Place and Standing in Canadian Art: Jack Humphrey and the Discourses of Regionalism, 1930–1967
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of place is an important and often underestimated aspect of Canadian art and its historiography.How does it serve to define, classify, or declassify certain art and artists?How does it function to determine standing in the Canadian art world?This dissertation considers the concept of place and why it matters in the history of Canadian art.Specifically, it considers the place-based signification inherent in the concept of regionalism, and the ways that "regionalism" has functioned to assign value and meaning in Canadian art history.It does so by employing the case study as its methodology, focussing on the life and art of New Brunswick painter Jack Humphrey (1901-1967).Recognized during his lifetime as a modernist painter, Humphrey was nevertheless often defined by his "regionalism" in the critical, curatorial and art historical discourses of his day.The time period of the study is 1930 to 1967, the decades of the Great Depression, the Second World War and the postwar years when culture played a critical role in the formation of a modern Canadian nation.This dissertation follows two threads.The first is the concept of regionalism as a discursive formation, one that serves to define and delimit "regional" art and artists as conservative, minor, and antimodernist.In effect, it serves to disembody place by means of its hegemonic structuring principles.The dissertation's second thread seeks to disrupt regionalism's disembodying effects by focussing on the lived experience of place and its meaning in the everyday.The case study serves both threads.It provides a lens through which to view the concept of regionalism in a centralist narrative.It discloses regionalism's antimodernist tropes, and its assumptions and statements of backwardness and conservatism.At the iv same time, by presenting a narrative of the life lived, the case study offers rich discontinuities that disrupt regionalism's discursive truisms.Bringing together life and art as the lived experience of place is a rereading and restaging of art history, inserting situated knowledge into its interpretative frames.This is a refocussing of the object of study itself; that is, an embodied art history in which place, among other lived experiences, defines the subject of inquiry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.058 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".