Plural
Exhibitions

2016 University of Toronto MVS Studio Program Graduating Exhibition

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University of Toronto Art Centre
15 King's College Circle

 

The Art Museum at the University of Toronto is pleased to exhibit the graduating projects of the 2017 Master of Visual Studies graduate students of the Studio program Evan Tyler, Sona Safaei-Sooreh, Léa Granthamand Sandra Brewster.

Opening Reception

Friday March 24, 2017, 6-8pm
University of Toronto Art Centre
15 King's College Circle

The exhibition will run until April 15, 2017.

 
 

Global Architecture: Hida, Japan exhibition

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Larry Wayne Richards Gallery, 230 College Street
Monday - Friday, 9 am - 5 pm

 

The Daniels Faculty’s summer Global Architecture program offers graduate students an opportunity to study abroad with a design and research-oriented focus.

In 2016, students traveled to Japan to participate in the Hida Smartcraft Studio, a collaborative design workshop involving faculty and students from University of Toronto, Parsons School of Design, National Chaio Tung University of Taiwan, and Japan’s Institute of Advanced Media and Science.

Situated northeast of Tokyo in a mountainous region of Japan, Hida’s primary industry is sustainable forestry and wood carpentry. Traditional wood joinery techniques that structure most of ancient Japanese architecture originated here. In recent years, due to cheaper prices of lumber from Southeast Asia and the lack of interest from younger generations to learn traditional craftsmanship, the Hida forests are at risk of falling into neglect while ancient woodworking techniques such as kumiki are being forgotten.

Working in inter-school teams, students developed collaborative prototypes equally invested in ancient craft and current technology. Hida Smartcraft studio challenged a cohort of international students to:

  • Learn and practice traditional Japanese wood carpentry techniques;
  • Experience local Hida culture and identify potential strategies for social or economic advancement;
  • Experiment with basic IoT sensor technology to investigate the dovetailing of user responsive sensors embedded in wood products.

 

FACULTY

WH VIVIAN LEE University of TorontoDaniels Faculty of Landscape, Architecture, and Design

KYLE LI The New School, Parsons School of Design

JUNE-HAO HOU National Chaio Tung University of Taiwan

SHIGERU KOBAYASHI Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences, Japan

KENJI WADAGifu Academy of Forest Science and Culture

STUDENT TEAMS

JAVED KHAN (UT)
MARTIN LUI (UT)
CHIEH PING CHEN (PSD)
CHUN HENG LIN (NCTU)
KANA HAGIRI, TA

YIMING CHEN (UT)
RICHARD FREEMAN (UT)
CHUCK KUAN (PSD)
CHUN CHAN CHIEN (NCTU)
HIDEAKI ASAOKA, TA

BRANDON BERGEM (UT)
BILLY KC LEE (UT)
QINQIN YANG (PSD)
CHENG WEI HUNG (NCTU)
HIROAKI OHBA, TA

PENGXIAN MENG (UT)
GENEVIEVE SIMMS (UT)
MIXUAN LI (PSD)
CHILI CHENG (NCTU)
CHIEN I LEE (NCTU)
MASAYASU GOTO, TA

MENGJIE CHENG (UT)
SAMSON TAM (UT)
RAY WU (UT)
CHUN YUNG WANG (NCTU)
KAZUYA SANO, TA

 
 

Toronto Ravines Exhibition and Reception

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Eric Arthur Gallery, 230 College Street

 
 

Associate Professor Alissa North, director of the Master of Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Toronto and Associate Professor Bradley Cantrell, director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Degree Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design are pleased to invite you to review graduate studio projects on Toronto’s Ravines.

The City of Toronto and other stakeholders have recently taken great interest in the potential of its ravines — the multiple rivers and their valleys that cut into the city’s otherwise mostly flat topography. Laying out the city in a grid, Toronto’s early developers buried its smaller rivers and creeks, filling in wetlands to allow the grid to prevail. Today, there is little undeveloped land around the ravines, which now face challenging — and increasing — environmental pressures due to significant flooding, aged infrastructure, and an ever-increasing population seeking urban recreation opportunities within.

If the ravines fall into a state of disrepair, their ability to perform substantially as green infrastructure for the city will be compromised. In early 2015, various City of Toronto divisions, along with the TRCA began consultation with the public and a wide range of stakeholders to develop a Toronto Ravine Strategy. Daniels Faculty students in this Option Studio were provided guidance from The City of Toronto to help envision and develop innovative design ideas to inspire targeted catalytic solutions of change.

What if Toronto’s ravines were thought of as a system of flows, rather than delimited non-dimensional green shapes on maps? How would their relationship with the city change? Could they productively erode and deposit, change shape, or even spread? Could the ravines be held accountable for the ecosystems services they provide to the city? Would this enhance their value, resiliency, and appreciation? How could the city’s ravines be imaginatively visualized to ignite new perceptions, understandings, and interactions?

Join us on Monday, December 12 from 4:00 – 6:00pm to view our students’ final projects, which aim to answer many of these questions.

