Part of me is always surprised whenever I see evidence of right-brained activity within the U of T community, as it often seems like the campus is overrun with students who care for nothing but engineering, commerce, or science. It’s always reassuring to see the capacity for creativity and ingenuity is still alive and well at our school. Enter Exhibit A, the culmination of a year’s worth of work for U of T’s Visual Studies Department fourth-year thesis class.
Exhibit A displays the work of the 20 students in the class, and is organized and executed entirely by their own hands. The process involved raising funds to secure a gallery, finding a suitable space, and designing and printing posters. To raise funds, the class organized two band nights at Rancho Relaxo, and Victoria, Innis, and New colleges, the Fine Art Department, and the Fine Art Student Union generously supported the project as well.
The show, which runs until April 8 at SOF Art House, includes photography, video, painting, collage, and everything in between. Several large installation pieces dominate the main space, one of which is by Emily French. “Gail” is an installation of six innocuous looking folding chairs, arranged in two back-to-back rows reminiscent of a doctor’s waiting room. When a chair is sat on, an audio clip begins to play out of an attached speaker. Each chair plays a different clip, all of which join together as the narrative of one woman’s long battle against cancer, and her experiences at the hands of modern medicine.
The show also displays a wide variety of photography, much of which is the work of Nicholas Jardeleza. Two series of photographs in particular show his heightened concern for issues of sexuality and gendering in our society. In “Beauty and the Beast,” a black-and-white photo series, he juxtaposes a recurring image of a male torso with images of a seductively posed female. As the viewer’s eye moves from left to right, the female is shown in less and less clothing until she is finally nude. In “Secrets: The I Hate Myself Series,” Jardeleza takes five images of the male body and inscribes them with loaded text. A torso is shown with the words “I am powerful. I can take her,” an arm with “I am strong. I can hold her down,” and finally, male genitals with the words “I am a man. I hate myself.”
There is also the “Shelter” photo series by Katie Babcock, and “The most beautiful place I’ve been,” a series of photo collages by Sarah Phillips. Babcock’s large-scale colour photos show human subjects in cocoon-like environments of synthetic materials, such as plastic or Styrofoam, emphasizing the fragility of the body and its struggle against natural decay. Phillips’s collages illustrate her struggle to reconstruct the final months of her late brother’s life. The works layer colour-saturated images of her brother with stark black text, segments of correspondence she has received from his friends.
Also not to be missed are the fabric collages of Kate Busby and the playful video “Friends and Lovers” by Paula Zamecka.
Exhibit A is impressive for both its execution and for the quality of the work it contains. It’s a must-see for anyone interested in the visual arts, or for any engineering, commerce, or science student who’s ever wondered what it’s like on the other side.
