Critical Conversations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29268
Critical Conversations is a nexus space between artists and those who reflect upon and present their work. Our critical writing initiative specifically engages Oregon’s arts writers and cultural producers around currents in society, our region, and the field of art. Commissioned writing comes from a range of perspectives and creative practices, and vary in form from speculative essays, art reviews, and interviews, to photo essays, annotated bibliographies, ekphrastic poems, and editioned multiples. All of this work can be found on the Oregon Visual Arts Ecology Project and some appear in print in our annual thematic publications.

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    Noon
    (2023) Center for Art Research, University of Oregon
    Noon may be the least romanticized phase of a day. Not a beginning or an end, but a quiet tipping point. The lighting does not swoon as dawn and dusk, the energy does not pulse. But one can move without the deep shadows of other times — a body alone without the complications of its drawn shell. This time for our world may be noon. Soft noon, lower case, not to slide into the hard High Noon of Western pastiche. We find ourselves just past history-making periods for racial justice, social networks, and women’s rights. After such upheaval, these spaces are changed but not by any means resolved. Restitution has hardly begun. Sickness lingers. Losses of ground around every corner. Wars draw on with faltering attention. There is a sense still of the day ahead, but not many markers for what it will bring. Aren’t we close enough to dusk for urgency? Our project, of commissioning and gathering art writing into bound books, holds evidence of this epoch. Writers are still hit by COVID, again and again. People are torn: their attentions, families, lives of joining adjunct work with writing work with editing work, curating. They are tired from pressing very hard through the past two years, with less time even in the face of days that are far more domestic. To return to the image of the body alone without shadow: at this noon, we are more able to see each other as we are. The writing of the hour has less arch, less bass, but more authenticity, be it a look back at an artist-run space of decades ago or a futuristic journey. These writers are working confidently, with their voices and their propositions clear.
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    Figuring
    (2021) Center for Art Research, University of Oregon
    By holding space for both indeterminacy and latent form, Figuring conjures histories and possible futures, lived experiences, and propositions for ways that ethereal matter might exist concretely or be allowed to endure as defined by its own logic.
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    Conditions
    (2022) Center for Art Research, University of Oregon
    Critical Conversations encourages exchange and inquiry. The partners above facilitate a year-round calendar of studio visits for Oregon artists by prominent visiting curators and arts writers who present public lectures and other forms of engagement in our community. Recognizing the nexus between artists and those who research, reflect upon, and present their work, Critical Conversations also sponsors a series of convenings that specifically engage Oregon’s curators and arts writers with currents in the field. The title and concept for CONDITIONS came into focus as the editorial team launched its first issue, FIGURING. Here, we shift from FIGURING’s multiple perspectives on the body and the psyche to examine the cultural and biological mysteries and actualities of life at this tenuous environmental and socio-political moment. As our need for breath and sustenance are foregrounded across an accounting of our shared lives, we hope that CONDITIONS offers a space to meditate on the ways in which works of art (including writing) support us in making meaning from our state of, and provisions for, being.