SFU Graduate Studies

Barbara Lindenberg will be presenting her final MFA dance project for the School for the Contemporary Arts on August 18, 2011, 8 pm, at the WISE Hall in Vancouver. Admission is by donation.

A Thousand Mountains brings Barbara Lindenberg’s choreography to the charming dancefloor of Vancouver’s Wise Hall. From unsettlingly silent lip-synching to slow motion depictions of crowd surfing, each dance creates a world on its own and in relation to others. Best performed in informal environments, Barbara’s dances are short events of a depictive nature. These highly accessible works present a synthesis of simplicity, complexity, absurdity, and optimism.

Barbara Lindenberg is a choreographer/performer who creates contemporary dance for the stage as well as site-specific works. She had the pleasure of carrying forward research and creation as a guest with the Amsterdam Master of Choreography (AMCh) at the Amsterdamse Hoogeschool voor de Kunsten this past spring/summer.

She has worked with songwriters and composers including Jennifer Castle, Dave Chokroun, Eric Chenaux, John Sherlock, Dale Morningstar, Jason Benoit, Jonathan Adjemian, Taylor Rankin and Michael Overton. While she most often creates and performs her own choreography she has also performed dances by Marie France Forcier, Learie McNicolls, Megan English, Aimée Dawn Robinson, Hope Terry, Magali Charrier, Sara Porter, Denise Duric, Allen Kaeja and others.

Her dances have been presented by Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Just for Laughs Street Festival (Toronto), Fringe Shanghai, Series 808 Season Finale, AWOL Gallery’s wHole exhibition, Lab Cabaret, A Month of Sundays, Au Revoir Darling, and Up Darling. Barbara has also presented sets of dances independently at a variety of informal venues in Vancouver and Toronto.

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The Canadian Federation of University Women (CFUW/FCFDU) offers a number of scholarships to women in graduate studies.

Awards range in value from $2,000 to $11,000 and applicants must be women who are Canadian citizens. Different awards have different criteria, such as enrollment in a history program, enrollment in a PhD program, enrollment in a fine arts program or returning to academia after years away.

The application deadline for the 2012–2013 academic year is November 1, 2011.

• CFUW Fellowships and Awards Competition Guidelines and Instructions for 2012–2013 Academic Year
• CFUW Fellowship and Award Application Form for 2012–2013
• CFUW Fellowship and Award Filing Fee Payment Form 2011
• CFUW Reference Letter Form 2011

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Congratulations to Doug Blackley, one of this year’s recipients of a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship for his work in SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts (SCA).

This isn’t his first award by far: he’s received Leo and Sterling awards as well as nominations for Dora, AMPIA and the West Coast Music Awards for his musical compositions for film and the theatre. (The Leo was for the NFB documentary Tokyo Girls, in collaboration with SCA alumna Penelope Buitenhuis.)

Doug is focusing on music composition within the MFA program.  He writes:

After years of working with many different musical sounds, I think it is time to really spend time with notes, chords, melody, harmony, and musical form, all unadorned with timbral colours. As such, I am working with music for the piano.  I am primarily interested in a twentieth and 21st century harmonic palette.  I am interested in composition primarily, but an essential tool for composition remains a study of music theory.  I am paying attention right now to the writings of György Sándor Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, and Karel Janecek.

The MFA has many attractions that seductively beckon my attention. I’d like to spend some time paying attention to current state (and background) of the visual arts.  I’d like to paint some more; the “collaboration class” offered me the opportunity to create a painting with a classmate. I’d like to spend more time looking at Max/msp and other methods of new music/media production.  I’d like to find out what’s really going on today in photography. So many things, so little time.

• Doug Blackley’s website (includes some video demos of his work)
• IMDB: Doug Blackley’s credits
• LinkedIn: Doug Blackley
• School for the Contemporary Arts, SFU

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Congratulations to Casey Wei, one of this year’s recipients of a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship for her work in SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts.

Casey Wei is an interdisciplinary artist working through a multi-genre approach of video, text, collage, installation, and music to explore the methods in which identity unfolds as a process of consuming other identities. She often places herself in the work as a performer and/or through diaristic means, weaving together a multiplicity of truths to destabilize any univocal understanding (and therefore complacency) of the art object. She is currently working on her thesis project tentatively titled, Murky Colors, a feature length experimental video/film.

Recent exhibitions include The Dark Arts: SFU MFA Spring Review, and I Could Be Wrong at the Audain Gallery. Other recent works include a performance of a collaged-monologue at Emily Carr’s Student Symposium: Liminal Positions in 2011, and “White Light,” a short story published in inter/tidal.iv, a literary journal.

• Casey’s blog: Nothing Reasons
• Georgia Straight review of Casey’s band: “Kick Evrything refuses to mellow on Stay In/Slow Now“
• Georgia Straight review: “The weirdness is compelling on Kick Evrything’s This I Is Demented and Possibly Deceased“
• Myspace: Kick Evrything

Kick Evrything – “WANNA DO” from Kick Evrything on Vimeo

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Congratulations to Steven Hubert (with daughter above), one of this year’s recipients of a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship for his work in SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts.

Steven graduated from Emily Carr in 2007 and has exhibited at CSA Space, Or Gallery, Helen Pitt Gallery, Shudder Gallery, LES, Emergency Room Strathcona, Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax), Jeffrey Boone Gallery, Cafca, and the Ministry of Casual Living (Victoria). His work has also appeared in Pyramid Power and The Fillip Review. As an incoming student at SFU, he was the recipient of the C.D. Nelson Scholarship.

Bearing the imprint of previous study in English literature and history, his work in painting, sculpture, drawing, and video takes cues from the process of writing, in the sense that it develops like an obsessed-over sentence, full of negation and modified by clauses, and with a great deal of effort. It is logical, partly mystical, and perforated by alternating bouts of the simple and the complex. It is often absurdly expansionistic and lacking in apparent clarity due to its chronic and programmatic mistaking of one idea for another. There is also the notion between all the works of an apparently unified plot playing out as a tension between “out there” and “in here”—a psychic dimension which sets a limit on the question of form in painting and invites a consideration of subject matter as emergent from a series of inevitable complications arising from the theatrics of expression.

• Steven’s profile at the Contemporary Arts MFA blog
• Review of one of The So-Patternistic, one of Steven’s pieces
• The Dark Arts show, April 29, 2011, where the piece pictured above was premiered
• Youtube: Recording of Steven’s show at Ministry of Casual Living
• Youtube: Interview with Steven at Ministry of Casual Living

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Three songs from Moby’s latest album are available for free download from a Vimeo contest website. The contest is to create a video using one of those songs.

Ten finalists will be highlighted on the Vimeo website and the winning contest entry will be screened at the New Directors’ Showcase in Cannes.

Submission deadline is midnight EST, May 9, 2011. Good luck!

• Moby/Vimeo contest website

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The Association of Moving Image Archivists has announced two awards for graduate students.

1. 2011 Scholarship Program
   Four awards for students accepted into or enrolled in a full-time, graduate-level or other advanced program in film or television studies or production, library or information studies, archival administration, museum studies, or a related discipline.
   Value: $4000
   Downloadable application form | Application deadline: May 1, 2011
2. 2011 Kodak Fellowship in Film Preservation
   For students who are US citizens and who are accepted into or enrolled in a graduate-level or other advanced program in moving image studies or production, library or information studies, archival administration, museum studies, or a related discipline.
   Value: $4000, a conference, and an internship in Los Angeles
   Downloadable application form | Application Deadline: May 1, 2011

Specific eligibility requirements, selection criteria and applications are available on the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) website.

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