Talks

Beach Talk: Chris Gaudet on Richard Crashaw

August 7, 2016
4:00PM

Please join us for the launch of a new round of Or Gallery Beach Talks. This series, originally held in 2012 at various beaches around Vancouver, was curated by Jonathan Middleton and Jonah Gray and featured presentations thematically linked to the beach context. This year’s iteration will take up where the original series left off.

 

The first talk will take place at Locarno Beach at 4PM on August 7th. Chris Gaudet, a PhD candidate in the department of English at UBC, will present research from his dissertation, which takes up the (failed) aesthetic experiments of the seventeenth century and their reemergence in (late) modernity. His talk will focus specifically on the ways that:

The sphere and the bubble present themselves as sites for poetic reflection on form as such, and, in the seventeenth century, become capable of standing in for a range of historical crises and displacements. How to understand them when they are re-formed under the sign of Richard Crashaw’s wildly experimental poetics? The permanence, the perfection, of the form of the sphere, the impermanence of the barely-holding-itself-together, nevertheless held together in the ‘still’ ‘still’ ‘still’ of Crashaw’s soap bubbles, his tears, his drops of blood, which are all, in some way, the deformed, misshapen pearl of the baroque.

 

More talks TBA! Stay tuned via Facebook and Twitter for exact details on the location. Stick around after the talk for refreshments and grilling on the hibachi.

 

Also, don’t miss out on our latest publication, a risograph-printed transcription of Steven Maye’s 2012 Beach Talk, Surfaces for Rent: Distraction, Tactility, and the Gallery. It’s now available at the Or Bookstore for $5.