Course code: LAN3016
Course Name: Design Studio Option: Toronto Ravine Re-Create—Design Local III
Professors: Alissa North, with guest Professor Brad Cantrell
Program: Master of Landscape Architecture

 
 
 
Eyeball poster

Eyeball: Visual studies undergraduate exhibition

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North and South Borden Building, 487 and 563 Spadina Crescent

All are invited to the annual undergraduate Visual Studies exhibition and party on Friday, December 9. The exhibition will feature work by second, third and fourth year undergraduate students, and will include refreshments and a cash bar.

Visit the Eyeball Facebook event page for more details and updates.

Three X Five: Visual Studies Undergraduate Thesis Exhibition

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563 Spadina Crescent, North Borden Building
Opening reception: Friday, April 15,  6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
The exhibition will also be open Saturday, April 16 and Sunday, April 17 from 12-5 PM.

Three X Five — the 2016 Visual Studies undergraduate thesis exhibition — will feature the work of 15 Daniels Faculty students. These students spent the full 8 month duration of their fourth year exploring a final project using such mediums as photography, video and sound installation, physical installation, painting, and drawing. 

The exhibition will feature work by:

Connor Buck
Shannon Gagnon
Chantal Hassard
Aliya Karmali
Andrew Keung
Jiemin Lin
Sara Mozafari
Miyoshi Nagao
Naichen Pan
Bethany Pile
Anton Skorishchenko
Tawny Stoiber
Winnie Wu
Vicky Yang
Ru Yap

The opening reception will take place from 6 PM - 9 PM on Friday, April 15 in the North Borden Building, 563 Spadina Crescent. Refreshments will be provided. The show will also run from 12-5 PM on Saturday, April 16 and Sunday, April 17.

Lo-Fab | MASS Design Group

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Eric Arthur Gallery, 230 College Street. The gallery is open Monday to Friday, 9:30 am - 5:00 pm.
The exhibition has been extended until July 15, 2016.

The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is pleased to present Lo-Fab, a new exhibition featuring work by MASS Design Group. MASS’s work explores how architecture can address social challenges, effect systemic change, and mobilize communities. 

Lo-Fab – locally fabricated – speaks to MASS’s approach to the design and building process, which highlights and scales local innovation and ideas, hires local labor, and uses local materials.

Lo-Fab showcases two projects: The GHESKIO Cholera Treatment Center in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti; and the never-before exhibited Ilima Primary School in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

Please join us for a reception celebrating the exhibition — which will include a screening of two new short films about MASS Design Group’s work — on Thursday, March 31, from 6:30pm to 9:00pm.

Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition featuring the work of undergraduate students in U of T's visual studies programs

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University of Toronto Art Centre
15 King's College Circle
Opening reception: Friday, March 18, 6 PM - 8 PM
Runs until April 9, 2016

The University of Toronto Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition showcases the artistic excellence of undergraduate students in the University of Toronto’s tri-campus visual studies programs. Selected for artistic merit and originality, these works highlight the artists’ diverse and experimental practices. Among the works, various thematic resonances emerge organically. Many use technologies as tools to manipulate the body and confront perceived identities, while others foreground the passing of time and its powerful effect on the self.

Featuring work by Daniels Faculty Visual Studies students Ameen Ahmed, Seo Eun “Sunny” Kim, Charlene Lo, Alvin Luong, Miyoshi NagaoNaichen Pan, Maximilian Suillerot,  and Yi Zhang.

Also featuring the work by U of T students in other visual studies programs Patrick Atienza, Daniel Bernal, Olivia Brouwer, Carol Cheong, Allison Clayton, Rebecca Dedrick, Min Joo “Emily” Jung, Katarina Kaneff, Shavon Madden, Matthew Morales, Dahyun Nam, Royce Wei, Shu­han “Suzanne” Yeh, Audrey Yip, Muzhen “Suzie” Zhang.

Curated by Master of Museum Studies Students Samantha Purvis-Johnston, Katelyn Roughley and Janine Zylstra.

The Art Museum is pleased to welcome Renée van der Avoird, Associate Curator at the MacLaren Art Centre as a Guest Curatorial Mentor, and Jon Davies, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, as the Juror for the 2016 exhibition.

Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table, exhibition curated by MVS Curatorial student Emelie Chhangur

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Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
7 Hart House Circle
Opening reception: Friday, March 18, 6 PM - 8 PM
Runs until April 30, 2016

A composition by Emelie Chhangur
With arrangements by Diane Borsato, Aleesa Cohene, Erika DeFreitas, Derek Liddington, Gertrude Stein, and Terrarea

The tableau has come off the wall.

This exhibition is a rehearsal for Gertrude Stein’s 1922 play Objects Lie on a Table. It is also a dramaturgical proposition for its contemporary staging and reception. Objects Lie on a Table is a “still life” but its composition is not simply what is fixed in the frame, static in the picture. In this non-narrative play, a constellation of activities—of objects and people coming and going—dynamically shapes its form through an arrangement that is never resolved: in Stein’s “still life” the play of objects and relations that constitute “dramatic action” are only ever “equal to its occasion” (105). As a still-life-in-movement, Objects Lie on a Table playfully performs and plays around with pictorial conventions, as well as doing other strange and funny things. So we shall see.

