Natalie Loveless | University of Alberta (original) (raw)
Book Chapters by Natalie Loveless
Social Practice Art: Technologies for Change, 2022
With a focus on socially engaged art practices in the twenty-first century, this book explores ho... more With a focus on socially engaged art practices in the twenty-first century, this book explores how artists use their creative practices to raise consciousness, form communities, create change, and bring forth social impact through new technologies and digital practices.
Suzanne Lacy’s Foreword and section introduction authors Anne Balsamo, Harrell Fletcher, Natalie Loveless, Karen Moss, and Stephanie Rothenberg present twenty-five in-depth case studies by established and emerging contemporary artists including Kim Abeles, Christopher Blay, Joseph DeLappe, Mary Beth Heffernan, Chris Johnson, Rebekah Modrak, Praba Pilar, Tabita Rezaire, Sylvain Souklaye, and collaborators Victoria Vesna and Siddharth Ramakrishnan. Artists offer firsthand insight into how they activate methods used in socially engaged art projects from the twentieth century and incorporated new technologies to create twenty-first century, socially engaged, digital art practices. Works highlighted in this book span collaborative image-making, immersive experiences, telematic art, time machines, artificial intelligence, and physical computing. These reflective case studies reveal how the artists collaborate with participants and communities, and have found ways to expand, transform, reimagine, and create new platforms for meaningful exchange in both physical and virtual spaces.
An invaluable resource for students and scholars of art, technology, and new media, as well as artists interested in exploring these intersections.
Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity, 2019
This edited collection examines conflicting assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of materni... more This edited collection examines conflicting assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of maternity in artistic, cultural, and institutional contexts. Over the past two decades, the maternal body has gained currency in popular culture and the contemporary art world, with many books and exhibitions foregrounding artists’ experiences and art historical explorations of maternity that previously were marginalized or dismissed. In too many instances, however, the maternal potential of female bodies—whether realized or not—still causes them to be stigmatized, censored, or otherwise treated as inappropriate: cultural expectations of maternity create one set of prejudices against women whose bodies or experiences do align with those same expectations, and another set of prejudices against those whose do not. Support for mothers in the paid workforce remains woefully inadequate, yet in many cultural contexts, social norms continue to ask what is “wrong” with women who do not have children. In these essays and conversations, artists and writers discuss how maternal expectations shape both creative work and designed environments, and highlight alternative ways of existing in relation to those expectations.
A Companion to Feminist Art, 2019
This chapter discusses the work of contemporary US-born or -based artists that work with the mate... more This chapter discusses the work of contemporary US-born or -based artists that work with the maternal not as content but, more potently, as form, and situates these artists inter-generationally. It provides some of the different ways contemporary artists are working with the maternal. This small and localized selection helps the author to underscore the way that while the maternal functions as content, it also, through the mobilizing of maternal relation, affect, and labor, emerges as form. With their focus on activities such as insemination, birthing, nursing, and childcare, the artists suggest alternate ways of interrogating the daily practice of the maternal, working to undo, to rework, and to render uninhabitable the figure of the maternal as a phallogocentric identity tied to specifically coded affects, performances, and ideals. Adding to the political invitations proffered by the works, Herrera Silva offers us the maternal not as an endless font of plenitude but as a finite, responsive relation.
A Companion to Feminist Art, 2019
The term ‘feminist art’ is often misused when viewed as a codification within the discipline of A... more The term ‘feminist art’ is often misused when viewed as a codification within the discipline of Art History—a codification that includes restrictive definitions of geography, chronology, style, materials, influence, and other definitions inherent to Art Historical and museological classifications. Employing a different approach, A Companion to Feminist Art defines ‘art’ as a dynamic set of material and theoretical practices in the realm of culture, and ‘feminism’ as an equally dynamic set of activist and theoretical practices in the realm of politics. Feminist art, therefore, is not a simple classification of a type of art, but rather the space where feminist politics and the domain of art-making intersect. The Companion provides readers with an overview of the developments, concepts, trends, influences, and activities within the space of contemporary feminist art—in different locations, ways of making, and ways of thinking.
Newly-commissioned essays focus on the recent history of and current discussions within feminist art. Diverse in scope and style, these contributions range from essays on the questions and challenges of large sectors of artists, such as configurations of feminism and gender in post-Cold War Europe, to more focused conversations with women artists on Afropean decoloniality. Ranging from discussions of essentialism and feminist aesthetics to examinations of political activism and curatorial practice, the Companion informs and questions readers, introduces new concepts and fresh perspectives, and illustrates just how much more there is to discover within the realm of feminist art.
