a queer feminist artlab for making and thinking on the 5th floor of the UWinnipeg library
the greenhouse artlab is a space that focuses on artistic process and queer + feminist ecologies. It opens possibilities for the creation of new artistic works and research; collaboration on art projects with other artists, scholars, and community members; and hosting artist residencies and working with students/community members on artistic projects. Dr. Roewan Crowe began to conceive the greenhouse artlab upon receiving space at UWinnipeg after the studio space she held in Sparling Hall had been condemned. An abandoned greenhouse space previously used by the Department of Biology had become available after they received a new greenhouse at UWinnipeg’s Richardson College of the Environment. The greenhouse artlab offers possibilities for creating a new kind of artist-researcher program built around the multiple possibilities of this bright, transparent, unusual site situated on the top floor of the library. Not only is it well suited to artistic creation, but it is also intended for growing things. Crowe is steaming-up the greenhouse artlab, highlighting the need to build STEAM, not only STEM spaces in higher education (the added “A” standing for “Arts”). The greenhouse artlab facilitates feminist cultural production with UWinnipeg students who are enrolled in classes with the department of Women’s and Gender Studies and are interested in learning about feminist art and artistic practices. The greenhouse artlab also hosts short-term feminist art residencies and public workshops that engage with queer + feminist ecologies, both on and off campus.
Keywords
queer + feminist ecologies | anthropocene feminisms | collaborative | collective | intergenerational | intersectional | student engagement | teaching | sharing work | art community | university community | queer art experiments | feminist art project
Roewan Crowe, Associate Professor
Transdisciplinary artist Dr. Roewan Crowe is energized by acts of disruption, radical transformation and the tactical deployment of self-reflexivity. Born under the big skies of Saskatchewan and raised in scofflaw Alberta, Crowe left the prairies to deepen her engagements with art and feminism, and to do graduate studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. A return to the prairies inspired art and writing centered on queer feminist reclamation practices to ask questions about the land, whiteness and queer settler identities. In her artistic practice she often enters into fatal wounded landscapes—sometimes violent and xenophobic —to explore possibilities for regeneration. Recent work includes: digShift(ongoing), a decolonizing and environmental reclamation project using site specific performance and multichannel installation to explore the shifting layers of an abandoned gas station; Lifting Stone, a queer femme performance/installation creating intimate stone encounters; and the queer Western text Quivering Land (ARP), a gritty feminist meditation on the possibilities of art to reckon with the ongoing legacies of violence and colonization. As part of the artist collective, CONSTELACIONES, Crowe traveled with artists Helene Vosters, Monica Martinez, Christina Hajjar, and Doris Difarnecio to the Atacama Desert in Chile (2016) to perform and create a monument, an unauthorized sound sculpture with ceramic forms created by Martinez. CONSTELACIONES embodies collective healing through art-making, kinship and vulnerability—rejecting isolation, silence, and disconnection in the face of trauma. Dr. Roewan Crowe and Dr. Helene Vosters co-edited the open access digital book, Return Atacama: Engaging Histories of Political Violence Through Performance and Durational Witnessing. Crowe’s longstanding community practice is concerned with creating space for and building engaged feminist/queer/artistic communities. Her scholarly work seeks to open meaningful encounters with art through feminist engagement with a particular focus on artistic practitioner knowledges, collaboration, collectivity, and artistic processes. She is an Associate Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Winnipeg and Co-Director of The Institute for Women’s & Gender Studies.
Dallas Cant, Research Coordinator
Dallas Cant is an interdisciplinary visual artist who has recently completed a B.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg. They are interested in exploring how queer performance practices and curatorial methodologies can work to centre sex workers and ongoing calls for decriminalization. Dallas recognizes the creative form as medium of resistance and incorporates video, poetry, and textile sculptures in their work. Currently, Dallas is co-curating SWARM with Dr. Roewan Crowe, an online exhibit presented with the University of Winnipeg’s Gallery 1C03. Dallas’s video work has screened in spaces like PLATFORM centre for Photographic & Digital Arts, Images Festival and Gimli Film Festival. Photo by Callie Lugosi.