Director
Kirsty Robertson is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies at Western University, Canada (London, Ontario). She is a founding member of the Synthetic Collective, a group of artists, scientists and cultural researchers working on plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region and project co-lead on A Museum for Future Fossils, an ongoing “vernacular museum” focused on responding curatorially to ecological crisis.
Faculty
Kelly Wood is a photographer and practicing artist whose research focuses on the environmental impact of waste accumulation, waste economies, and all forms of visible and invisible pollution. She is the instructor for the Making Art with Environmental Awareness course at Western University. Kelly is also a member of the research collectives The Toronto Photography Seminar and The Synthetic Collective .
Sarah E.K. Smith is a scholar and curator whose research explores contemporary art and museums, with an interest in how artworks and institutions provide a lens to address the topics of cultural diplomacy, cultural labour, and cultural policies. Sarah works as Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at Western University, and is also Affiliated Faculty at Queen’s University, where she works with graduate students in the Cultural Studies Program.
Post-doctoral Fellows
Zoë Heyn-Jones is a settler researcher-artist and cultural worker who grew up on Saugeen Ojibway land in Ontario, Canada and on Tz’utujil/Kaqchikel Maya land in Guatemala. Zoë holds a PhD in Visual Arts from York University and a graduate diploma in Latin American Studies from CERLAC (the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, York University). Zoë is a co-founder of the F4A (Film for Artists) collective and F4A’s Site + Cycle residency project that combines analogue filmmaking instruction with teachings about site specificity and plant-based image making. Zoë is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Curating in the Visual Arts department at Western University where she is developing an interdisciplinary arts-based project on food security, sovereignty and justice in Canada and Mexico. She lives and works in Tenochtitlan/Mexico City and Tkaranto/Toronto.
Amanda White (She/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar working at the intersection of art, environment and culture, examining alternatives to the dominant visualizations of the environmental, with a current focus on plant studies. Amanda holds a PhD (Cultural Studies) from Queen’s University, a MFA (Visual Art) from the University of Windsor and a BFA from OCADU. She has exhibited and published with support from SSHRC, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council among others. Amanda’s current research includes several ongoing studio-based works in progress and a forthcoming co-edited book project. Amanda will be a SSHRC Posdoctoral fellow at the CSC where her research-creation project will examine the symbiotic relationships between humans and the plants that we eat. This work will focus on how, amid current ecological crisis, the future of our relationship with edible plants might be interrogated and reimagined through artistic and curatorial interventions, scholarly writing, and teaching.
The CSC is associated with other projects in the Department of Visual Arts such as:
The Synthetic Collective (www.syntheticcollective.org), an interdisciplinary collaboration between visual artists, cultural workers, and scientists working together to sample, map, understand, and visualize the complex ways in which plastics and microplastics pollute the Great Lakes region.
A Museum for Future Fossils (www.museumforfuturefossils.org), a vernacular “museum without walls” focused on responding curatorially to the Anthropocene.