All are invited to the annual undergraduate Visual Studies exhibition and party!

Far and Near: the Distance(s) between Us, curated by Master of Visual Studies alumnus Henry Heng Lu, brings together several generations of Canadian artists of Chinese descent, offering perspectives onto the Chinese Canadian community’s historical and cultural evolutions and developments. The works included in the exhibition investigate overlooked narratives by exploring notions of distancing and being distanced in relation to race, identity, sexuality and their intertwining with Chinese Canadian history.

The idea of distance unfolds in multiple layers: in the geographic sense, as in going through a distance from point A to point B, like the construction process of the Canadian Pacific Railway; in the cultural sense, through the mainstream’s imposition of stereotypes, as in how the Chinese Canadian community has been culturally differentiated and essentialized; and in the context of the Chinese community itself, as in who is “Us”, and the distances between different groups of ethnic Chinese.

This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.

The exhibition will run from September 6 to October 29, 2017.

Read more on the Art Museum website.

Opening Reception
Wednesday, September 6, 2017 Justina M. Barnicke Gallery

Re:Visiting Desires
Friday, September 15, 7-9 pm Video screening followed by Q & A Featuring works by Jennifer Chan, Richard Fung, Brenda Joy Lem, Ho Tam, Lisa Wong, Wayne Yung Music Room, Hart House

Artist Talk: Chih-Chien Wang
Tuesday, September 26, 1-2pm Room AA304, Arts & Administration Building, UTSC

Chinese Diaspora in Canada: Chinese Canadian Art as an Apparatus of Revisiting History, a talk by Henry Heng Lu
Saturday, October 14, 2-4pm Hinton Learning Theatre, Toronto Reference Library

Public lecture: Ken Lum
Thursday, October 19, 6:30-8:00pm Room 200, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design

Discovering and preserving the history: Chinese Canadian Archives at Toronto Public Library, a talk by Annie Fan
Saturday, October 21, 1-2pm Justina M. Barnicke Gallery

Curator’s Tour with Henry Heng Lu
Saturday, October 21, 2-3pm Justina M. Barnicke Gallery

Artist Talk: Karen Tam
Thursday, October 26, 2-4pm Moderated by Professor Lily Cho Justina M. Barnicke Gallery

Off-site Projects
Gu Xiong’s photographic intervention “I am Who I Am” and a selection from Karen Tam’s Chinese restaurant menu collection John M. Kelly Library, St. Michael’s College, 113 St Joseph St, 1st floor

Gu Xiong’s work will also be on view at the E.J. Pratt Library, Victoria College, 71 Queen’s Park Crescent

Title Image: Morris Lum, Wong Kung Har Wun Association, 40″ X 50″, Archival Pigment Print, 2016.

The gallery will be open from Tuesday, April 25 to Friday, April 28 from 9:30 am to 5 pm, and then 4 pm to 7 pm for the reception on Saturday, April 29.

Reception:
Saturday, April 29
4 pm - 7 pm

This exhibition will include a selection of work by current Master of Visual Studies students Rouzbeh Akhbari, Sam Cotter, and Noah Scheinman.

Rouzbeh Akhbari is an Iranian-Canadian installation and video artist whose practice is research-driven and often interventionist in approach. He has exhibited at Si Shang Art Museum (Beijing), la Fabrique Culturelle des Abbattoirs (Casablanca), Birch Contemporary (Toronto), Art Mur (Montreal), and Art Museum of Nanjing University (Nanjing).

Sam Cotter is a Toronto-based artist and writer whose practice exists at the intersection of research, text, and image. He regularly employs photography, film, and installation to examine issues of visual representation and artifice. Cotter is represented by Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto).

Noah Scheinman is an artist, designer and writer based in Toronto. His research-based practice uses various strategies including sculpture, installation, and photography.

for there are many stories here brings together works that address multiple iterations of ‘here,’ from the specific location of the exhibition to the expanded notions of place and presence. This geographic exploration asks: have the stories that are located in this place carried over time?

The exhibition, curated by Master of Visual Studies thesis student Jaclyn Quaresma, engages in a conversation that spans some 40,800 years between contemporary, historic, and prehistoric artists and writers. The agential acts performed by Andrea Chung, Doris McCarthy, Ana Mendieta, Shelley Niro, Elizabeth Simcoe, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Alize Zorlutuna are central to the conversation. The stories take the form of archive ephemera, books and diaries, soundscape and video, and pursue self-determination as a form of resistance and remembrance.

Images of the cave and the bluffs bracket the exhibition. They offer two distinct ways of thinking with the land and through the stories it holds. The cave, an early place of ritual, provides a model of care, preservation and protection. It nods to emergence, the origin of human consciousness, knowledge and truth as well as the safekeeping of tradition, whereas the bluffs present something altogether different. Bluffs, constant in their erosion, are continually releasing the past. As the grains and detritus of the rock wall leave its surface, they recalibrate amongst the waves, coming together to make a new landmass. This formation can take tens and hundreds of years but eventually the bits of old come together to make something new. Within this framework, for there are many stories here considers small acts of resistance and the stories that carry through them.

This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto.

Works by Andrea Chung, Shelley Niro, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Alize Zorlutuna

Additional materials by and about Doris McCarthy, Ana Mendieta, Nicholas Poussin, Elizabeth Simcoe and a reproduction of the prehistoric La Cueva de El Castillo

Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma

The exhibition will run until May 20, 2017. For more information, and gallery hours, visit the Doris McCarthy Gallery website.

The opening of the exhibition Subject: Post- will feature thesis work by ten Visual Studies undergraduate students.

The prefix 'post-' is impliated in a long list of compound words that persist within a state of subsequence, as in 'post-human,' 'post-mortem,' and 'postgraduate.' While 'post-' suggests a present or prescient afterwards, it also connotes to the act of publishing, as in, to post is to make public. It is between these posts that ten graduating Visual Studies undergraduate students pursue their eight-month arts-based research projects towards a final culmination in an art exhibition and accompanying publication, open and free to the public.

Featuring work by:

Aisha Ali
Ameen Ahmed
Anne Tom Wong
Carmen Lam
Chao Wang
Elora Crawford
Erin Monica Evans Fitz-James
Jolie Zhou
Rebecca Banfi
Seo Eun Kim

https://vimeo.com/205145399

Curated by Master of Museum Studies Students Khristine Cuthbertson, Alex Robichaud and Tammy Law. 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.

The Art Museum at the University of Toronto is pleased to welcome Renée van der Avoird, Associate Curator at the MacLaren Art Centre as a Guest Curatorial Mentor.

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.

all our days are full of breath: a record of momentum brings together two artists who foreground the body and movement as material in evolving choreographic works. Jessica Karuhanga and Brandy Leary transform the gallery into a place of kinesthetic field work — part performance, part laboratory, part choreographed sculpture. The artists utilize bodies, gestures and related detritus as their materials, mining personal, cultural, ancestral and corporeal archives.

The gap between live performance and physical traces of its movements draws attention to the presence and absence of the body, considering “how performance comes off the body.” — From a conversation with Francisco Fernando Granados

This exhibition is curated by Jennifer Goodwin and is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the Daniels Faculty.

Co-presented by the 30th edition of Images Festival running April 20 – 27, 2017 in various locations across Toronto.

Opening Reception:

Friday March 24, 2017, 6-8pm
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
7 Hart House Circle

The exhibition will run until April 8, 2017.

For more info, visit the University of Toronto's Art Museum.

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.

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

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