Guest Speakers

MOWRY BADEN

Panelist
Sculptor ~ Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Through his sculptures Mowry Baden challenges viewers to interact with his work and forces them to explore the boundaries of their senses and perception. He conveniently places his work in public spaces, requiring the public to develop opinions and reactions. He is generally interested in public interaction with art. He has been commissioned to create public works of art in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Pittsburgh, Washington and Victoria.

Articulating an internal awareness of movement and posture has always been the most important element in Baden’s work. Over the past 37 years, he has developed various methods of de-centering vision and interfering with habitual human gestures. He has built harnesses, furniture, rooms, pathways and catwalks, all with the goal of impinging upon the viewer's movements and awakening a physical self-awareness that was previously unconscious.

Baden tries to provoke a perceptual crisis that assaults the viewer’s confidence in the information that comes through the senses. His practice has always involved materials, just like any artist who makes objects. Ideally, however, he is less interested in the object than in the experience. He wants the viewer to enter the object (or the space) and have an experience that is visceral, internal, and sensorially cross-circuited.

Baden has exhibited extensively across North America since the 1960s and his work is in collections in Canada and the U.S. He is the recent recipient of the 2006 Governor General’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Media Arts as well as the 1996 Canada Council’s Victor Martin Lynch Staunton Award. Born in Los Angeles in 1936, Baden graduated with his BA from Pomona College and MA from Stanford University in California. After teaching at Stanford and the University of British Columbia, among others, Baden began his tenure at the University of Victoria in 1975, from which he retired in 1997.