David Ogawa & Helen O’Leary
David Ogawa
All Visible Facts of Interest to Science or Society
This talk will explore some nineteenth-century photographic albums and portfolios. What can early efforts to organize photographic objects and the images contained within them tell us about the ways the medium was understood, deployed, and instrumentalized? What can they tell us about art-historical and archival practices in the digital age?
David Ogawa is the Terra Foundation Affiliated Fellow in Modern Italian Studies and associate professor of art history in the Department of Visual Arts at Union College.
Helen O’Leary
Safe House- open studio
“The end of art is peace / could be the motto of this frail device,” writes Seamus Heaney in The Harvest Bow, but it is an end that is rarely, if ever, easily attained. In between the identified need and the desired end is a process of some turbulence and disorder, wherein the claims of fracture and disappointment must be accounted for. Helen O’Leary’s work understands the play between a unifying scheme of resolution and its opposite: how art is to be wrestled from difficulty and contest, and how it may still cohere on a surface that is given to peace as much as to beauty.
Helen O’Leary is the Jules Guerin/Harold M. English/Miss Edith Bloom Fund Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts and professor of art for the School of Visual Arts at Pennsylvania State University.
The event will be held in English.