By Stacey Gibson
Cross-posted from U of T Magazine

As executive director and CEO of the Gardiner Museum, Kelvin Browne (BArch 1977, MArch 1981) oversees Canada’s national home to ceramics. Here, he talks about making art less intimidating, why contemporary Japanese ceramics are so amazing, and the joys (and frustrations!) of making his very own mug.

What do you do?
I oversee the museum’s operations, including finances, security, maintenance and marketing. I’m chief curator, although I rely heavily on our wonderful curators and people who manage the exhibits and collection. I also fundraise.

Do you come up with the ideas for exhibits?|
I’m very involved in the selection of the exhibits. I come up with some of the ideas. Our curators come up with others. Many ideas start off in staff meetings and group conversations. We often collaborate with other museums to do shows.

Do you have any exhibits you’d like to mention?
Last year, we did a show with artist Kent Monkman [who is First Nations Cree] called The Rise and Fall of Civilization. I had invited him to do something for us. He came here, looked around and said, “I want to do something about bone china.” Then, he explained how buffalo were killed on the Prairies and the First Peoples whose lives were based on the buffalo almost went extinct, because the buffalo were run over a cliff and the meat was just thrown away and their bones were ground for bone china. It was just an astoundingly beautiful exhibit.

A visit to a museum or gallery can sometimes feel intimidating if you don’t have an education in art. How do you address this for visitors?
I worked at the ROM as head of exhibitions before coming here. I think making the objects accessible is the number one thing you have to do. There are many different ways you can come to care about the objects in the museum. You can like a story about them. You can like the history about them. You can just like the way something looks. You can have a connection from your childhood or your travels, but the museum has to find a way to make a visitor connect to the real object. Otherwise, why are we here? Stuff could be in storage and you could look at things on your computer.

Right now, we have two clay studios downstairs – but we’re also building a new clay studio in the lobby. When you come in, you’ll see people making things. I think for many people, when they go into the galleries, they don’t necessarily appreciate the complexity, both technical and artistic, of the objects. So when you see people making things and then you go in the gallery, it will be a really good way to start your visit.

Your Twitter photo shows you using a pottery wheel. Did you take a Gardiner class in pottery when you started your job?
Yes. I took a class and I was absolutely, utterly hopeless. It’s harder than it looks. Actually, I have the mug that I made on my desk right now.

How did it turn out?
Once they glazed it for me it did look better, but…  It’s a sincere attempt. That’s what I can say. [Laughs]

Are you fairly competent at pottery now?
I’m not and I’m never going to be. But I enjoy it. It’s fun to do a class now and then. However, I’m just staggered that people who have never used clay before, they’ll sit down with it – and all of a sudden, they can make something. It’s true with kids, too. I think they surprise themselves sometimes. For some people, it really is a gift. Once they get clay in their hands, it’s amazing.

You studied architecture at U of T. How does it relate to your work now?
There’s the practical part of it: I understand design, and that’s one of the reasons I like working with exhibits, because I get 3-D. And I get the connection of visual and ideas, and that’s relatively easy for me to do.

What’s your favourite part of the job?
It’s the ability to be creative and to work with staff to make things happen. We’re a small museum, but we’re a successful museum. If we think we’d like to have a speaker here, we can usually do it. Or if we can’t afford it, we can go out and try to raise some money. There’s not a lot of layers of bureaucracy. You can take risks and you can try to reach out to the community and do things differently. I think in bigger places, sometimes you feel – I wouldn’t say powerless, but more constrained or ideas end up just disappearing or becoming watered down.

How do you do reach out to the community?
Our community art space allows different groups to come in and do things that relate in some way to ceramics or creativity. When Kent Monkman had his show here, we worked with a lot of First People’s organizations to bring things to the museum that we thought would help tell a richer story around Kent’s installation. We’re trying to give back about we’re also trying to connect to the community to enrich ourselves.

Do you have a favourite type of ceramic?
[My partner and I] collected Chinese antiquities. I’ve always liked the Han period pieces in China. I also think Japanese contemporary ceramics are some of the most amazing things in the world.

