These gorgeous pysanky eggs were created for Rebecca Johnson’s Business Associations class in 2018. They are based on J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy’s book Take Back the Economy. As you can see in the following video and photos, the text and images on these eggs address taking back work, the market, property, business, and finance.
Video and photos by Max Gross
This box and the medicines contained, were created and gathered in 2018 for Rebecca Johnson’s Business Associations course. The artist wanted to learn more about First Nation’s connections to plant medicines and the economy around them. The artist gathered the medicines on a trip to Salt Spring Island. The contents are licorice fern, juniper berries, madrone leaves and bark, grand fir pine needles, and heather flowers. The box is made of birch bark.
Photos by Max Gross
Photo by Max Gross
This project, produced for Rebecca Johnson’s Business Associations class, reflects on the common passive style of investing many of us do through mutual funds and other conventional diversified investment methods. It goes “inside the box” to look at ethical problems behind these conventional investing methods. It looks at how one can end up investing in projects that can hurt life on earth.
Inside the boxes of the artwork, the artists take you into the violent aspects of certain companies which many of us unkowingly invest in. They artists also make a pledge to begin divesting their own money from these kinds of destructive projects.
The following unboxing video is split into two parts:
Video and photos by Max Gross
Margaret Lovely created this project for a course taught by Gillian Calder (Law 357: Sexual Orientation and the Law).
[This] is a full sized figure that was handed in for Sexual Orientation class. It is the creation of an Indigenous student who has a partner who is is a trans-man. The figure represents the various ways she is living the life of a two-spirited person. Both the front and the back are meant to be seen and draws on different notions of what it means to be present in such a body. I have this figure in my office. I take it with me to presentations where I am talking to others of my colleagues about the transformative role projects can play in the teaching and learning of law. Teachers from the art school were just enamoured by this work. The figure is presented as looking out the window of this room so that everyone who is passing by and looks through that window can see her.
Caitlin Stockwell and Kaitlin Keufler created this book and mobile on textiles for Rebecca Johnson’s 2017 Business Associations class.
Flip through the book here, and listen to Rebecca Johnson discuss the project below:
“This project of textiles and mobiles was created in the context of Business Associations Law 315. In this class, the students were asked to respond in some form to J.K. Gibson-Graham’s book Take Back the Economy. This particular project is an engagement with taking back work; taking back economy. And the two students who worked on this together took as their question tracking the relationship between majority and minority worlds through fabrics and through women’s work. So, in these two documents, if I can call them that, . . . the book and the mobile, they sought to understand what would be the realtionships between the fabrics we buy and the places that they are produced. On the mobile, what you see is beads representing the distance that the fabric in question travelled from the place of its origin to Canada. So you see various lengths of distance as well as the sizes of paper representing what proportion of fabric produced by that country enters the Canadian market. What is also interesting here is thinking about the ways in which those relations are invisible to the consumer; the ways in which . . . it is very hard to locate the actual locations between the women who produce them and very often the women who purchase them or wear them.”
