~Broken Pencil Magazine~

Public's purpose is to showcase innovative ideas and forms of art. It is a stunningly designed art journal that explores how critical issues intersect with art and visual culture. Featuring Canadian and international artists and writers, each issue curates a unique assemblage of art projects and writing that reflect a contemporary theme.

Public encourages a broad range of dialogue by bringing together artists, theorists, curators, philosophers, creative writers, and historians; by always publishing a diverse range of contemporary artists' projects; by experimenting with alternative forms of dissemination (i.e. DVD's); and by inviting guest editors from a variety of communities and organizations.

In 1988 the journal Public was launched by the Public Access Collective, which simultaneously began to publish the journal and curate public art exhibitions that utilized urban screens as a means to consider the potential of public art for both engendering collective experience and insight and for inciting debates and raising awareness in a city (Toronto) that was quickly privatizing every inch of shared space. Since that time, the journal Public has expanded its content, but continues its mandate to investigate ideas of art and culture within the urban context.

In the past twenty years the landscape of the public has changed dramatically: the Internet has emerged as an important space for consolidating and collaborating, bringing with it a renewed emphasis on the figure of the commons; spatial topographies have been transformed through the new architectures of information and media; temporary autonomous zones have been used as performance spaces; non-places such as airports have become important sites of critical investigation for artists and activists; counter-publics and scenes have been created through events both spontaneous and community-based; and boundaries (national, urban, and personal) have become at once more blurred and more policed.

Public continues to explore the intersections of visual culture with critical studies: It exists as an intellectual and creative forum that focuses on how aesthetic, theoretical, and critical issues intersect with art and visual culture.

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Editorial Collective Members

Dan Adler is assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at York University in Toronto. A specialist in the history of art writing and the aesthetics of installation art, he has published in the London-based journal Art History and regularly contributes reviews to Artforum and Canadian Art Magazine. An alumnus of the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program, he holds a doctorate in art history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He has taught previously at Hunter College, RISD, the University of Guelph, and the New School in New York. He was formerly senior editor of the Bibliography of the History of Art at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. His book about the German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven was recently published by Afterall Books/MIT Press.

Ken Allan is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Lethbridge, teaching courses in 20th-century art, photography, and avant-garde cinema. Among other subjects of interest, his main research specialization has been Conceptual art and the history of artists’ magazine projects. He has contributed the essays “Understanding Information” to the book Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (2004); “The A-Poetic Poetry of Bernar Venet” to Public (2003); as well as “Business Interests, 1969-72: N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Les Levine, Bernar Venet, and John Latham,” to Parachute (2002).

Christine Davis is a visual artist based in Toronto. She is a founding member of the Public Access Collective and the journal Public. Davis has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, and her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including: Projections, Hart House, University of Toronto (2007); La Biennale de Montréal (2007); Paradise Now: Creating the Genetic Revolution, Exit Art, New York (2000); Press/Enter: Between Seduction and Disbelief, The Power Plant, Toronto (1995); Prospect '93, Frankfurter Kunstverein; Beau, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa (1992); and Embodying Faith, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1991), among others. Christine Davis is represented by Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto.

Jim Drobnick is a critic, curator, and Associate Professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design. His writings have appeared in anthologies such as Foodculture (2000), Crime and Ornament (2002), and Empire of the Senses (2004), as well as in catalogues for Aernout Mik (2004), Su-Mei Tse (2006), and Carolee Schneemann (2007). He is the editor of Aural Cultures (2004) and The Smell Culture Reader (2006). In 1994 he co-founded the curatorial collaborative DisplayCult, which has organized CounterPoses (1998), Museopathy (2001), and Listening Awry (2007), among other exhibitions.

Caitlin Fisher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and holds a Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture at York University. A theorist, creative writer, and digital artist with broad interdisciplinary interests, she completed York's first hypertextual dissertation in 2000. Her hypermedia novella, These Waves of Girls, was awarded the International Electronic Literature Award for Fiction in 2001. Most recently, she co-edited an issue of PUBLIC on digital confession and narrative. She directs the Augmented Reality Lab in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York, where she is currently working to construct and theorize spatial narrative environments that combine the physical world with digital traces and artifacts.

Monika Kin Gagnon has published widely on art, cultural politics and media, and is Associate Professor in Communication Studies at Concordia University. She is author of Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2000) and with Toronto video artist, Richard Fung and eleven artists, 13 Conversations About Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002), translated in 2006 as Territoires et Trajectoires: 14 dialogues sur l’art et les constructions raciales, culturelles et identitaires. Her current project, “Archiving R-69,” is exploring cultural memory, film and archives, in a collaboration with her late artist father that she calls “Posthumous Cinema.”

Saara Liinamaa bio coming soon.

Susan Lord teaches at Queen's University in the Department of Film and Media, with cross-appointments to the Departments of Art and Women's Studies. Her main research areas are cultural studies of media and technology, Cuban film and visual culture, and feminist film culture in Canada and internationally. She also curates film, video and new media programs. She is co-editor of two collections of essays: Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinemas (2007) and Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence (2006). She has been a member of the Public Access collective since 1993.

Scott Lyall is a Canadian artist who works in sculpture and painting, typographic and drawing media, and scenographic design. He has exhibited across Canada, the United States, and Europe, with recent solo shows in Paris, New York, London, and Toronto. He has also worked with artists in performance situations, including at the 2008 SITE Santa Fe Biennial in New Mexico, and with the choreographer Maria Hassabi in New York and Marfa, Texas. After completing his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, he spent several years in practice in New York and London, England. Lyall’s work can be viewed at Susan Hobbs Gallery (Toronto), Miguel Abreu (New York), and Sutton Lane (London and Paris).

Janine Marchessault is a Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization at York University (Toronto, Canada). She is the author of Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media (2005) and is the editor of several collections, including Mirror Machine: Video and Identity (1994); and co-editor of Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women Filmmakers (1999); Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media (2000) and Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (2007). She is the Director of the Visible City Project + Archive (www.visiblecity.ca) at York University, which is examining artists' cultures in the context of globalization in Toronto, Havana and Helsinki. She is a founding member of the Public Access Curatorial Collective and the journal Public.

Dorit Naaman is a filmmaker and film theorist teaching at Queen's University in Canada. She was born and raised in Jerusalem, and her academic work concentrates on Middle Eastern cinemas. She is currently working on a book project on the visual representation of Palestinian and Israeli women fighters. As a filmmaker she is interested in documentaries, home movies, and a diary format. She developed a video format she calls DiaDocuMEntaRy, and has so far six short videos in the series.

Deborah Root is a Toronto-based writer and critic. She is the author of Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference and numerous articles on cultural politics and the arts. She holds a Ph.D. in Social and Political Thought from York University, and has taught in Canada and overseas.

Chloe Brushwood Rose is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University. Her current research examines the multimedia storytelling of educational biographies, with an emphasis on theories of aesthetic experience and psychoanalytic theories of learning. Her scholarly and artistic work has appeared in several publications and she is co-author of Policy Unplugged: Dis/connections between Technology Policy and Practice in Canadian Schools (2007). She has a series of photographs published in the award-winning book Boys Like Her: Transfictions (1998), is co-editor of the Lambda short-listed anthology Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity (2002), and, most recently, is curator of a DVD compilation of video shorts for Video Out in Vancouver, entitled Gender Currents (2007).

Administration

Aleksandra Kaminska is Managing Editor of Public and Director of Public Access.

Pamela Smith is financial and office manager of Public and Public Access.

Contact:
By email: public@yorku.ca
By mail:
303 Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts
York University
4700 Keele St.
Toronto, ON
M3J 1P3