Catalogue Essays by Natalie Loveless
Lyndal Osborne: Mutation of the Commons, 2018
Catalogue essay for Lyndal Osborne: Mutation of the Commons at the Nickle Gallery, University of ... more Catalogue essay for Lyndal Osborne: Mutation of the Commons at the Nickle Gallery, University of Calgary, Fall 2018
Dialogues, Interviews, and Critical Conversations by Natalie Loveless
Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation, 2019
The following conversation between Natalie Loveless and Erin Manning 211 was held via email over... more The following conversation between Natalie Loveless and Erin Manning 211
was held via email over the course of three months in 2018. Together,
they discuss research-creation and the state of the contemporary
university.
Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation., 2019
Sarah E. Truman in Conversation with Natalie Loveless, Erin Manning, Natasha Myers, and Stephanie... more Sarah E. Truman in Conversation with Natalie Loveless, Erin Manning, Natasha Myers, and Stephanie Springgay in Loveless (ed) Knowings and Knots Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation.
A roundtable conversation, initiated by Sarah E. Truman, 221
activates a discussion on research-creation’s potential and limitations
as a research method/methodology, complicates cursory references to
it, and demonstrates the already robust and nuanced theorizations of
research-creation within Canada.
Books by Natalie Loveless
How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, 2019
In recent years, the rise of research-creation—a scholarly activity that considers art practices ... more In recent years, the rise of research-creation—a scholarly activity that considers art practices as research methods in their own right—has emerged from the organic convergences of the arts and interdisciplinary humanities, and it has been fostered by universities wishing to enhance their public profiles. In How to Make Art at the End of the World Natalie Loveless draws on diverse perspectives—from feminist science studies to psychoanalytic theory, as well as her own experience advising undergraduate and graduate students—to argue for research-creation as both a means to produce innovative scholarship and a way to transform pedagogy and research within the contemporary neoliberal university. Championing experimental, artistically driven methods of teaching, researching, and publication, research-creation works to render daily life in the academy more pedagogically, politically, and affectively sustainable, as well as more responsive to issues of social and ecological justice.
Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation, 2019
Knowings and Knots presents a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the methodology of resea... more Knowings and Knots presents a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the methodology of research-creation and asks how those who make knowledge think about and value it. Not just a method but a site of ongoing experimentation around what counts as knowledge, research-creation is a meeting place of academia, artistic creation, and the wider public. The contributors argue that academic institutions and funders must recognize research-creation as innovative knowledge-making that leaps over the traditional splitting of theory from practice while considering how gender/feminist studies, Indigenous practices, and new materialism might inform and develop the conversation. Through this book, readers can transform the way they experience both art and education.
Contributors: Carolina Cambre, Owen Chapman, Paul Couillard, T.L. Cowan, John Cussans, Randy Lee Cutler, Petra Hroch, Rachelle Viader Knowles, Natalie Loveless, Glen Lowry, Erin Manning, Sourayan Mookerjea, Natasha Myers, Simon Pope, Stephanie Springgay, Sarah E. Truman
How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, 2019
In recent years, the rise of research-creation—a scholarly activity that considers art practices ... more In recent years, the rise of research-creation—a scholarly activity that considers art practices as research methods in their own right—has emerged from the organic convergences of the arts and interdisciplinary humanities, and it has been fostered by universities wishing to enhance their public profiles. In How to Make Art at the End of the World Natalie Loveless draws on diverse perspectives—from feminist science studies to psychoanalytic theory, as well as her own experience advising undergraduate and graduate students—to argue for research-creation as both a means to produce innovative scholarship and a way to transform pedagogy and research within the contemporary neoliberal university. Championing experimental, artistically driven methods of teaching, researching, and publication, research-creation works to render daily life in the academy more pedagogically, politically, and affectively sustainable, as well as more responsive to issues of social and ecological justice.
Journal Articles by Natalie Loveless
The Maternal in Creative Work; Intergenerational Discussions on Motherhood and Art, 2019
This interview between Natalie Loveless and Mary Kelly revisits Kelly’s important historical work... more This interview between Natalie Loveless and Mary Kelly revisits Kelly’s important historical works, such as Post-Partum Document and The Nightcleaners, bringing attention to the foment out of which they were produced and linking this to the contemporary moment through some of Kelly’s most recent work as well as her influence on feminists of younger generations. This wide-ranging exchange makes a claim for the importance of feminist inheritance, feminist pedagogy and intergenerational feminist collaboration for the project of social and ecological justice today.