Why?
They’re technically unbelievable. The force of their artistic expression is amazing. They’ve got this tension between a society that is very traditional and rooted in ceramics and yet very, very idiosyncratic artists who are pushing with a vision they have. So many Japanese artists right now I find just extraordinary, just my absolute favourites.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve learned about ceramics since working at the Gardiner?
That everybody can love it. That it can be the most fancy, elitist stuff, but at the same time, school kids can come in and love it, too. It’s universally applicable. Everybody can love clay.

Visit U of T Magazine to view its Winter 2017 issue.

Top: Apparently by Greg Payce, 1999, part of the Gardiner’s holdings of contemporary Canadian ceramics

Come February 20, Toronto’s Balmy, Kew, and Ashbridges Bay beaches will be dotted with temporary public art installations — stations designed to engage passers-by and celebrate winter along the waterfront.

This year, a number of Daniels Faculty graduates and students are among the winners of Winter Stations, the international design competition held to select the installations.

Master of Landscape Architecture students Asuka Kono and Rachel Salmela reinterpreted a Japanese hot spring for their winning submission I See You Ashiyu. “Providing Torontonians the opportunity to engage physically with water in the winter creates an immersive experience that frames this harsh landscape in a new way,” wrote the duo in their submission.

In BuoyBuoyBuoy, another winning entry by Dionisios Vriniotis, Rob Shostak (MArch 2010), Dakota Wares-Tani (MArch 2016), and Julie Forand, each component of the “infinitely reconfigurable” installation is shaped in the silhouette of a buoy. When the installation is eventually dismantled, the pieces can be kept as a keepsake or donated to schools and community centres for reuse.

A team of students from the Daniels Faculty is also among the institutional winners, which include the University of Waterloo, and the Humber College School of Media Studies & IT, School of Applied Technology. The Daniels Faculty’s submission, Midwinter Fire, “reframes the narrative of our local forests to show the potential power of our urban ecology to city dwellers.” The team of Daniels students included John Beeton, Herman Borrego, Anna Chen, Vikrant Dasoar, Michael DeGirolamo, Leonard Flot, Monika Gorgopa, James Kokotilo, Asuka Kono, Karima Peermohammad, Rachel Salmela, Christina Wilkinson, Julie Wong, and Rotem Yaniv. Assistant Professor Pete North served as their advisor.

Honorable mentions were awarded to 18 teams, four of which involved Daniels Faculty alumni and students. These proposed installations included:

Catalyzed Winter
Seven (Xiru) Chen (MLA 2012), Naiji Jiao (MArch 2014), and Louis (Yi) Liu (MArch 2014)

Every Last Drop Of Sunlight
Yvan MacKinnon (MArch 2013)

Qbic Hangars
Stephen Baik (MArch student) and Abubaker Bajaman (MArch student)

Sift
Deagan McDonald (MArch 2015) and Kelsey Nilsen (MArch 2015)

Congratulations to everyone who participated in the competition. For more about the Winter Stations project, visit: http://www.winterstations.com/

Media:
Toronto beaches winter station design winners announced [CBC]
Eight art installations to make a splash at Toronto waterfront [Metro]

Pictured, above: 1. BuoyBuoyBuoy, by Dionisios Vriniotis, Rob Shostak (MArch 2010), Dakota Wares-Tani (MArch 2016)  2. I See You Ashiyu, by Asuka Kono and Rachel Salmela  3. Midwinter Fire, by Daniels Faculty students  4. Catalyzed Winter, by Seven (Xiru) Chen (MLA 2012), Naiji Jiao (MArch 2014), and Louis (Yi) Liu (MArch 2014)  5. Every Last Drop Of Sunlight, by Yvan MacKinnon (MArch 2013)  6. Qbic Hangars, by Stephen Baik (MArch student) and Abubaker Bajaman (MArch student)  7. Sift, by Deagan McDonald (MArch 2015) and Kelsey Nilsen (MArch 2015)

In 2016, the Toronto Star profiled Monica Adair (MArch 2005) among young architects who “have been turning heads in the profession, while Wallpaper listed her firm, Acre Architects, in its list of 20 “breakthrough practices from around the globe.”

How do Adair and her partner at Acre Architects Stephen Kopp (MArch 2005)  — also her husband, and yes they met here at the Daniels Faculty! — continue to achieve recognition and grow their small New Brunswick-based firm in such a competitive field? Master of Architecture student Ilana Hadad sat down with Adair to learn about her unique approach to business and design.

