September 12, 2002

Thursday, September 12, 2002

Art galleries celebrate retired prof
'The war against the innocents'
Campus events for a Thursday

Editor:
Chris Redmond
credmond@uwaterloo.ca

[Urquhart]

Art galleries celebrate retired prof

Two exhibitions will open this weekend to begin a community celebration of artist and retired UW professor Tony Urquhart (left). Several special events and an exhibition in UW's own art gallery, opening next week, are also planned.

Urquhart was recognized in the late 1950s and early 1960s as one of Canada's pioneering abstractionists, UW art gallery director Carol Podedworny says in her introduction to the on-campus show. "Since the 1960s, Urquhart has followed an independent and autonomous path centred upon his distinctive box format," she adds. "This exhibition examines two series of paintings: one group arising out of the artist's experimentations within modernism in the 1960s, and the other from recent studio practice that has reflected -- in 1999 -- on the work of the 1960s."

From 1972 to 1999, Urquhart was a fine arts faculty member at UW where he helped established the MFA program. In 1995 he was awarded the Order of Canada.

In recent years, Urquhart has returned to landscape painting, "exploring the possibilities of painting at the turn of the 21st century as well as rethinking the codes of representation of visual forms." And he is the artist of "Our House", an outdoor work more than ten feet tall and wide ("steel structure and enclosed plantings") at the Grey Silo golf course and Walter Bean Trail in Waterloo's new RIM Park.

Exhibitions of Urquhart's works are being held at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, at 101 Queen Street North in Kitchener, and at the Harbinger Gallery, 22 Dupont Street East, Waterloo. Both exhibitions open on Saturday.

The KWAG show -- "Power of Invention: Drawings from Seven Decades by Tony Urquhart" -- will feature more than 100 drawings and selections from sketchbooks, journals and reliquaries of Urquhart's travels. A separate exhibition of works from the gallery's collection will include a selection of prints and the painting "Threshold V".

At the Harbinger Gallery, a collection of Urquhart's drawings, from 1949 to the present, will be on display. Tracing the artists development, "the earlier works highlight gestural use of brush or pen whereas the later works value intricate precision."

Coming next week -- the opening will be September 19 at 7 p.m. -- is "The Revenants/Long Shadows", in UW's own gallery in the Modern Languages building. With 64 works from private and public collections across Ontario, it's the largest painting exhibition of Urquhart's work ever mounted. A curator's talk about the exhibition is scheduled for October 3.

September 18 at 7:30 p.m. in the Theatre of the Arts, Urquhart will be interviewed by UW author-in-residence Rob Reid as part of a series of conversations or "Portraits of the Artist" which Reid is conducting over the fall and winter terms. They will explore stages of Urquhart's development as an artist, and the difficulties and rewards of living an artist's life.

The UW exhibition continues through October 24, with a talk by the show9s curator, Joyce Zemans, director of the arts administration program at York University, on Thursday, October 3, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. in ECH room 1219.

The City of Waterloo is celebrating Urquhart with a sculpture installation. Our House, a steel structure enclosing plantings, "explores tensions between nature and created artifact." The sculpture is at the entrance to the Grey Silo Golf Course and the Walter Bean Train in RIM Park, Waterloo.

In Kitchener, Urquhart will present a talk about his favourite artists and their works on Thursday, October 19, at 8 p.m. in the Heritage Room, Kitchener City Hall.

'The war against the innocents' -- from the remarks by Lowell Ewert of Conrad Grebel University College at yesterday's September 11 memorial service

Remembering is a dangerous thing, and my concern is that we are often being encouraged by our leaders to remember the wrong things about what happened a year ago. The terrorist attacks have been described by political leaders and the media as an event that has "changed everything." While the attacks on US soil represented a dramatic change of terrorist tactics, I don't think it is accurate or fair to say that everything changed. Sadly, it seems to me that the mass killings of a year ago were far too typical. For as Caleb Carr has written in his book entitled The Lessons of Terror, attacks against innocent civilians can be traced back as far as the Roman Empire when the Romans employed ruthless violence and cruelty against civilians. It is not the unusual nature of the September 11 attacks that should shock us, but rather the fact that this kind of cold blooded killing has been so much a part of political violence for so long.

