Conceptualism in Canada and the Politics of Urban Space w/Adam Lauder

Urban space is a privileged subject of first-generation conceptual art produced in Canada during the 1960s and 1970s. Although at first glance this investigation of the built environment might appear to signal a shift away from the nationalist landscape tradition associated with the earlier Group of Seven, curator Scott Watson has drawn attention to how early photo-conceptual practices approached the vacant spaces of suburban Vancouver as a “new ‘wilderness’” (2011 [1991], p. 265), one that harkened back to the depopulated representations of landscape found in the work of earlier colonial painters. This talk will revisit the emergence of the Vancouver School with an eye to its protagonists’ historically freighted relationship to public space in the built environment. The result will be a reassessment of conceptual practitioners’ subterranean affiliations with modernist precedents, as well as a recovery of more diverse case histories of conceptual practice across Canada and the inclusive geographies they document. This presentation will ask: Which spaces have been commemorated by the art-historiographical record? Which have not, and why?

Lauder’s scholarship on conceptual practices includes two recent books, Variable Conditions: Paracomputational Arts in Canada, 1965-1995 (MQUP, 2023), and Out of School: Information Art and the Toronto School of Communication (MQUP, 2022). Additionally, Lauder has published peer-reviewed articles on architectural topics including the landscape architecture and preservationist designs of Montreal architect Percy Nobbs (Future Anterior, 2010), the industrial architecture of Albert Kahn (with Lee Rodney; Future Anterior, 2015), the built environment of Detroit (with Lee Rodney; MQUP, 2018), and Indigenous public art and public space in Toronto (Scapegoat, 2021).

Adam Lauder graduated with a PhD from the Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto in 2016. Lauder was co-curator with Mark P. Hayward of Computational Arts in Canada 1967-1974 (2020) at Western University’s McIntosh Gallery, and has contributed articles to scholarly journals including Afterimage, American Indian Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Communication, PUBLIC, and The Journal of Canadian Art History, as well as features and shorter texts to magazines including Border Crossings, C, Canadian Art, e-flux, esse, and Flash Art. In 2017-2019, Lauder was SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at York University, and is currently an adjunct professor at OCAD University.