You describe your practice as developing “storied architecture.” What do you mean by that?
Storied Architecture, for us, is about helping people live great stories. It’s a way for architecture to have permanence beyond physical bricks and mortar. You may never see a building, but you may have learned about it. And rather than hear about a beautiful window or a really great façade, we want to hear: “this changed the way we live.” One of the best compliments we’ve ever received about one of our projects came from a client who said “We get along better as a couple.” That is a really big thing. If you can change the way people think, you can change the way they live their lives.

Why is collaboration so important in your practice?
It’s easy to talk about collaboration as a buzzword, but there are so many talented people out there; it’s really about corralling them. Things become richer when you incorporate other people’s skills and talents. Sometimes it feels we’re on the edge of something really great, but then we ask: “where does the frame start?” and we realize that we’re only looking at it relative to our own world. When you start collaborating with other people, you start to see the world through a new lens.  

Canadian Builder’s Quarterly wrote that every year you embark on a non-traditional project or competition to keep sharp. Why is this important to you?
There are few architects in New Brunswick, which limits our dialogue with others in the field, so we want to make sure that we’re not getting complacent or comfortable. Instead, we’ll challenge ourselves by entering a competition or going after a new project. We’re now doing fewer competitions, but pitching more projects. We look for a need and we propose a project for it. Instead of waiting for projects to come, we chase them.

How do you decide which projects to chase?
It’s something that evolves out of relationships. Sometimes I feel like the clients I’m going to be working for in the future are the people I’m just getting to know now. It takes years for people to trust you and to learn what you have to offer. You don’t just start a project. You hone a project. You develop a relationship. Even clients that I have today, like Picaroons Microbrewery — our relationship may have started five years ago, but it’s only now that we really feel like we’re on the same side of the table and asking, “where can we go together?” The owner knows we’re looking after helping him build a successful company.

We also recently broke ground on a wedding retreat outside of Austin, Texas. This was a relationship that started as a business mentor turned friend, turned client. At the end of the day, these meaningful relationships with people who are willing to think big are the grounding for all our projects.

How did it feel to receive the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's 2015 Young Architect Award?
It’s definitely humbling. I remember we were just moving offices, and I got the letter and I gave it to Stephen and said “can you read this a couple times?” I just didn’t believe it. I’m used to opening letters and saying “oh yeah, we didn’t get accepted.” In life you don’t always get people to validate your work. You’re lucky when you do. So you take it when you get that. It’s really nice.

What do you like about living and working in Saint John?
It’s funny because I’m still getting used to saying that I live in Saint John again. It really is a great place to start and grow a business. It’s full of people that want great things to happen so there is a lot of support. It feels like a family, a great community. I’ve lived in Taiwan and Spain, and I’ve lived in Toronto and New York. I’m open to where the world is going to take me, but for now it’s a beautiful place to grow and we are excited to exercise the potential that Saint John has to offer.

Your first project as a firm was a 100-square-foot patio. What did you learn from that project that you still apply to projects you’re doing today?
The importance of good-quality craftsmanship. The patio was temporary, built to come down every year and get thrown in the back of a shed for the winter. If it hadn’t been built properly, the first year they took it down would have been the end of it. It wouldn’t have gotten published the next year. It wouldn’t have ended up in “top places to kiss in Saint John.” If you want something to last, you have to build the care to make it last.

We also learned that small projects are as important as big projects. A small project is still somebody’s dream. It’s still important to their business. So treating small projects with the same value, regardless of the scale, is important.

How did your time at U of T help inform the work you are doing today?
I loved architecture school. I think as a student you don’t realize it, but the stuff that you do in school stays with you forever. And it touches other people. If you work really hard on one project, that project will influence all your other projects forever. Your thesis work follows you. It’s part of who you are. I’m proud to be an alumna here.

Do you have any advice for current students?
Don’t be entitled; be engaged. Entitlement kills creativity. Engagement, in a way, is the opposite. It says that you’re willing to make a contribution and listen to the people around you and hear what they have to offer. It’s an active position versus a passive one. Be open to the world. See what it has to offer. Be open to be perpetually learning.