In the last six decades, our world has seen an unprecedented level of violence which has lead to millions of civilians murdered by efficiently run state operations as well as by the grass roots killing machines of the kind we saw in Rwanda where "mothers with babies strapped to their backs killed other mothers with babies strapped to their backs."

Lest we think that such things have disappeared from our world in recent years, recall the testimony that unfolded in the Milosevic trail in The Hague last Friday when a Yugoslav soldier testified how he and his unit were ordered on March 25, 1999 to go the village of Trjne and ensure that "no one should remain alive there." He reported that when the massacre was taking place, he "remembers most vividly how there was a baby and it had been shot with three bullets and was screaming unbelievably loudly. Never a night goes by," he continued, "without my dreaming about that child." No, unfortunately it is not true that the events of last year represented a radical new pattern of attacks on civilians. It was simply another cold blooded act of mass murder in the long-standing war against the innocents, one of an endless series of operations which continue elsewhere in our world unabated. . . .

What sets us apart today from what happened a year ago is that unlike the photographers who trained their telephoto lenses on the burning upper floors of the WTC, we have the ability to respond to what we see. We can see the persons who are trapped in the burning twin towers of hatred and violence. We can see the victims clinging to a desperate hope for peace.

And we can act. At the University of Waterloo, we have responded, and we can continue to respond, when we deny a home in our midst to intolerance and discrimination. We can respond in our communities by giving hope to those who have none, and by providing the fertile ground of opportunity in which hatred and despair cannot live. We can respond in our country by reaffirming diversity and by ensuring everyone a fair and equal chance to achieve their hopes and dreams. And finally, we can respond internationally by "screaming unbelievably loudly" in resisting the call to rush blindly into new cycles of war that will have no end and which will ultimately, only sow more seeds of hatred and revenge.

The power to create the kind of world that we want is in our hands. The terrorists have lost.

[Slomka]
Brenda Slomka (right), president of the Federation of Students, is still Brenda Slomka, for now. The student handbook being distributed this week calls her "Brenda Koprowski", but that won't be official until October 12, when she's getting married, a statement from the Feds said yesterday. "Brenda will continue to be known as Brenda Slomka for the remainder of September and the first eleven days of October."

Campus events for a Thursday

"Do you have questions or concerns about the recent UW-Microsoft

Last week's Gazette story

Statement from the dean of engineering

Discussion on 'uwstudent.org'

Partnership?" the Engineering Society asks students. To deal with such matters, EngSoc will hold an open forum tonight, starting at 5:00, in Rod Coutts Engineering Lecture Hall room 101. UW president David Johnston, dean of engineering Sujeet Chaudhuri, and the chair of electrical and computer engineering, Tony Vannelli, are among those who will speak.

The pension and benefits committee is meeting today (8:30 to noon, Needles Hall room 3004) to discuss items ranging from the January 1, 2002, valuation of the pension fund to "a macro level examination" of the faculty and staff extended health care plan.

In the Student Life Centre, Clubs Days continue today, with displays and activities from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Library books that were checked out on term loan before the beginning of August are due today and should be returned or renewed.

"Welcome Week" continues for graduate students, with "info day" at noontime at the Graduate House, "campus rec sports day" from 5 to 7 p.m., and "Artie Fulkin's Golden Trivia" from 7 to 9 p.m., followed by a Welcome Mixer with "dancing, prizes, food!" All graduate students are welcome.

Making new optometry students welcome, meantime, is the point of a week's schedule of orientation events there. A crowd will be heading off to Niagara Falls for this afternoon and evening.

The launch of a local branch for the Canadian Water Resources Association is scheduled for 7:00 tonight, in Rod Coutts Engineering Lecture Hall room 309.

Need I add: the first Boys 'n' Girls Night of the term gets going tonight at Federation Hall.

The department of drama will be presenting Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" later this term, and auditions will be held Tuesday through Thursday next week. More information is available from the drama department office in the Modern Languages building.

Also in the middle distance: UW staff association members and their families are invited to volunteer for the Lung Association Hike for Life, to be held October 6 at the Laurel Creek Conservation Area. More information is available from Verna Keller in UW's teaching resource office, phone ext. 3857.

CAR

TODAY IN UW HISTORY
September 12, 1975: Classes are cancelled for first-year students taking a set of experimental achievement tests designed to find out the relationship between high school marks and readiness for university study. September 12, 1997: The university introduces a new logo.