Derek Knight

Derek J.J. Knight
Director, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts
Marilyn I. Walker Chair in Imagination, Creativity and Imagination
Associate Professor, Dept. of Visual Arts

I am an art historian, curator and artist by training.

Currently as Director of the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts my job is primarily administrative in nature with a focus on our downtown building project, which in July 2014 will relocate 50-60 full and part-time faculty, 10-12 support staff and 500-550 students in the departments of Dramatic Arts, Music and Visual Arts to new facilities.

Also as the holder of the Marilyn I. Walker Chair in Imagination, Creativity and Innovation my research continues in the areas of contemporary art, the post-studio environment and the interstices between public space, architecture and art. These topics feature prominently in my course, SCLA 5P64, Space and the Social Ecology of Art, which I teach in the MA Program on Studies in Comparative Literatures and Arts.

http://brocku.ca/humanities/departments-and-centres/visual-arts/faculty-...

A list of recent refereed papers includes:

“Gerhard Richter: Embodied Silence,” Image and Imagery VI, conference, session on "Death, Terror and the Sublime," Brock University, Oct. 28, 2011.

“Instant Report: N.E. Thing Co., Photography and Vernacular Modernism,” session on ““Like a Rainbow”: Experiments in Visual Culture,” conference on The Sixties, Canadian-Style, Two Days of Canada, Brock University, Nov. 5, 2010.

“Remapping the City and the Ecology of Space in the Work of N.E. Thing Co,” Universities Art Association of Canada, University of Guelph, Oct. 15, 2010.

“Public Art and Environmental Dialogue: Aesthetic Discourses in work of Olafur Eliasson, Christo and Jean-Claude, and Robert Smithson” session on "Promised Lands: Immanence and Epiphany," Greenscapes conference on the theme of Fields of Dreams: Landscapes of Myth and Imagination, Brock University, Oct. 3, 2009.

“Revisiting an Exhibition: Re-envisioning Habitat,” Universities Art Association of Canada, University of Waterloo, session on "Land Claims and Real Estate: Post-Colonial Developments of the Canadian Landscape," University of Waterloo, November 3, 2007.

“The High Line, New York City: Permeable Borders and Edgeless Perimeters,” Greenscapes conference on the theme of The Garden in the City, session on “Exploding the Borders,” Brock University, October 18-21, 2007.

“Anti-Monument: Architecture and the Aesthetics of Intervention,” Image and Imagery IV conference, Brock University, October 20-21, 2006.

“Bliss and the Experiential in Contemporary Art —Between Spirituality and Spectacle,” The Victor Fic memorial conference on the Tantra, Brock University, March 4 & 5, 2005.

My current research also involves a major archival component in which I am using photography to document art objects and architectural spaces that house art but were designed for other purposes.

Conceptual and Minimalist Art; North American and European contemporary art; Re-envisioning the environment; installation art; architecture and its impact on cultural structures; photography and socio-political discourse; art and literature in a post 9-11 world.

MRPs supervised

First reader:

2011-12 Wayne Corlis, "The Sublime: Gerhard Richter and Deleuze and Guattari".

2008-09: Alex Jankovic, “Beyond the Artist’s Vision: War, Disillusionment, and the Urban Commune in the 20th Century”.

2007-08: Marlie Huisman, "Re-envisioning Habitat: Paul Kantner-Jefferson Starship's Blows Against the Empire and Haight Ashbury".

Second reader:

2010-11 Steven Proctor, "The Autobiographical and Confessional Mode as Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Metafiction: Narrativizing the Self in Contemporary Literature and Visual Art".

McGuiness, Kevin 2007
Sebastian Queer Saint