The Office of Research & Innovation is excited to announce the launch of the second iteration of the "THIS IS RESEARCH" campaign.
OCAD University faculty are engaged in inclusive, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research that audaciously and responsibly pursues the questions of our time.
THIS IS RESEARCH features posters and media showcasing the many forms of research at the University. You can see the first set of these on the many screens across campus and our website.
In concert with provincial efforts being coordinated through the Council of Ontario Universities, “THIS IS RESEARCH” will help to raise the profile of research performed across faculties by the creative professionals, scholars, and strategic thinkers that make up our research community.
If you would like your research to be profiled through “THIS IS RESEARCH” please contact our office at research@ocadu.ca.
OCAD U’s Professor Martha Ladly and colleague Katrina Keefer of Trent University are using visual analytics to help reconstruct the lives of individuals who were victims of the mid-Atlantic slave trade.
Their project, Decoding Origins: Creating a Visual Language of Marks, is based on the rich history of applying permanent body marks, such as scarification and tattoos, to represent individual’s membership in African kin groups and local societies. The Project seeks to trace origins of enslaved peoples of Africa, and to address the obliteration of identities for enslaved individuals, which is one of the lasting legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The researchers received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
Working in archives in the UK, the US and Sierra Leone, the team is engaged in data gathering, digitization, interpretation, and visualization, using both historical and contemporary data and imagery, cross referenced with records from the 1880s Registers of Liberated Africans.
The researchers are working with these endangered records collected from the archives of Freetown, Sierra Leone, along with open source data, using research analysis tools employed in the Digital Humanities. Ladly’s team is adapting technologies such as Optical Character Recognition, Machine Learning, and eventually, Artificial Neural Networks to build an interlinking relational database, which will assist in analysis, visualization, and reconstruction of events in the lives of African individuals who were enslaved.
This work may assist scholars, and eventually members of the public, to identify enslaved individuals who were transported to the Americas and the Caribbean, and potentially to trace their origins back to homelands in Africa, in an attempt to uncover identities lost in the mid-Atlantic slave trade.
Project collaborators and researchers are a multi-disciplinary, multi-ethnic team of designers, technologists and artists, including graduate research assistants Kartikay Chadha, Georgina Yeboah and Maria Yala (OCAD University) and historians Eric Lehman and Michael McGill (Trent University), working with scholars of the Mid-Atlantic Slave Trade, including collaborators Paul Lovejoy (York University, Tubman Institute), Dean Rehberger (Michigan State University), Mohammed Salau (University of Mississippi), and Abubakar Babajo Sani (Umaru Musa Yar'adua University, Katsina).
The project is featured on CBC News.
Join Shamina Chherawala and members of the Queer Publishing Project to learn about their process of creating Handbook: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art & Design Education, the first student-authored resource book of its kind. The guide draws from anti-oppressive education models to enable faculty to unlearn and critically address oppression on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality, and transform their understanding of how to support queer and transgender students in the studio, classroom, and beyond.
Handbook is a creation of the Queer Publishing Project, a research group of over 100 students, alumni, staff and faculty at OCAD University.
One of the most important aspects of university life is the sharing and discussion of ideas. The colloquium — or academic conference or seminar — represents an invaluable opportunity for graduate students to present their work. Each graduate program at OCAD University hosts such an event with the goal of having students discuss their thesis or MRP work. Open to the university and wider community, these colloquia are defined by intellectual rigor, the presentation of original ideas and work and critical discussions.
Grad Gallery @ 205 Richmnd St. W.
Room 322, 230 Richmond St. W.
Learn about arts specific resources and services available at the Toronto Public Library. Bring your OCAD U ID and get signed up for a Toronto Public Library card!
Hidden Treasures of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Edward P. Taylor Library & Archives.
Librarian Adrienne Connelly will profile the many creative possibilities of the AGO's library collections, services, and programming.
Contemporary Painting and Print Media, Faculty of Art, is proud to present a public presentation by Etienne Zack, recent paintings and and research practices.
Etienne Zack had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal, Canada (with catalogue) in spring 2010. His work has also been shown in numerous solo exhibitions including Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway; Thomas Dane Gallery, London, England; Marina-Miranda, Madrid, Spain; Equinox Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada. Zack’s work was also been included in East International 2004 (selectors: Neo Rauch and Harry Gerb Lybke), Norwich, England; The Model, Sligo, Ireland; the National Gallery of Canada; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Nicole Klagsbrun, New York, United States; Projektraum Viktor Bucher, Vienna, Austria, and was part of the 2008 Quebec Triennial at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal, Canada.
In 2012, Etienne Zack’s was included in Oh, Canada, at Mass. MoCA, USA, the largest survey of Canadian art in the US. The Oh, Canada exhibition will be touring until 2015.
Etienne Zack is the 2005 winner of the RBC Painting Competition, the 2008 City of Montreal's Pierre-Ayot prize and the recipient of the 2014 Emily Award in Vancouver, Canada.
His work is collected by major institutions and museums, including the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal, National Fine Arts Museum of Quebec, Montreal Fine Arts Museum, Surrey Art Gallery, Glenbow Museum and The Model, Ireland. His work can also be found in corporate and private collections in the United States, Europe, Scandinavia and the UK.
Etienne Zack’s work uses fictitious possibilities and historical moments that are staged into paintings that are reminiscent of fabricated environments. Each painting operates within its own systems and logic. A painting is made up of a succession of ideas that are performed using paint. In effect, the paintings function as a way to activate and pry open different pictorial, cultural, and historical forces in order to experience them yet again in unique ways.
Etienne Zack lives and works in Los Angeles, USA since 2010.
OCAD University Auditorium 100 McCaul St.