Mimi Gellman Artist Talk

Visiting artist Mimi Gellman will be giving an artist talk in room WW104 at 10 am on Tuesday November 5th, 2013. Mimi will be visiting the Algoma campus to conduct research in the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre. All are welcome to join us for Mimi’s talk.

Mimi Gellman is an Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi Métis (Ojibway-Jewish Métis) conceptual artist, educator and PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queens University. A practicing, multi-disciplinary visual artist and curator with many years of experience, Gellman has an impressive list of accomplishments: from creating half-million dollar public art projects for the Rogers Centre and the Toronto Transit Commission to the building of large-scale architectural glass installations for sacred places (churches, synagogues, and mosques). A former instructor of design methodologies and ethics at the Ontario College of Art and Design, she is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University. Her upcoming PhD dissertation, “Between the Dreamtime and the GPS/ the Metaphysics of Indigenous Mapping,” will explore why land matters through the lens of Indigenous maps and will be manifested as an embodied project-based PhD. This 9 ft’ round carved wooden cabinet will function as a travelling mobile contact zone providing a place for dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians to grapple with why land matters and will house her Indigenous mapping exhibition, archive and GPS interface. Her art installations can be found in numerous corporate and private collections, among them, Kraft-General Foods, Price-Waterhouse and Shoppers Drugmart Corp. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in Canada and abroad, with highlights at the Museum of Modern Art in Passau, Germany, the Centre du Vitrail in France, the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, Japan and most recently at the MOMA in New York, where her performative photographs were included in the seminal historical exhibition, “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century.” Gellman is a board member of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective.

Image info: Left: Mimi Gellman Night Drawing 1, 2009, black & white photograph, 20 X 30 in.
Right: Night Drawing 2, 2009, black & white photograph, 20 X 30 in.