Professor Norman Cornett: screening/projection

SASA, STUDENT ART STUDIES ASSOCIATION, in collaboration with the FOFA Gallery is presenting a screening of renowned feature documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin’s film; Professor Norman Cornett: "Since when do we divorce the right answer from an honest answer?"

The film “pays tribute to Professor Norman Cornett, a popular Religious Studies professor dismissed by McGill University in 2007.” The institutional rejection of Professor Cornett’s unconventional teaching method - dialogic teaching - emphasized how different forms of knowledge expression and creation are not always recognized or legitimized within dominant culture. In this way, the film draws parallels to First Nations and palliative care issues.

The event will be open to all fine arts students. It presents the opportunity for important dialogue about methods of teaching and learning applicable to the arts. An exhibition of artwork demonstrating this will be in the FOFA Gallery during the period when the film is to be screened. Matthieu Brouillard and Donigan Cumming, the two exhibiting artists, have used this approach in their practice. Both artists are from different generations of Canadian photographers. Instead of viewing Brouillard’s works as being influenced by Cumming as their historical successor, the artists are presenting their works in a dialogical method. Through their differences and similarities, the two artists have been able to raise shared questions about photographic creation.

The film and its relation to the exhibition, in the FOFA Gallery, provides multiple access points to students from Art Education, Art History and Studio Arts to understand different ways of knowledge creation and dissemination and follows the undergraduate Art History Conference Continuing Discourses: Women and Art as well as the Graduate Art Education Conference On the Edge: Taking Risks in Art Education.

Professor Norman Cornett will be present for the screening and after the screening, will engage in conversation with François Morelli. Morelli is a trans-disciplinary artist and educator, Professor in Studio Arts at Concordia University.