Artist Talk: J.R. Carpenter - Mapping Place / Troubling Space

As part of the ART, ACTIVISM & GLOBAL CRISIS lecture series co-presented by SPAR²C and the Research-Creation / Social Justice Colaboratory (CoLAB)

Mapping Place / Troubling Space
Thursday 18 February 2020, 5-7 PM MST
Register here for this event here.

In this public lecture University of Alberta’s current Writer in Residence J. R. Carpenter will share questions which have long pervaded her work. Questions about place, displacement, migration, and climate change. Questions which are mostly unanswerable. Questions which Carpenter continues to try to answer anyway, increasingly through dialectic, dialogic, and collaborative processes. Because speaking about the unspeakable with someone comes as a relief. Drawing together examples from cartography, philosophy, poetry, media theory, and her own work, Carpenter implores us all to ask questions about the loss, desire, and violence implicit in the systems of imperial measurement which underpin the ways we conceptualize and operationalize space.

J. R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, and practice-led researcher working across performance, print and digital media. Her web-based works have been exhibited in museums, galleries, and festivals around the world. Her digital poem The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. Her print poetry collection An Ocean of Static was highly commended by the Forward Prizes 2018. Her most recent collection, This is a Picture of Wind, is based on a web-app by the same name. She is currently the Writer in Residence in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. More information about her work can be found on her website at luckysoap.com