Please join Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) for a conversation between artists Jennifer Dickson and Jane Martin held in conjunction with genderhow?.

Dickson and Martin will take as a point of departure Dickson’s photographic and print series The Secret Garden (1976), which was commissioned by the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board for International Women’s Year in 1975. With practices grounded in feminism, (self-)representation, and the body, Dickson and Martin will share some of their observations and experiences of working as artists and cultural advocates over the past five decades.

Jennifer Dickson is known the world over for her hauntingly beautiful hand-tinted etchings and photographs. Over the past four decades, she has photographed gardens and architecture in Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and Turkey, creating sensuous works that combine photography, etching, and watercolour. Her work explores Western symbolism of historic gardens, statuary, and architecture, with their narratives of love, beauty, time, mortality, the body, gender, sexuality, and humans’ relationship to the natural world.

Dickson has exhibited extensively in Canada and internationally, and her work is represented in numerous public and private collections. In 1998, CUAG exhibited The Secret Garden, which are represented along with other bodies of work in CUAG’s collection. Dickson is the sole Canadian to have been elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, where she continues to exhibit and lecture regularly. Dickson received an honorary doctorate from the University of Alberta in 1988 and was named to the Order of Canada in 1995. She is recognized for her passionate cultural advocacy and leadership, receiving the Victor Tolgesy Award by the Council of the Arts Ottawa in 2002.

Since the 1970s, Jane Martin’s work in painting, drawing, lithography, installation, and video has been exhibited widely across Canada and abroad and is represented in many public collections including Carleton University Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and National Gallery of Canada. In 1999, CUAG presented her exhibition Jane Martin: Gathie’s Cupboard 1988-1998, with a catalogue essay by Christine Conley.

Martin was co-founder of Canadian Artists Representation Copyright Collective in 1988, and on the founding board of CANCOPY. She has worked as an advocate for the rights and representation of women artists, authoring studies that examined women’s participation on Canada Council juries, selection committees, and advisory boards and as grant recipients in the 1970s.

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