Listening to Pictures playlist for 08/11/2022

Artist Title Album Label Link
Program Audio: 

     Episode 9 | August 11
     Kara Ditte Hansen and Steffanie Ling on Ken Lum

 

 

Image Description: An offset lithograph on newsprint presents a grid of 16 black and white photographic portraits; of diverse youth ranging in age from infants to young adults. Each portrait is closely cropped, where the portraits’ smiling faces gaze outward in various directions.

Ken Lum, Youth Portraits, 1985, offset lithograph on newsprint. Gift of Bill Jeffries, 2017. Photo SFU Galleries.

Comprised of a grid with 16 photographic portraits of youth ranging from infants to young adults from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds, Ken Lum's Youth Portraits (1985) was originally installed as part of a series spray-mounted to the walls of Vancouver's Coburg Gallery (1983-1987), creating a constellation of diverse faces. While in conversation about Youth Portraits, Kara Ditte Hansen and Steffanie Ling reflect on memories of encountering Lum’s conceptual art practice, first as self-described "keener art students," and now a decade later, less burdened by the pressure to perform intellectually cumbersome readings of it. They consider Lum’s exploration — at times humorous, other times painful — of social and political belonging that comes into particular focus when tracing tensions between institutional records and personal experience.

Kara Ditte Hansen is an artist and filmmaker. She is a master’s student in the Cinematic Arts program at University of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She loves all things pickled. 

Steffanie Ling is an occasional critic and regular reader of Marx. She is a current graduate student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. 

Hansen and Ling attended the same high school in Calgary, Alberta.

Podcast

 

Transcript
 

[Image Description: An offset lithograph on newsprint presents a grid of 16 black and white photographic portraits; of diverse youth ranging in age from infants to young adults. Each portrait is closely cropped, where the portraits’ smiling faces gaze outward in various directions.]

 

  • Posted on: 11 August 2022
  • By: cjsfpa