Feminist Formations, 2022
This essay takes the form of a dialogue between Natalie Loveless and Carrie Smith, both professor... more This essay takes the form of a dialogue between Natalie Loveless and Carrie Smith, both professors at a large western-Canadian research-intensive university undergoing restructuring prompted by budget cuts. Together they ask how feminist collaboration can work to resculpt academic political spaces. Though both agree that large-scale action is needed, they also argue for the value of insurgent, modest, local modes of
collaborative resistance that operate in the cracks of the neoliberal university.
Beginning from their experience navigating the dual threats of COVID-19 and radical budget cuts as professors in academic leadership positions, they make a claim for an anti-racist, feminist university that is responsive in its capacity to nurture generosity, care, and creativity. Together they invite readers to be attentive to the conditions necessary for any true critical collaboration to take place, listening for and attuning to what Sarah Sharma has called “brokenness” (2020)—those places where things are not working from the perspectives of patriarchal power and where those committed to feminist anti-racist/ableist/speciesist university spaces might want to linger.
Studies in the Maternal Special Issue on The Everyday Maternal Practice: Activist Structures in Creative Work, 2016
This special forum for Studies in the Maternal asks fourteen activist- mother-artists, or “mamac... more This special forum for Studies in the Maternal asks fourteen activist-
mother-artists, or “mamactivists”, to respond to the following questions:
(1) When and why did you start making activist/political work on the
maternal?
2) What reception/reaction did you receive for the work?
(3) What is the latest activist/political work you have made on the maternal?
(4) What shifts do you see from this first work to this last work? and
(5) Why is the maternal, in your opinion, important to activist, engaged,
political art today?
Responses highlight a range of geographic and cultural
perspectives, as well as artistic strategies. One commonality between them is that they take the maternal not as a biological facticity, but a rich feminist site of political intervention.
Canadian Theatre Review, 2021
Canadian Journal of Communication, 2012
in what follows I offer an anecdotal engagement with the Fine Arts PhD at a moment when it is jus... more in what follows I offer an anecdotal engagement with the Fine Arts PhD at a moment when it is just emerging in North America. I argue that doctoral activities that cross theory/practice lines, at their best, offer a unique opportunity to rethink what constitutes academic knowledge production and assessment by necessitating that these lines be made porous and responsive to each other. This reconfiguration, to the extent that it calls into question both the subject and object of knowledge, is one that benefits from the insights of feminism in its "new materialist" incarnation.
Social Practice Art: Technologies for Change, 2022
With a focus on socially engaged art practices in the twenty-first century, this book explores ho... more With a focus on socially engaged art practices in the twenty-first century, this book explores how artists use their creative practices to raise consciousness, form communities, create change, and bring forth social impact through new technologies and digital practices.
Suzanne Lacy’s Foreword and section introduction authors Anne Balsamo, Harrell Fletcher, Natalie Loveless, Karen Moss, and Stephanie Rothenberg present twenty-five in-depth case studies by established and emerging contemporary artists including Kim Abeles, Christopher Blay, Joseph DeLappe, Mary Beth Heffernan, Chris Johnson, Rebekah Modrak, Praba Pilar, Tabita Rezaire, Sylvain Souklaye, and collaborators Victoria Vesna and Siddharth Ramakrishnan. Artists offer firsthand insight into how they activate methods used in socially engaged art projects from the twentieth century and incorporated new technologies to create twenty-first century, socially engaged, digital art practices. Works highlighted in this book span collaborative image-making, immersive experiences, telematic art, time machines, artificial intelligence, and physical computing. These reflective case studies reveal how the artists collaborate with participants and communities, and have found ways to expand, transform, reimagine, and create new platforms for meaningful exchange in both physical and virtual spaces.
An invaluable resource for students and scholars of art, technology, and new media, as well as artists interested in exploring these intersections.
Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity, 2019
This edited collection examines conflicting assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of materni... more This edited collection examines conflicting assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of maternity in artistic, cultural, and institutional contexts. Over the past two decades, the maternal body has gained currency in popular culture and the contemporary art world, with many books and exhibitions foregrounding artists’ experiences and art historical explorations of maternity that previously were marginalized or dismissed. In too many instances, however, the maternal potential of female bodies—whether realized or not—still causes them to be stigmatized, censored, or otherwise treated as inappropriate: cultural expectations of maternity create one set of prejudices against women whose bodies or experiences do align with those same expectations, and another set of prejudices against those whose do not. Support for mothers in the paid workforce remains woefully inadequate, yet in many cultural contexts, social norms continue to ask what is “wrong” with women who do not have children. In these essays and conversations, artists and writers discuss how maternal expectations shape both creative work and designed environments, and highlight alternative ways of existing in relation to those expectations.
