Work-In-Progress Conference
Schedule
Fri Apr 24 2026 at 08:30 am to 07:00 pm
UTC-06:00Location
Alberta University of the Arts | Calgary, AB
About this Event
The Work-In-Progress conference aims to bring together faculty and graduate researchers as well as artists, designers, and cultural workers from across Calgary. It seeks to advance new and emergent research that engages with art, craft, design, and/or the creative industries whether in a historical, contemporary, practice-based, or theoretical capacity.
Thematically open, there will be contributions from researchers and practitioners working across disciplinary and professional fields including but not limited to:
Studio Art, Craft, Design, Art History and Visual Culture, Cinema and Media Studies, English/Literature, Curatorial/Museum Studies, Education
Poster artwork courtesy of the artists Sarah Nordean & Ashleigh Bartlett
Please note that all presentations and workshops* will take place on the 5th floor except for the Faculty exhibition (Room 371), the Film Screening (Stanford Perrott Lecture Theatre, Main Mall) and the end of conference drinks reception in the Main Mall.
Faculty Exhibition (on view April 22 - 26): Room 371
Ashleigh Bartlett and Sarah Nordean, Richard Clements, Megan Dyck, Heather Huston, Jill Ho-You, Mackenzie Kelly-Frère, Mitch Kern, Mike Kerr, Anahita Mosayebi, Paul Robert, and Kara Stone.
*The Conference timetable is subject to change and will be updated accordingly.
Agenda
🕑: 08:30 AM - 09:00 AM
Coffee/Tea
Info: Join us in room 524 on the 5th floor of AUArts campus for coffee & tea to start the conference off.
🕑: 09:00 AM - 10:20 AM
Session 1: Panel A - Through the Lens (Room 532)
Host: Chair: Lexie Angelo
Info: • Leia Guo (Independent Artist): Lens/Mirror/Plate – Intersections between Glassmaking and Photography
• Megan Dyck (AUArts): Collage as Everyday Mise en Scène: Fragmentary Bodies, Objects, and the Waking Sensual World
• Annie Rudd (University of Calgary): Invisible Photographer: Walker Evans, Candid Cameras, and “Vanity"
• Mitch Kern (AUArts): The Drowning of an Artist
🕑: 09:00 AM - 10:20 AM
Session 1: Panel B - Re-Staging Gender (Room 560)
Host: Chair: Melanie Hamilton
Info: • Bailey Horton (Athabasca University): Queer Curatorial: Meaningful Engagement with Material Culture
• Xahra Hafeez (AUArts) with Sana Hafeez: Feminine and Masculine Motifs in the Islamic Design Legacy: Identifying Gendered Patterns to Address Historical Misattribution
• Ziya Lin (Artist): Hair as metaphor for female subjectivity
🕑: 11:35 AM - 11:35 AM
Session 2: Panel C - Earth in Art (Room 558)
Host: Chair: Mackenzie Kelly-Frère
Info: • Kara Stone (AUArts): Landfill: Designing for Low-Carbon Pleasures
• Andrea Lau (Artist): Groundwork: A Creative Approach to Environmental Data
• Eveline Kolijn (Artist): Art for Coral Reefs in Crisis
🕑: 10:35 AM - 11:35 AM
Session 2: Panel D - Shifting Forms (Room 520)
Host: Chair: TBA
Info: • Lexie Angelo (University of Edinburgh/Calgary): Liminal spaces: emotional engagement with nebulous places in creative writing
• Ian Fitzgerald (AUArts): Each Mouthful Dripping in its own Rich Creamy Goodness
• Leah Naicken (University of Calgary):Lines of Action: Exploring Figure Drawing as an Experimental Ethnographic Method
🕑: 10:35 AM - 11:35 AM
Session 2: Workshop 1 (Room 562)
Host: Michele Braun (AUArts)
Info: Serious Storytelling: A Pracademic’s Guide to Using Storytelling in the Classroom
🕑: 11:50 AM - 12:40 PM
Session 3: Panel E - Collaborative Making (Room 532)