Image credits, top to bottom:

1:  Into the Wild. Saint John, NB | Photo by Mark Hemmings 
2: The Centennial. St. Andrews, NB | Photo by Sean McGrath
3: Tinkers Orchard, Kingston Peninsula, New Brunswick | photo by Mark Hemmings
4: LeParc - Petanque. Part of Third Shift Sait John, NB | Photo by Mark Hemmings

This Thursday, alumnus Jesse Colin Jackson (MArch 2009) launches the solo exhibition Marching Cubes at the Pari Nadimi Gallery. Marching Cubes is a large collection of 3D printed components that can be assembled together through magnetic interlocking geometries. The shapes of the individual components are based on an eponymous computer algorithm developed in the 1980s.

From the gallery's website:

Drawing inspiration from an eponymous computer algorithm, Marching Cubes is part sculpture, part playground. In the 1980s, researchers devised a method of generating mesh graphics from medical scan data that featured an underlying grammar of faceted cubes. Jackson has taken this digital syntax and refined it into a language for assembly, produced as a family of 3D printed components with interlocking geometries and magnetic connections—and invited people to help build with them. The participants enact the algorithm in the real world, becoming a collective computer in service of sculptural form-making.

The exhibition originally began as a series of events at the Experimental Media Performance Lab at the University of California, Irvine where Jackson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art. Marching Cubes at the Pari Nadimi Gallery showcases the result of these events. On display will be a two-channel video showing the collaborative construction performances, an accompanying refined sculpture of the most successful assembly, and an inventory of the components involved in the original events.

The exhibition will be on display from November 17, 2016 to January 14, 2017 with an opening reception happening November 17 from 6:00-8:00pm.

Pari Nadimi Gallery is located at 254 Niagara Street in Toronto.

Two years ago, Jackson launched an exhibition at the Pari Nadimi Gallery titled Radiant City. Focused on Toronto’s tower apartment neighbourhoods, Radiant City explored the evolving presence and status of these sites in our city: arrival destinations for incoming immigrant populations, essential housing for one quarter of the city’s population, the decaying location of much of Toronto’s urban poverty, products of modern ideologies gone awry, and locations of past glory, current dynamism, and future potential.

On October 13, Instructor and MVS Alumnus Joshua Thorpe (MVS 2009) — in collaboration with ERA Architects and Blackwell Engineers — unveiled his recent installation titled Flag Field at Maple Claire Park. The artwork consists of 14 flags on flag poles, ranging from 25 to 50 feet high, clustered into two areas in the park.

“This work moves from turf to sky, is activated by the wind, and plays on the topography of the park,” says Thorpe. “People can linger through paths in the poles, gaze up and space out, and kids can run about and play tag.”

Flag Field is part of an ongoing project to revitalize Maple Claire Park in light of funds becoming available from the adjacent Stockyards retail mall development. The revitalization includes new plantings, a new splash pad, a public art competition, and eventually a sports field.

Earlier this year, Thorpe launched a book titled The Unexpected with Emily Smit-Dicks. Through a combination of flash fiction and poetry, the book tells “a story of love in a hundred pages of slowly unfolding scenes in melancholy and joy.” The Unexpected is available for purchase through The Swimmers Group.

Alumni Kelsey Nilson (MArch 2015) and Deagan McDonald (MArch 2015) were recently awarded 1st place in the Iceland Trekking Cabins Competitionhosted by Bee Breeders with CDS NORD Property Developers.

“The structure is humble, directing focus outwards to the landscape,” says Nilson and McDonald of their submission titled Terra Firma. They proposed a three-roomed shelter distilled down to its basic functions, which incorporates gabion walls, a rainwater collection tank, photovoltaic cells, and translucent polycarbonate panels on a timber-framed roof.

From the Jury Commentary:

It is in this delicate balance between rigid structure and an untouched landscape that the project finds resonance. The play between manmade and natural heightens the visitors awareness of surrounding, allowing protection from the elements while still remaining fully engaged within the environment. In a landscape where the temporal patterns of hiking and camping are lauded for a leave no trace transience, the shelter challenges the perception that permanence and obstruction necessarily go hand-in-hand, developing an architectural language that both monumentalizes the act of camping and allows natural systems of the site — animals, hydrology, and fauna — to flow through uninterrupted.