A Companion to Feminist Art, 2019
This chapter discusses the work of contemporary US-born or -based artists that work with the mate... more This chapter discusses the work of contemporary US-born or -based artists that work with the maternal not as content but, more potently, as form, and situates these artists inter-generationally. It provides some of the different ways contemporary artists are working with the maternal. This small and localized selection helps the author to underscore the way that while the maternal functions as content, it also, through the mobilizing of maternal relation, affect, and labor, emerges as form. With their focus on activities such as insemination, birthing, nursing, and childcare, the artists suggest alternate ways of interrogating the daily practice of the maternal, working to undo, to rework, and to render uninhabitable the figure of the maternal as a phallogocentric identity tied to specifically coded affects, performances, and ideals. Adding to the political invitations proffered by the works, Herrera Silva offers us the maternal not as an endless font of plenitude but as a finite, responsive relation.
A Companion to Feminist Art, 2019
The term ‘feminist art’ is often misused when viewed as a codification within the discipline of A... more The term ‘feminist art’ is often misused when viewed as a codification within the discipline of Art History—a codification that includes restrictive definitions of geography, chronology, style, materials, influence, and other definitions inherent to Art Historical and museological classifications. Employing a different approach, A Companion to Feminist Art defines ‘art’ as a dynamic set of material and theoretical practices in the realm of culture, and ‘feminism’ as an equally dynamic set of activist and theoretical practices in the realm of politics. Feminist art, therefore, is not a simple classification of a type of art, but rather the space where feminist politics and the domain of art-making intersect. The Companion provides readers with an overview of the developments, concepts, trends, influences, and activities within the space of contemporary feminist art—in different locations, ways of making, and ways of thinking.
Newly-commissioned essays focus on the recent history of and current discussions within feminist art. Diverse in scope and style, these contributions range from essays on the questions and challenges of large sectors of artists, such as configurations of feminism and gender in post-Cold War Europe, to more focused conversations with women artists on Afropean decoloniality. Ranging from discussions of essentialism and feminist aesthetics to examinations of political activism and curatorial practice, the Companion informs and questions readers, introduces new concepts and fresh perspectives, and illustrates just how much more there is to discover within the realm of feminist art.
Lyndal Osborne: Mutation of the Commons, 2018
Catalogue essay for Lyndal Osborne: Mutation of the Commons at the Nickle Gallery, University of ... more Catalogue essay for Lyndal Osborne: Mutation of the Commons at the Nickle Gallery, University of Calgary, Fall 2018
Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation, 2019
The following conversation between Natalie Loveless and Erin Manning 211 was held via email over... more The following conversation between Natalie Loveless and Erin Manning 211
was held via email over the course of three months in 2018. Together,
they discuss research-creation and the state of the contemporary
university.
Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation., 2019
Sarah E. Truman in Conversation with Natalie Loveless, Erin Manning, Natasha Myers, and Stephanie... more Sarah E. Truman in Conversation with Natalie Loveless, Erin Manning, Natasha Myers, and Stephanie Springgay in Loveless (ed) Knowings and Knots Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation.
A roundtable conversation, initiated by Sarah E. Truman, 221
activates a discussion on research-creation’s potential and limitations
as a research method/methodology, complicates cursory references to
it, and demonstrates the already robust and nuanced theorizations of
research-creation within Canada.
How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, 2019
In recent years, the rise of research-creation—a scholarly activity that considers art practices ... more In recent years, the rise of research-creation—a scholarly activity that considers art practices as research methods in their own right—has emerged from the organic convergences of the arts and interdisciplinary humanities, and it has been fostered by universities wishing to enhance their public profiles. In How to Make Art at the End of the World Natalie Loveless draws on diverse perspectives—from feminist science studies to psychoanalytic theory, as well as her own experience advising undergraduate and graduate students—to argue for research-creation as both a means to produce innovative scholarship and a way to transform pedagogy and research within the contemporary neoliberal university. Championing experimental, artistically driven methods of teaching, researching, and publication, research-creation works to render daily life in the academy more pedagogically, politically, and affectively sustainable, as well as more responsive to issues of social and ecological justice.
Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation, 2019
Knowings and Knots presents a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the methodology of resea... more Knowings and Knots presents a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the methodology of research-creation and asks how those who make knowledge think about and value it. Not just a method but a site of ongoing experimentation around what counts as knowledge, research-creation is a meeting place of academia, artistic creation, and the wider public. The contributors argue that academic institutions and funders must recognize research-creation as innovative knowledge-making that leaps over the traditional splitting of theory from practice while considering how gender/feminist studies, Indigenous practices, and new materialism might inform and develop the conversation. Through this book, readers can transform the way they experience both art and education.
Contributors: Carolina Cambre, Owen Chapman, Paul Couillard, T.L. Cowan, John Cussans, Randy Lee Cutler, Petra Hroch, Rachelle Viader Knowles, Natalie Loveless, Glen Lowry, Erin Manning, Sourayan Mookerjea, Natasha Myers, Simon Pope, Stephanie Springgay, Sarah E. Truman
How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, 2019
In recent years, the rise of research-creation—a scholarly activity that considers art practices ... more In recent years, the rise of research-creation—a scholarly activity that considers art practices as research methods in their own right—has emerged from the organic convergences of the arts and interdisciplinary humanities, and it has been fostered by universities wishing to enhance their public profiles. In How to Make Art at the End of the World Natalie Loveless draws on diverse perspectives—from feminist science studies to psychoanalytic theory, as well as her own experience advising undergraduate and graduate students—to argue for research-creation as both a means to produce innovative scholarship and a way to transform pedagogy and research within the contemporary neoliberal university. Championing experimental, artistically driven methods of teaching, researching, and publication, research-creation works to render daily life in the academy more pedagogically, politically, and affectively sustainable, as well as more responsive to issues of social and ecological justice.
The Maternal in Creative Work; Intergenerational Discussions on Motherhood and Art, 2019
This interview between Natalie Loveless and Mary Kelly revisits Kelly’s important historical work... more This interview between Natalie Loveless and Mary Kelly revisits Kelly’s important historical works, such as Post-Partum Document and The Nightcleaners, bringing attention to the foment out of which they were produced and linking this to the contemporary moment through some of Kelly’s most recent work as well as her influence on feminists of younger generations. This wide-ranging exchange makes a claim for the importance of feminist inheritance, feminist pedagogy and intergenerational feminist collaboration for the project of social and ecological justice today.
Feminist Formations, 2022
This essay takes the form of a dialogue between Natalie Loveless and Carrie Smith, both professor... more This essay takes the form of a dialogue between Natalie Loveless and Carrie Smith, both professors at a large western-Canadian research-intensive university undergoing restructuring prompted by budget cuts. Together they ask how feminist collaboration can work to resculpt academic political spaces. Though both agree that large-scale action is needed, they also argue for the value of insurgent, modest, local modes of
collaborative resistance that operate in the cracks of the neoliberal university.
Beginning from their experience navigating the dual threats of COVID-19 and radical budget cuts as professors in academic leadership positions, they make a claim for an anti-racist, feminist university that is responsive in its capacity to nurture generosity, care, and creativity. Together they invite readers to be attentive to the conditions necessary for any true critical collaboration to take place, listening for and attuning to what Sarah Sharma has called “brokenness” (2020)—those places where things are not working from the perspectives of patriarchal power and where those committed to feminist anti-racist/ableist/speciesist university spaces might want to linger.
Studies in the Maternal Special Issue on The Everyday Maternal Practice: Activist Structures in Creative Work, 2016
This special forum for Studies in the Maternal asks fourteen activist- mother-artists, or “mamac... more This special forum for Studies in the Maternal asks fourteen activist-
mother-artists, or “mamactivists”, to respond to the following questions:
(1) When and why did you start making activist/political work on the
maternal?
2) What reception/reaction did you receive for the work?
(3) What is the latest activist/political work you have made on the maternal?
(4) What shifts do you see from this first work to this last work? and
(5) Why is the maternal, in your opinion, important to activist, engaged,
political art today?
Responses highlight a range of geographic and cultural
perspectives, as well as artistic strategies. One commonality between them is that they take the maternal not as a biological facticity, but a rich feminist site of political intervention.
Canadian Theatre Review, 2021
Canadian Journal of Communication, 2012
in what follows I offer an anecdotal engagement with the Fine Arts PhD at a moment when it is jus... more in what follows I offer an anecdotal engagement with the Fine Arts PhD at a moment when it is just emerging in North America. I argue that doctoral activities that cross theory/practice lines, at their best, offer a unique opportunity to rethink what constitutes academic knowledge production and assessment by necessitating that these lines be made porous and responsive to each other. This reconfiguration, to the extent that it calls into question both the subject and object of knowledge, is one that benefits from the insights of feminism in its "new materialist" incarnation.