Shopping Around: Time and Tide. A Selection of Photo-Media Impressions

James Loran Gillespie

May 2001

Interdisciplinary artist, James Loran Gillespie will be showing a recent series of photographs and image-text works in a feature exhibit at the Durham Art Gallery.

A Toronto based artist and scholar, James has also inhabited the Durham area for more than a decade. James' artistic career comprises a complex practice extending from, drawing, painting, photography and sculpture, to architectural stained glass, sculptural installation, and photo-media arts including experimental film and video, image-text works, and creative writing that includes graphic text works, and a novel and screenplay in progress. His public artworks can be seen at Hart House (U of T), Park Mansions (Toronto), and the Chancery of the Canadian Embassy/Beijing, China.

James is involved with curatorial and critical activity in the arts, and his reviews and articles appear in Canadian cultural journals and web sites. Also a cultural critic and art historian, James' scholarly research interests focus on critical theory and cultural studies in the arts, involving a political economy of the image, post-colonial studies, spectacle, and other psychological and inter-textual relations of the image.

Dr. Gillespie is newly appointed as Special Assistant Professor in the Fine Art Cultural Studies Programme at York University. He has taught in the faculty of fine arts at several universities and was recently Visiting Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Professor Gillespie has lectured internationally, on specific topics in art history and cultural theory, notably in England, France, Russia and China, and is writing a book called Art and Spectacle.