First IREWG resident scholar to lecture

Vera Frankel is one of Canada's leading interdisciplinary artists and the recipient of the most distinguished art prizes offered in that country. Her work, which has been presented throughout the world, uses many media, including video, prose, installations, photography, opera and the Internet, to challenge cultural assumptions about power and truth, dislocation and transformation.

Frankel has been selected as the first resident scholar sponsored by the Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender. In connection with her residency, she will present several free public lectures and seminars Monday through March 26, as well as studio and seminar visits.

In her art and writing, Frankel is known for her complexity, depth and playfulness. Recently she has examined the forces at work in the process of human migration-exile, displacement, alienation, bureaucratization of experience and the unlearning and learning of cultural memory.

She also speaks to the relationship between truth and fiction, an issue that she says helped inform her development during the years in which much intellectual discussion in Toronto was dominated by the presence of Northrup Fry and Marshall McLuhan.

A former professor of interdisciplinary studio art at Ontario's York University, she has since 1995 concentrated full time on her studio practice. She also has worked as an artist-in-residence at such venues as Vienna's Academy of Fine Art, the Leighton Artists' Colony at Banff, the Royal University of Stockholm and London's Slade School of Art.

Frankel's art has been discussed and critiqued in many publications of note including Art Monthly, Dialog, artscanada, Descant, Fuse, Vanguard and C-Magazine. It frequently has been anthologized, most recently in "By the Skin of Their Tongues" (YYZ Books, Toronto, 1997).

Her videotapes have been screened at international film festivals and in solo screenings on five continents. Frankel's projects also have included artwork produced for and available on the Internet and she recently wrote a folk opera that will appear in the second issue of the British arts journal, N Paradoxa.

Frankel will present three free, public lectures during her residency at UB. The schedule:

- March 22, 3:35-5 p.m., Screening Room, Room 112, Center for the Arts, North Campus, "Inside Exile: Old Assumptions, New Media and the Making of Meaning." A consideration of interdisciplinary art practice; a discussion of work that poses questions about abuse of power and its consequences.

- March 24, 2-5 p.m., 235 Center for the Arts, "Herman and Herbert: The Frye-McLuhan Forcefield." Personal memoir as intellectual history; a discussion of the Northrup Frye-Marshall McLuhan presence in Toronto during the artist's formative years.

- March 26, 2-5 p.m., 235 Center for the Arts, "Toward a Creole Consciousness: Revisiting Interdisciplinary. Is the Blurred Edge Always Benign?" An introduction to "The Institute or What We Do for Love," a web-video in process on the travails of a large cultural institution.