Christine Ross is awarded the inaugural Artexte Prize for Research in Contemporary Art

October 30, 2012

Artexte honours Christine Ross, first recipient of the Artexte Prize for Research in Contemporary Art.

Christine Ross is Professor and James McGill Chair in Contemporary Art History in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal.

The Artexte Prize is being awarded in recognition of Ross’s outstanding contribution to the study of contemporary art in Canada. Ross’s long-standing commitment to excellence in research has greatly enhanced our understanding of today’s leading artistic practices and their bearing on contemporary society. Ross specializes in contemporary media art, and she is particularly interested in the relations between media, aesthetics and subjectivity. Cognitive sciences and neuroscience also play a significant role in her work. Her most recent book reconsiders how time and space are reconfigured in contemporary media art. Ross and her research group are currently conducting research on augmented reality in the visual arts and in visual culture at large.

Throughout her career, Christine Ross has published several books with prestigious academic presses, both in Canada and abroad. Her essays have also appeared in influential periodicals. In addition, she has also edited anthologies that have helped shape the practice of art history.

The Artexte Prize recognizes Ross’s original and sustained contribution to research, a contribution that has already been acknowledged by the Royal Society of Canada, which Ross entered in 2011. That same year, she received the David Thomson Award for Graduate Supervision and Teaching.

By creating the Artexte Prize for Research in Contemporary Art, Artexte’s Board of Directors wishes to support the work of researchers who contribute in a tangible way to the development of knowledge on contemporary art in Canada.

To pursue research on contemporary art can be a daunting and precarious undertaking with few rewards in Canada. Nevertheless, Ross’s determination and resolve have helped her to innovate and sustain her broad intellectual endeavours. As a result, her numerous books, essays and seminars constitute important contributions to knowledge that afford artists, authors, publishers, museologists, art historians, art critics, journalists, students and cultural workers a better understanding of the role art plays in our society.

In order to celebrate Christine Ross, first recipient of the Artexte Prize for Research in Contemporary Art, you are kindly invited to a ceremony to be held at Artexte on October 30, 2012 at 5:00 p.m. Christine Ross will deliver a thirty-minute lecture (in French) at 5:30 p.m. This will be the first in a series of lectures she will deliver throughout 2013. The lecture will be followed by the launch of Professor Ross’s new book, The Past is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art.

Christine Ross is the author of The Past is the Present; It’s the Future too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art (Continuum, 2012); The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression (University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Images de surface : l’art vidéo reconsidéré (Artextes, 1996). She has recently co-edited (with Olivier Asselin and Johanne Lamoureux) Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).

Recent publications include: “Historical Narrative in the Work of Stan Douglas,” in L’Art de la syntaxe, ed. J. Game (Éditions de Vincennes, 2011); “New Screens Beyond the Screen: The Spatial Distribution of the Image in Augmented Reality Art,” in Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art, ed. T. Trodd (Manchester University Press, 2011); “Spatial Poetics: The (Non)Destinations of Augmented Reality Art, Part I” and “Spatial Poetics: The (Non)Destinations of Augmented Reality Art, Part II,” Afterimage, 2010; “Video Art in Canada,” in Canadian Art: The Twentieth Century, ed. B. Foss, S. Paikowsky and A. Whitelaw (Oxford University Press, 2010); “The Suspension of History in Contemporary Media Arts,” Intermédialités, Spring 2008; “New Media’s Presentness and the Questioning of History: Craigie Horsfield’s Broadway Installation,” Cinémas, 2007; “The Temporalities of Video: Extendedness Revisited,” Art Journal, 2006; “New Media Art Hybridity and Augmented Reality: A Process for the Interaction of Art, (Neuro)science and AR Technology,” Convergence, 2005; “The Paradoxical Bodies of Contemporary Art,” in A Companion to Contemporary Art, ed. A. Jones (Blackwell, 2006); “The Disappearing Screen: An Incomplete Matter,” Parachute, 2004; “Redefinitions of Abjection in Contemporary Performances of the Female Body,” in Modern Art and the Grotesque, ed. F. Connelly (Cambridge University Press, 2003); “To Touch the Other: A Story of Corpo- Electronic Surfaces,” in The Feminism and Visual Cultural Reader, ed. A. Jones (Routledge, 2003); “Pipilotti Rist: Images as Quasi Objects,” n. paradoxa 7, 2001; “The Insufficiency of the Performative: Video Art at the Turn of the Millennium,” Art Journal, 2001; and “Vision and Insufficiency at the Turn of the Millennium: Rosemarie Trockel’s Distracted Eye,October, 2001.

Christine Ross is Professor and James McGill Chair in Contemporary Art History in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her main field of research is contemporary media arts, in particular: the relationship between media, aesthetics and subjectivity; spectatorship and interactivity studies; augmented reality; and reconfigurations of time and temporality in recent media arts.