Host: Chair: Xahra Hafeez
Info: • Ashleigh Bartlett and Sarah Nordean (AUArts): The Exchange Project
• Jodie Stevens and Sarah van Sloten (Artists): Finding Reciprocal/Collaborative/Converging/Overlapping Processes for Making
• ING Collective - Yilu Xing and Phoenix Ning (AUArts): Reading Chinatown’s Water System through Print
• Jenna Van Buekenhout (Artist): Quilt-Top Roleplay: Creating the Fabric of Community
🕑: 11:50 AM - 12:40 PM
Session 3: Workshop 2 (Room 560)
Info: Set, Setting, Sound: Failures & Emergent Methods
Ada Jaarsma (Mount Royal University) with Guy Obrecht, Eli Buechler, Brenden Ormandy
🕑: 12:45 PM - 01:45 PM
LUNCH (Room 524)
🕑: 01:45 PM - 02:45 PM
Session 4: Panel F - Process and Passage (Room 558)
Host: Chair: Rose Wei
Info: • Natalie Gerber (Artist): TBA
• Kurtis Lesick (AUArts): The Failure of Beginning
• Patricia Lortie (Artist): Skiff: Tracing Memory, Ritual, and Passage
• Anahita Mosayebi (AUArts): Tangible Affects
🕑: 01:45 PM - 02:45 PM
Session 4: Panel G - Network Economies (Room 532)
Host: Chair: TBA
Info: • Ashley Scarlett (AUArts): Evidentiary Aesthetics after the Operational Image
• Christine Tran (AUArts) with Nelanthi Hewa: Academia under the Influencer Creep: Scholarship and “Content”
• Yukun Hao (AUArts): The Digital and the Home: Domesticity, Interface, and Craft
🕑: 01:45 PM - 03:00 PM
Performance (Room 536)
🕑: 03:00 PM - 04:15 PM
Session 5: Panel H - Intertextualities (Room 560)
Host: Chair: TBA
Info: • Trevor Stark (University of Calgary): The Weak Politics of Marcel Broodthaers: A Critique of Poetical Economy
• Stephen Guy (City University, Seattle, Calgary Campus): Coover in the Manosphere: Allegory and Misogyny in “The Hanging of the Schoolmarm”
• Narges Rezaian (AUArts): Myths and Flesh: Remapping this Monster of Kin
🕑: 03:00 PM - 04:15 PM
Session 5: Panel I - Unsettling Colonial Ecologies (Room 562)
Host: Chair: Hannah Dubois
Info: • Troy Patenaude (AUArts): From Thinker to Sage: Art Historical Wisdom, Skill, and Teamwork in a Complex Relational World
• Gail Hinchliffe (Founder of United Active Living/Artist-Scholar): Living in the Time of Dying
• Mackenzie Kelly- Frère (AUArts): Damask Herbarium: Banff
• Geraldine Ysselstein (Artist): Confluence: Mapping myself to the rivers
🕑: 03:00 PM - 04:15 PM
Session 5: Panel J - Reciprocal Pedagogies (Room 520)
Host: Chair: TBA
Info: • Naoko Masuda (AUArts): Being and becoming in the design studio: Practicing a practice, practicing for practice, and practicing a shared life (work-in-progress)
• Zoha Shaukat & Joan Tu (MedULingo): Designing Medical Literacy with Multidisciplinary Collaborations
• Nurgul Balac (AUArts): Learning History through Making: Ceramic Practice, Citizenship, and Critical Pedagogy in Progress
• Alishau Diebold (Mount Royal): Art in Action: Redefining Research through Community Practices
🕑: 04:30 PM - 05:20 PM
FILM : Terhpi Thâkthâja: Stoney Nakoda, Catharine Whyte and her Museum
Host: Stanford Perrott Lecture Theatre
Info: The film screening will be followed by a discussion with:
• Jarret Twoyoungmen (Film-maker/Storyteller, Founder of Nakoda AV Club)
• Giona Smalleyes (Film-maker/Artist)
• Cheyenne Bearspaw (Film-maker/Artist)
• Amanda Foote (University of Calgary)
🕑: 05:20 PM - 07:00 PM
Drinks & Reception (Main Mall)
Where is it happening?
Alberta University of the Arts, 1407 14 Avenue Northwest, Calgary, CanadaEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
CAD 0.00 to CAD 20.00



















