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New faculty
 Multimedia
artist highlights curating as a career
by Maria Lironi
“The number of artists who curate is on the increase,”
says UVic assistant professor Luanne Martineau, “and they make
good curators as they tend to curate quite differently from non-artists.
They tend not to group things by discipline, for example, but by
complex, non-didactic topics and themes.”
A multimedia artist who has shown nationally and internationally,
Martineau teaches a curatorial director’s program (Art 380)
where students learn how to organize, administrate, promote, and
present thematic group shows and solo exhibitions.
She also teaches Art 499 (senior project) and administers
the visual art department’s visiting artists program, which
invites artists and other cultural practitioners to speak at the
university.
On being an artist who curates, Martineau speaks from
experience. Until this fall she was associate curator at the Art
Gallery of Calgary. She’s also worked at Calgary’s Glenbow
Museum.
“My course addresses the challenges that exist
for students, such as maintaining enough energy and balance to work
within a system and continue to create one’s own art,”
says Martineau. “The life of a freelance curator can be difficult,
and I want to show students what such a career path entails, and
how to do it well.”
Martineau continues to create and exhibit her art.
Just last month her sculptures were shown in Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket
Gallery as part of the “Hammertown” exhibit—a showcase
of an emerging generation of West Coast-based Canadian artists.
This is how the gallery’s catalogue describes
her work: “Compulsive and laboriously produced sculptures and
drawings combine an interest in early 20th-century cartoons—and
their stark portrayal of race and class—with suggestively biomorphic,
modernist forms.”
Martineau studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design and the Alberta College of Art and Design, and completed
her master’s in fine arts at the University of British Columbia.
To see samples of her work visit <www.finearts.uvic.ca/visualarts/faculty/luannem/index.html>.
(Photo by Joy Poliquin)
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