META art show opens today
Mark’s 4th year new media students at Ryerson University will have their final year-end show today, in the uber artsy district of Queen West in Toronto. I stopped by the gallery during the set up time yesterday and was reminded of my student show-time at ITP: tons of details to finish, computers lay on the floor everywhere, and to an outsider, you have no idea what these people were so frantic about.
This is the first year they took the student show off-campus, into a space that will give the work a proper context than ad-hoc classrooms-turn-gallery setup. The show is curated by a group of students to feature works by their fellow students. The curatorial statement is written in bold manifesto-style, and I quite like it:
We, the artists of our generation, will take the knowledge that has been given to us in full stride. We want to use it, and make a change. Our works, ideas and attitudes are going to challenge society’s prevailing structures, values and obsessions. We are moving toward the horizon and the revolutions of the wheels beneath our feet are spinning fast.
Our journey has allowed us to grasp the world of art through the eyes of our friends, our family, our professors, and the technologies of our newly digital world. Now, we twist and mold our ideas with an elasticity unknown to any other era in history. Instead of building edifices and institutions, we seek out opportunities—for innovation, transformation, creation, and change.
Through an exploration of ideas concerning the environment, the economy, family, scientific matter and even love, we have created stepping-stones into the future of art. We have changed the media, charged it with interactivity, and balanced innovation with the notion of conceptual beauty and artistic vision.
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Here’s the website for the rest of the statement and full list of work. The show is on for 3 days. If you’re in Toronto, check it out… because there’s really not whole lot of new media work in this town. Definitely not enough to account for all these graduates anyway.
I’ll post some photos from the show later.