AHGSS Graduate Conference 2013
9-10 March 2013
Carleton University, Ottawa
Decadence/Decay is a two-day interdisciplinary graduate student conference that will investigate excess, profligacy and degeneration in the built environment and in visual culture. Although not limited to modern capitalist society, the terms decadence and decay are expressive of the extremes experienced in our contemporary world. On the surface, decadence and decay seem diametrically opposed yet they are also interrelated. This conference therefore proposes this bifurcated theme as a site for cultural inquiry that highlights points of departure and convergence between the two.
Keynote Speaker: Maskull Lasserre, artist
Maskull Lasserre’s drawings and sculptures explore the unexpected potential of the everyday through allegories of value, expectation, and utility. Elements of nostalgia, accident, humour, and the macabre are incorporated into works that induce strangeness in the familiar, and provoke uncertainty in the expected.
Lasserre has exhibited across Canada, and in the United States and Europe. He is represented in the collections of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the Government of Canada, Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Ottawa. He is also a recent participant in the Canadian Forces War Artist Program in Afghanistan.
Lasserre has a BFA from Mount Allison University (Visual Art and Philosophy), and an MFA from Concordia University (Sculpture).
Conference Committee 2012-2013:
Shannon Bingeman (co-chair)
Jacqueline Quinn (co-chair)
Amanda Harris
Diane Pellicone
Danuta Sierhuis