Objects Lie on a Table could be considered a conversation between material objects and the spaces and people that shape and are shaped by their presence, their proximity, and their purposes. The play is a compositional experiment that takes the still life genre as a prompt to reconsider relations between subjects and objects (agency) or foreground and background (gestalt) or parts and wholes (mereology) and propose new ways of thinking arrangement that, in turn, arrange new ways of thinking. Just as Stein’s still life was composed in the continuous present—a mode of writing she likened to the pictorial innovations of her contemporaries, such as the painters Picasso or Cézanne—our rehearsal for her play today is developed as an iterative form (the rehearsal) through which to think, not about objects already arranged, but rather to think through objects that make new arrangements. We take our cue from the “nuns” that open the play. Perhaps a symbol of order and restraint, these nuns are in fact playing with objects, having “fun with funny things” (105), altering arrangements, in other words, messing with the system.

In 1922, Stein was asking questions in her time period that are equally relevant to ours—questions about relationality, systems theory, process thinking, and ontology of objects. In Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table subject matter becomes the matter of subjects and its business the subjects of matter—a still life for the 21st century, perhaps. Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table likewise is composed of the arrangements proposed by contemporary visual artists Diane Borsato, Aleesa Cohene, Erika DeFreitas, Derek Liddington, and Terrarea. Their practices offer new possibilities for thinking through connections made in the continuous present as ways to explore the new time-sense of this historic play—now as a composition in an art gallery and as an exhibition making its own arrangements.

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This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto.

This exhibition is part of the graduating Master of Visual Studies 2016 cohort, including:
How a Living Day is Made, curated by cheyanne turions, featuring the work of Aisha Sasha John, Walter Scott and Rachelle Sawatsky at the Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto Scarborough Campus, 21 April–11 June 2016. Opening reception: Thursday, 21 April 2016, 6–8 PM.

the distance between nowhere and now here, curated by Charlotte Lalou Rousseau at the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga. 20 April— 22 May, 2016. Presented in collaboration with the Images Festival and the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, and supported in part by the Department of Visual Studies (UTM) through the Graduate Expansion Fund.

Visit the exhibition website here.

Master of Visual Studies Studio Program Graduating Exhibition

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University of Toronto Art Centre
15 King's College Circle
Opening reception: Friday, March 18, 6 PM - 8 PM
Runs until April 9, 2016

The Art Museum at the University of Toronto is pleased to exhibit the graduating projects of the 2016 Master of Visual Studies graduate students: Gillian Dykeman, Elisa Julia Gilmour, Daniel Joyce, and Fraser McCallum.

Gillian Dykeman is a Canadian artist whose research and projects describe the sexual politics of landscape through and intersectional feminist and post-colonial framework. Dykeman seeks inroads to subjectivity and agency by working across mediums and disciplines such as performance, sound, installation, and art criticism. Her work has been exhibited nationally and abroad, and she is the host and producer of Working (it) Out, the ArtSlant podcast.

Elisa Julia Gilmour is an emerging Canadian artist producing analogue photographic and cinematic work with a particular interest in portraiture. In her installations she captures moments of ephemerality in human experience. Her work has been exhibited at the Ryerson Image Centre Student Gallery and at the Art Gallery of Mississauga.

Daniel Joyce is an interdisciplinary artist currently residing in Toronto. His works often utilize found objects, re-appropriated forms, and the participation of others. Joyce is interested in art’s social functions, as something with the ability to bring communities and histories together.

Fraser McCallum is a Toronto-based artist. His graduating project Come Live With Us exhumes and critically examines the history and legacy of Rochdale College, Toronto's infamous experiment in alternative education and communal living. He was a recent participant in Demos: Life in Common at the Banff Centre (2015), and a research fellow for the Curatorial Incubator program at Vtape (2013).

 

Clockwise from top left: Gillian Dykeman, Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future (teleporter II), single channel video, 10:30, 2016; Elisa Julia Gilmour, Éperdument (Madly), three-channel video installation, color, 22:42, Corsican and French with English subtitles, 2016; Fraser McCallum, Come Live With Us, still from HD Video, 21:00, 2016; Daniel Joyce, There is a better world coming, live webcam video feed, 2016. Courtesy of the artists.

Constructed with Light: The One Spadina Project — Photographs by Peter MacCallum

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Larry Wayne Richards Gallery, Daniels Faculty
230 College Street
On display from February 9 — April 8, 2016
Monday to Friday, 9 AM - 8 PM

Commissioned by the Faculty, Peter MacCallum has been documenting the revitalization of One Spadina Crescent — the future home of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design — since February, 2014.

Originally built as a vista to the lake along Spadina Avenue, and later home to the Knox College and the Connaught Laboratories, One Spadina Crescent is one of Toronto’s most prominent and historic addresses. Its renewal, now underway, represents the largest architecture school expansion ever undertaken in Canada. The project at One Spadina is the University of Toronto’s leading development in design education, research, and outreach on how to build more sustainable, beautiful, and socially just cities.