By Audrey Wang, AGGV Volunteer
Last Fall, scholars, theologists, art practitioners and followers of Buddhism gathered at the University of Victoria for a weekend of lectures and performances for In The Present Moment: Buddhism, Contemporary Art and Social Practice, A Research Convening. The opening Orion Keynote Lecture & Performance was Lecture on Nothing with acclaimed New York-based writer and art critic, Kay Larson.
The micro-exhibition, titled Art as Practice: Buddhism’s Relationship with Place combines historical Buddhist art from Asia with contemporary Buddhist-inspired art from Canada’s West Coast.
For the Closing Orion Keynote Conversation, we were given privy to an ongoing conversation between longtime friends – artist Suzanne Lacy and activist Jodie Evans. As they hashed out their differences in approach and opinion, lavished each other with praise and admiration, and critiqued their own areas of professional expertise, the engaged audience remained enthralled by two inspirational women, both practising Buddhists and both passionate about their work.
Derived from the Sanskrit, the key concept of dharma has different meanings in Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism.
This convening brings together professional artists, practising Buddhists, and scholars from a range of disciplines to better understand Buddhist influences in contemporary art in North America.
Dylan Thomas’s work has been deeply influenced by a lifelong passion for Northwest Coast art, as well as, Vajrayana Buddhist mandalas, Celtic knots, Islamic tessellations, and many other ancient geometric art traditions.
Horiuchi was a painter and collagist whose work has become an important hybrid of Western-style abstraction, Asian calligraphy, and eastern philosophies. His body of work has helped situate an alternative narrative to the development of modern art in the Pacific Northwest, one that fully considers Japanese and North American relations.
In the 1950s, Mark Tobey, a Seattle artist with strong ties to Victoria, championed the work of Japanese-American artists, including Paul Horiuchi, also represented in AGGV’s collection. He later influenced major artists such as Jackson Pollock. As such, he’s a link between Buddhism and 20th Century abstract art.
AGGV Curator Haema Sivanesan is a recent recipient of a Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation research grant in the amount of $150,000. She was also awarded a $50,000 curatorial research fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. What is Sivanesan working on and why? Hint: it’s infinitely vast with neither a beginning nor an end. Therefore, let’s start with the present moment…
