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Environment-trade link topic of lectures
Experimental cartographer Lize Mogel will kick off a lecture series presented by the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts that will explore the past, present and future relationship between the environment and trade.
Mogel’s talk, titled “The World as a Map,” will take place at 6 p.m. Tuesday in Room 215, Center for the Arts, North Campus. It is free and open to the public, as are all talks in the series.
As technology and commerce blur geographic boundaries, the iconic world map no longer can adequately describe the intricacies of globalization. Mogel, an interdisciplinary artist who works with the interstices between art and cultural geography, will present mapping projects that re-think familiar representations of the world, such as the world map, the UN logo and the spectacle of World’s Fairs. She also will discuss her work of the past decade creating and disseminating ‘radical cartography.’
The series will continue at noon on April 1 in the First Floor Gallery with a lecture by Alberto Rey, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Visual Arts and New Media at Fredonia State College.
In this lecture, titled “Looking for Home,” Rey will discuss his images and videos over the past 25 years and their relationship to his recent body of work: two on-going series—Biological Regionalism and the Aesthetics of Death—that explore contemporary society’s connection to the natural environment, as well as the series’ connections to art history, biology and social disconnection with nature and death.
An exhibition that continues Rey’s “Biological Regionalism” series will open on March 18 in the Lightwell Gallery in the UB Art Gallery. Click here to read a story about the exhibition.
The remaining two lectures in the series, both of which will take place at noon in the First Floor Gallery in the UB Art Gallery:
• April 8: “Hindsight on Highway H2O,” Jennifer Nalbone, director, navigation and invasive species, Great Lakes United. “Big water,” like the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, historically has been used to move commercial goods. Construction and the opening of canals and waterways, like the Chicago waterway system and the St. Lawrence Seaway facilitated larger ships and higher traffic volume. But development of commercial navigation has facilitated one of the worst ecological tragedies of all time: the introduction of invasive aquatic species. Nalbone will pose the question: If we knew then what we know now, would we have done things differently?
• April 15: “I Drink Therefore I Am,” Margaret Wooster, habitat coordinator, Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper. Wooster will use maps that she created of the major Great Lakes rivers that cross New York State to tell stories about the waterways of Western New York. Wooster days that among those stories are the Niagara River "unlimited power" scam, the Tuscarora resistance, the City of Buffalo’s history “as a water history that is coming full circle” and the “1,000-mile toxic legacy we live with—all the way out to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.”
In addition to the lecture series, the UB Art Gallery will present “Grow-Your-Own Garden Seedlings Organically,” a hands-on presentation on organic seedling production, at 10 a.m. May 1 in the First Floor Gallery. The workshop, to be conducted by Richard Price, a member of Seedsavers’ Exchange and a former Northeast Organic Farming Association-certified organic market gardener, will cover such topics as soil mixing, lighting and heat requirements, potting-up, equipment and supplies, and seedling care.
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