art
Anna Atkins: Botanical Illustration and Photographic Innovation
This event is supported by TORCH as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones of the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Supported by TORCH through the Humanities Cultural Programme. Join us for an online in-conversation with Prof Geoffrey Batchen and Dr Lena Fritsch, discussing the work of pioneering British photographer and botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871). Her innovative use of new photographic technologies linked art and science, and exemplified the potential of photography in books. Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford and Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. This talk accompanies the 2020 Photo Oxford festival, Women and Photography: Ways of Seeing and Being Seen.
Biographies:
Geoffrey Batchen is professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001), Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (2016), and Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (2018).
Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Her monographs on photography include Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (English version with Thames & Hudson / Japanese version with Seigensha 2018), The Body as a Screen: Japanese Art Photography of the 1990s (Georg Olms 2011), and Yasumasa Morimuras Self-Portrait as Actress: Überlegungen zur Identität (VdM 2008).
Discovering the identity of plants in art
We are surrounded by artistic images of plants. These may be symbolic, decorative or functional. They tell us about the plants important in peoples' lives. Ashmolean After Hours: Carpe Diem!
Mount Vesuvius is thought to have begun erupting on 24 October AD 79. Almost two thousand years later, TORCH collaborated with the Ashmolean Museum for a special edition of After Hours to 'seize the day' and celebrate all things Pompeii and ancient Rome, with bite-sized talks from students and researchers, and activities for all to enjoy.
This event was part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.
Resurrected Mosaics
Working on new tessellating animated gif tiles led me to revisit my older tile experiments, and repurpose for website backgrounds. I originally made these animated mosaics in Macromedia Flash 8 for my section of the feature film The Prophet.
I tried recreating the mosaics in Moho, but quickly became frustrated. Moho’s masking is very unlike Flash’s; in fact Moho’s everything is very unlike Flash’s, and where Flash excels at this type of mechanical construction, Moho favors the organic. Rather than figuring it out anew, I fired up the ol’ 2007 PowerMac and dug into my old Flash files. I exported as Quicktime Video with an alpha channel and copied to my less-ancient 2014 Mac Pro. Moho couldn’t read the old Quicktime format, so I exported again as Apple ProRes 4444, dropped it into Moho Pro, fiddled about with sizing, and eventually exported this transparent gif that will permit cartesian tiling even though the underlying shapes are hexagonal.
In the process I discovered this cool website that will generate a “sprite sheet” from your uploaded gif. This would have been convenient back when I was designing morphing tile fabric patterns, but back in those days – the days Flash still worked – I had to do it manually.
Speaking of Flash, Adobe just announced it’s dead forever. Wouldn’t it be nice if they released Macromedia Flash (you know, the GOOD version from before they bought and ruined it) so others could develop it?
Storming Utopia
This event is an Oxford Public Engagement with Research and part of a Knowledge Exchange project. Organised by Professor Wes Williams (Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages) and Richard Scholar (Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages). Thomas More’s ground-breaking island fantasy, first published in 1516, asks us all what brave new world we are to wish for. What would a society better than ours look like? Who ought to be allowed in? And on what terms? These are More’s questions in Utopia, and they have never mattered more than today, as the UK prepares to pursue a political future outside the EU and walls go up in the US. It may seem timely to return to the traditional reading of More’s text as a blueprint for political change: Utopia tells, after all, how a peninsula cut itself off from the continent to make a better future as an island… Yet the name More created for his island – Utopia – means ‘no place’: the political message of More’s text is undermined by the surrounding irony that his brave new world is a Nowhere Island.
A group of East Oxford residents have come together to develop a creative contemporary response to More’s text and Shakespeare’s Tempest in the form of a new theatrical show, Storming Utopia, which they are performing at the Pegasus Theatre in Oxford and at the Fondazione Cini in Venice in 2017. This lunchtime discussion event builds on their perspectives and on the work of two Oxford researchers – Professor Richard Scholar and Professor Wes Williams – to explore what Utopia has meant since 1516, from Venice to Venezuela and beyond, and what it might mean here in Oxford in the age of Brexit. Participants will include: researchers working on the history of Utopian literature and thought from the Renaissance to the present day; writers, directors and facilitators working in the Oxford arts scene; members of the Storming Utopia project.
Speakers: James Attlee (author of Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey); Sara-Louise Cooper (Caribbean Studies, Oxford); Euton Daley MBE (long term artistic director of Pegasus Theatre, now freelance performance poet and arts consultant) ; Erin Maglaque (History, Oxford); Amantha Edmead (Performer), Richard Scholar (French and Comparative Literature, Oxford); Wes Williams (French Literature, Oxford).