The top three Iceland Trekking Cabin projects will be considered for construction by CDS NORD, with plans to build next year.

Nilson and McDonald are co-founders of ORIGINS — a small scale, multi-disciplinary design studio based in Toronto. Recently, the firm created a winning furniture entry into the IIDEX Canada's 2016 Woodshop Competition, and received honorable mention in the Sequoia Climbing Space Competition. In an interview with IIDEXCanada 2016, Nilson and McDonald spoke about the intersection functionality and aesthetics in design, and commented that “good design should be honest, humble, and useful above all else.”

“In built form, Toronto looks at first glance like many other large North American cities. But up close, the city reflects the various and often conflicting urban planning and urban design ideas that shaped it.”

Filmmaker Ian Garrick Mason’s latest documentary interviews some of the city’s experts on design, urbanism and history as he unpacks the conflicting visions that have shaped the city of Toronto over the years. He writes: “[The film] explores how the city came to look like it does today -- and the processes likely to determine its future form.”

The faculty’s director of the Master of Urban Design program, Mark Sterling, appears as one of the interviewees, along with a number of Daniels alumni who now serve as leading design and planning practitioners in the city including Anne McIlroy (BArch 1986), Lorna Day (BArch 1984), and Kim Storey(BArch 1978) and James Brown (BArch 1978) of Brown + Storey Architects. UofT Canadian History instructor Richard White joins the panel of experts. As part of the project, Mason will release extended selections from the interviews.

The film was presented at the "Toronto Dialogues 1" symposium last October 4, 2016, and is also available for viewing through Mason’s website.

in/future — a multidisciplinary arts and music festival now on at Ontario Place in Toronto — features work by a number of Visual Studies faculty members, graduate students, and alumni from Daniels. The large, collaborative festival includes site-specific projects, musical performances, films and videos in Ontario Place’s iconic Cinesphere, and performances, workshops, talks, and tours.

Recently hired as an Associate Professor, Mitchell Akiyama has an installation entitled 108 Spectres of Release on the West Island; Ed Pien has occupied one of the weather silos with the immersive projection installation Revel; MVS alumni Faye Mullen (MVS 2013) performs daily at 7pm at Breaker Point; MVS Alumni Fraser McCallum (MVS 2016) and current MVS student Sam Cotter have curated 2 programs for Vtape (co-founded by MVS faculty Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak) that are screening in the Cinesphere; sessional lecturer Oliver Hussain’s 2-d and 3-d videos are screening in one of the amazing silos; and MVS Curatorial Studies graduate Wanda Nanibush (2013) and current MVS student Rouzbeh Akhbari are each speaking in the Onsite OCADU speakers series Lectures for the end of the world(s) on the West Island of Ontario Place.

in/future runs until September 25. Visit the in/future website, to view the schedule and ticket information.

Alumna and Sessional Lecturer Jennifer Davis (MArch 2011) recently unveiled Dividers Made into a Juncture in a ceremony at the Barrie Public Library’s Downtown branch with partner Jon Sasaki. The sculpture-bike rack is made of six different metal fences, artistically reconfigured to accommodate eight bicycles.

“Fences often serve to delineate private property and are inherently antisocial; in both concrete and psychological ways they fragment neighbourhoods and compartmentalize people from one another,” writes the City of Barrie. “The Sasaki/Davis vision is to create a meeting point, a place where people can gather and interact.”

Davis and Sasaki’s proposal for the sculpture-bike rack was selected through the Barrie Public Art Committee’s first juried national public art competition. It is currently installed in front of the Downtown branch of the Barrie Public Library at 60 Worsley Street.

Davis is the co-founder of Rear View (Projects) along with fellow alumna Su-Ying Lee (MVS 2011). Earlier this year, Rear View (Projects) received a 2016 Grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for their exhibition titled How to Make Space, which featured work by Tings Chak (MArch 2014). The exhibition explored temporary structures built by women in Hong Kong as gestures of female spatial agency. Other artists featured in the exhibition include Stephanie Comilang, Devora Neumark, and Rowena Yin-Fan Chan.