare Books, SFU Library
Wednesday, March 7, 2018, 12:30pm
SFU Gallery, AQ 3004, Burnaby
Unpacking Art: Lunchtime Talks on Works in the SFU Art Collection is a speaker series that invites members of the SFU community to "unpack" the context and the questions raised by works of art in the collection.
In conversation with Lorna Brown's installation work Reading (1990/2015), Melissa Salrin will be addressing the public and private act of reading in relation to the glass-fronted reading room in Special Collections and Rare Books (SCRB). In Reading, a woman commuting on public transit is the subject of a man's gaze while intimately bound to the private space her book provides. Both 'readers' are considered alongside a camera disguised as a book (used by women in public in the early twentieth century), which allows its user to subvert the power dynamic of who’s looking at who. Salrin will be speaking on the processes of looking and reading in relation to the private and public spaces we may find ourselves in.
Melissa Salrin is Head, Special Collections and Rare Books at Bennett Library. She is also an adjunct lecturer for the iSchool at the University of Illinois. Salrin earned her M.A. in history and her M.L.I.S. with a focus in special collections from the University of Illinois. She is especially interested in outreach, community-based collections, and examining archives as a political space.
SFU alumna Lorna Brown is a Vancouver artist, curator and writer. Her work has critically addressed constructions of femininity and desire in image culture, the politics of literacy, institutional manipulations of language, and civic and cultural publicness. A significant advocate for artist-run and public culture, Brown was a founding member of the collective Association for Noncommercial Culture from 1986-1994, the director of Artspeak from 1999-2004, a founding member of Other Sights for Artists' Projects, and is currently Associate Director/Curator at UBC's Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.
This series encourages participation from audiences that are new to visual art and to the SFU Art Collection.
Unpacking Art is free and open to everyone. No advance preparation or registration is necessary. Bring your lunch.
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