People's Landscapes: Creative Landscapes
A roundtable discussion exploring the ways in which writers, artists and musicians have both responded to and created conceptions of 'place' throughout history. Thursday 16th May 2019. People's Landscapes: Beyond the Green and Pleasant Land is a lecture series convened by the University of Oxford's National Trust Partnership, which brings together experts and commentators from a range of institutions, professions and academic disciplines to explore people’s engagement with and impact upon land and landscape in the past, present and future.
The National Trust cares for 248,000 hectares of open space across England, Wales and Northern Ireland; landscapes which hold the voices and heritage of millions of people and track the dramatic social changes that occurred across our nations' past. In the year when Manchester remembers the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo massacre, the National Trust's 2019 People’s Landscapes programme is drawing out the stories of the places where people joined to challenge the social order and where they demonstrated the power of a group of people standing together in a shared place. Throughout this year the National Trust is asking people to look again, to see beyond the green and pleasant land, and to find the radical histories that lie, often hidden, beneath their feet.
At the second event in the series, Creative Landscapes, panellists explore the ways in which writers, artists and musicians have both responded to and created conceptions of 'place' throughout history, considering the role of taste, nostalgia and imaginary spaces in our understanding of landscape today.
Speakers:
Alice Purkiss, National Trust Partnership Lead, University of Oxford (Welcome)
Helen Antrobus, Contemporary Arts Programme Manager, National Trust (Introduction)
Grace Davies, National Public Programme Curator, National Trust (Chair)
Kate Stoddart, Independent Curator, Project Manager and Mentor
Dr Rosemary Shirley, Senior Lecturer Art Theory and Practice, Manchester Metropolitan University
Craig Oldham, Designer and Creative Consultant
Professor Fiona Stafford, Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford
For more information about the People’s Landscapes Lecture Series and the National Trust Partnership at the University of Oxford please visit: www.torch.ox.ac.uk/national-trust-partnership
Art and Emergency
Book at Lunchtime, Art and Emergency During states of emergency, normal rules and rights are suspended, and force can often prevail. In these precarious intervals, when the human potential for violence can be released and rehearsed, images may also emerge. Art and Emergency: Modernism in Twentieth-Century India asks: what happens to art during a state of emergency? Investigating the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and political history, Emilia Terracciano traces a genealogy of modernism in colonial and postcolonial India; she explores catastrophic turning points in the history of twentieth-century India, via the art works which emerged from them. Art and Emergency reveals how the suspended, diagonal, fugitive lines of Nasreen Mohamedi's abstract compositions echo Partition's traumatic legacy; how the theatrical choreographies of Sunil Janah's photographs document desperate famine; and how Gaganendranath Tagore's lithographs respond to the wake of massacre. Making an innovative, important intervention into current debates on visual culture in South Asia, this book also furthers our understanding of the history of modernism.
Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions
Mary Beard and Neil MacGregor in conversation
Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions
Book at Lunchtime held on 8th November 2017. Exploring Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, this major exhibition will be the first to look at the art of the five world religions as they spread across continents in the first millennium AD.
On display will be remarkable objects created when the iconography of each religion was still being developed. Art and imagery were central to the spread of these systems of belief, and the visual identity of each religion was formed by encounters and interactions between different faiths and other traditions.
Accompanying the exhibition will be the 'Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions' catalogue. Editor Georgi Parpulov and contributor Stefanie Lenk are joined by an expert panel to discuss the catalogue and the exhibition at Book at Lunchtime. They will be joined by:
Gervase Rosser (History, University of Oxford)
Kate Cooper (History, Royal Holloway, University of London)
This event will be chaired by Mallica Kumbera Landrus (Eastern Art, Ashmolean Museum)
That Other Place: Art and Alzheimer's
A short video about a recent exhibition of photography and film As the social, emotional and welfare costs of Alzheimer’s disease gain prominence, and with the number of sufferers predicted to reach one million by 2025, exploring the ways in which the disease affects the lives of the sufferers and those around them becomes an ever more important task. Responding to this the O3 Gallery in partnership with TORCH presented That Other Place, an exhibition exploring Alzheimer’s disease from the perspectives of sufferer and carer.
In this short video we explore why photography is a valuable tool for documenting the effects of Alzheimer's and the relationship between art and research. We are joined by Victoria McGuinness (Business Manager, TORCH), Helen Statham (Director, O3 Gallery) and Nicola Onions (Artist).