U of L Art Gallery hosts unique exhibit that marries arts and science

caroline.zentner — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 16:15:00 +0000

What happens when an artist and a curator work with a team of monkey scientists? The answer will be on display at the Hess Gallery in October with an exhibit that invites visitors to explore what it means to be human with Icelandic artist Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir.

Icelandic artist Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir visited the South African field research site in 2017.

The exhibit is the culmination of the Borderline Human project that had its origins with the Level 2: Lichen Lab, an interdisciplinary research group at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge interested in how people engage with art.

“The Borderline Human project is not a normal exhibition,” says Dr. Josephine Mills, director and curator of the U of L Art Gallery. “We are going to be showing some drawings, but the bulk of it is working with a dancer and an aerialist. We’re going to have a structure in the gallery that the artist and dancer can swing and suspend from. It’s really more about turning the Hess Gallery into a space for an artist to explore and develop their work — kind of a lab space.”

In collaboration with Dr. Louise Barrett, psychology professor and Canada Research Chair in Cognition, Evolution and Behaviour, and Miranda Lucas, a PhD student being supervised by Barrett and Mills, the Borderline Human project takes research methodology for analyzing monkey behaviour that Barrett and Lucas use in the field and applies it to human behaviour in the art gallery.

“The bigger question we are looking at is what is actually involved when people find meaning with contemporary art,” says Mills. “There’s a lot of attention by arts funders to public engagement, but there’s no academic investigation. So it’s just things like exit surveys where people tend to tell you what they think you want to hear.”

Lucas, whose research is funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), has been observing people’s behaviour in four Canadian art galleries using the same methods she’d use in the field with vervet monkeys. Hauksdóttir has been involved with the project since 2017 when she visited Barrett and Lucas at the field research site in South Africa and spent a month studying the monkey scientists, as well as drawing and recording the monkeys.

The Borderline Human project kicks off on Thursday, Oct. 10 with a talk by Mills, Hauksdóttir and Lucas. Hauksdóttir has shown two pilot versions of the Borderline Human project in Germany and Sweden and will do a more fully developed version when she’s here at the U of L. Five U of L students from art, drama and psychology will work with her and be part of the final performance scheduled for Friday, Oct. 18 from 7 to 9 p.m.

Borderline Human is part of Celebrating Connection — A SSHRC Exchange Series. The series is designed to help disseminate research findings and provide opportunities for networking and collaborating in the humanities, social sciences, arts, education and management through events such as conferences, presentations and workshops.

Grant enables U of L researchers to investigate how people engage with art

caroline.zentner — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 20:58:10 +0000

Intuitively, Dr. Josephine Mills, curator of the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge Art Gallery, knows people get something out of art. Exactly how people engage with art remains a mystery even though art galleries, large and small, have a big interest in being able to answer the question.

“Public engagement in the arts is a huge topic right now, particularly for the Canada Council for the Arts and other funding bodies and boards of free-standing art galleries. Within universities, it’s often phrased as academic engagement,” says Mills. “There’s this pressure to do lots of public engagement but there’s really no sense of how you would know when it’s successful.”

The question of how public engagement in the arts can be measured is perfect fodder for the Level 2: Lichen Lab interdisciplinary research group at the U of L. The team consists of Mills; Dr. Louise Barrett, Canada Research Chair in Cognition, Evolution and Behaviour; Christine Clark (MFA ’14), assistant professor in the Department of New Media; Donald Lawrence, a professor in the Faculty of Arts at Thompson Rivers ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ; Dr. Tiffany Muller Myrdahl, senior lecturer in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ; and doctoral students Miranda Lucas, Leila Armstrong and Maria Madacky. It hopes to shed some light on public engagement thanks to $48,000 in funding from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connection (SSHRC) Grant.

U of L Lichen Lab members include, from left to right, Leila Armstrong, Maria Madacky, Dr. Louise Barrett, Christine Clark and Dr. Josephine Mills.

Previous research studies have focused on museums in large cities and most measures of audience engagement are based on assessing the performing arts where attendance numbers are easy to capture. People who visit an art gallery exhibit can provide anecdotes about their experience but there’s often a difference between what people say and what they do.

“Can you measure their behaviour and get some sense of what people are experiencing and getting out of an exhibition without having to ask them?” says Barrett.

To answer that question, Barrett and Lucas, recipient of a SSHRC graduate scholarship, thought techniques used to study the behaviour of vervet monkeys could be adapted to studying the behaviour of people at an art exhibit. In her study, Lucas set up small video cameras in four art galleries and recorded people’s behaviours, supplemented with her own notations. Lucas measured details like how close people went to an artwork, how long they stood in front of it, how much they moved around and whether they spoke to someone. The data has not yet been analyzed but Lucas will be looking for common factors in people’s behaviours.

To build on Lucas’s work, Mills and Barrett have devised a project called You are Here. The project will bring together artists with an interest in activism and audience engagement, ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ, art gallery professionals and students for a three-day workshop dedicated to developing the understanding of public engagement in art galleries on both practical and philosophical levels. Philosophically, Dr. Alva Noë’s (��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of California Berkeley) theory that art is a ‘strange tool’—a means to reorganize, reflect on and understand human behaviour—will be used to connect the behavioural studies of gallery engagement with the artists’ practices and the forms of art they produce.

“Can we look at art as something that’s a way of extending our mind into the world and use it as a tool for understanding ourselves and others?” says Barrett. “If we can understand more about how people engage actively with art, artists can use that knowledge to elicit particular responses and alter viewers’ perceptions. As the artists we work with are also activists, they are keen to incorporate such ideas into their practice.”

In conjunction with the workshop, and a related series of exhibitions at the U of L Art Gallery in the fall of 2017, Clark will be involved in the knowledge mobilization component of the project, facilitating the creation of podcasts and a video miniseries which will be hosted on a dedicated website.

“I’ll be helping with concept development and production of the podcasts, editing alongside the others, and overseeing a student to create the website that will host the podcasts and videos and other information to extend the material that people will have access to,” says Clark.

The project will contribute to research and teaching in museum studies, visual art and the field of cognition, as well as inform art gallery professionals.

UNews - Miranda Lucas

U of L Art Gallery hosts unique exhibit that marries arts and science

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Grant enables U of L researchers to investigate how people engage with art

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