Notice Board

Art NOW featuring Jessica Jacobson-Konefall
At the Heart of the Social
February 3 | Noon | University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome

Vulnerability, exposure to another’s power, is salient in the work of contemporary Canadian artists Mary Pratt and Joyce Wieland, in their depictions of gendered care work that reflect capture within via the generalized commodity form at the heart of our social relations.[i] To move without this enclosure, I bring their works into confrontation with works by Scott Benesiinaabandan (Anishinaabe) and Brian Jungen (Dane-Zaa), affording disagreement to emerge with the former’s interpretations of their own exposure to another’s power. Benesiinaabandan and Jungen re-present commodities in expansive Indigenous sovereignties. My historical materialist approach to these works contemplates what Stolo scholar Dylan Robinson calls “the separation of kinship at the heart of settler colonialism.”[ii]

Jessica Jacobson-Konefall is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies in the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lethbridge. She was previously Assistant Professor of Canadian Art and Theory at the School of Fine Art and Music, University of Guelph. Her research interests include Canadian and Indigenous art, Marxist feminism, Critical Theory, Indigenous and critical race theory, and poststructuralist theories. Her forthcoming book Terra Insum: On the Ground of Art, Knowledge, and Politics in the Settler Colony, is under review with Manchester University Press’s Rethinking Art’s Histories series.

[i] Karl Marx, Capital, edited by Friedrich Engels, Regnery Publishing, 1996.

[ii] Dylan Robinson, “Critical Conversations 2021: Dylan Robinson: The Museum’s Incarceration of Indigenous Life,” Critical Conversations, University of Saskatchewan, March 5, 2021.