Dr. Roewan Crowe

Title: Professor (on sabbatical)
Phone: 204.786.9426
Email: r.crowe@uwinnipeg.ca

Biography:
Multidisciplinary artist and Professor Roewan Crowe is energized by acts of disruption, radical transformation and the tactical deployment of self-reflexivity. Born under the big skies of Saskatchewan and raised in scofflaw Alberta, Crowe left the prairies to deepen her engagements with art and feminism, and to do graduate studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. A return to the prairies inspired art and writing centered on queer feminist reclamation practices to ask questions about the land, whiteness and queer settler identities.

In their artistic practice they often enter into fatal wounded landscapes—sometimes violent and xenophobic —to explore possibilities for regeneration. Recent work includes: digShift(ongoing), a decolonizing and environmental reclamation project using site specific performance and multichannel installation to explore the shifting layers of an abandoned gas station; Lifting Stone, a queer femme performance/installation creating intimate stone encounters; and the queer Western text Quivering Land (ARP), a gritty feminist meditation on the possibilities of art to reckon with the ongoing legacies of violence and colonization. 

Their longstanding community practice is concerned with creating space for and building engaged feminist/queer/artistic communities. Their scholarly work seeks to open meaningful encounters with art through feminist engagement with a particular focus on artistic practitioner knowledges, collaboration, collectivity, and artistic processes.

Recently, as part of the artist collective, CONSTELACIONES, they traveled with artists Helene Vosters, Monica Martinez, Christina Hajjar, and Doris Difarnecio to the Atacama Desert in Chile (2016) to perform and create a monument, an unauthorized sound sculpture with ceramic forms created by Martinez. CONSTELACIONES embodies collective healing through art-making, kinship and vulnerability—rejecting isolation, silence, and disconnection in the face of trauma. 

Dr. Roewan Crowe and Dr. Helene Vosters co-edited the open access digital book, Return Atacama: Engaging Histories of Political Violence Through Performance and Durational Witnessing which assembles the many movements, reflections, and practices surrounding hemispheric artist collective CONSTELACIONES’s 2016 performance Return Atacama. This richly visual collection from the award winning HemiPress Gesture Series incorporates photography, video, drone footage, poetry, and prose, to produce a polyphonic experience of this politically urgent performance. Blurring the distinction between artistic and scholarly work, both the performance and this publication, which bears its name, probe the possibilities and limits of transnational creative collaboration, while “challenging the containment of trauma associated with political violence within isolated historical events and disciplinary or geographic locations.”

Dr. Crowe's most recent endeavour is the greenhouse: a feminist artlab for making and thinking. This space is a feminist art experiment, a space that focuses on artistic process and transparency. The greenhouse artlab opens possibilities for: the creation of new artistic works and research; collaboration on art projects with other artists, scholars, and community members; hosting artist residencies and working with students/community members on artistic/creative projects.

Sometimes Roewan updates their blog