Please join us for the Annual Fine Arts Graduation Exhibition 2016
DisJointed Narratives
April 8 to 14 2016
Opening Reception: April 8th from 6:30PM to 9:30PM
Cloverdale Campus room 1843
5500, 180 street, Surrey BC Getting There
Show Open:
Sat April 9 11 to 4
Tues April 12 11 to 4
Wed April 13 11 to 4
Thurs April 14 11 to 4
When we are invited to look at art, we are being invited into an experience. With this overture, both a challenge and an opportunity emerge—the challenge to question your own position, perspectives, and untested assertions, and the opportunity to step outside yourself and connect more completely with another person or idea. For the artist, the balance between showing and telling is often the most difficult one to achieve. Audiences seek meaning and artists seek connection.
Disjointed Narratives presents the projects of five graduating artists in Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Fine Arts Program as they strive to retell and represent while activating and engaging their audience. The exhibition hinges on notions of disorder, confusion, and the incoherent, while simultaneously reflecting upon the practice of storytelling and the human desire to understand and sequence the world.
In this show, we are introduced to these themes through a spectrum of approaches. In the installation work of Aksha Suri, we are immersed in a world of projecting voices, literally and figuratively placing viewers within a field of thoughts and competing perspectives struggling to be heard. Olivia Richardson presents us with the narrative promise of photographs but then complicates their careful framing and storytelling through the inclusion of actual objects and collected waste. Natalie Mussell’s grotesque sculptures challenge our conventional ideas around the perfect story by confronting audiences with the specter of the monstrous, dysfunctional, and “abnormal.” Harpreet Mandher interrogates the semiotics of language systems by placing audiences within a nexus of multiple and competing narratives based on the slipping memory and loss of her mother tongue. And in the paper installation of Alison Law, we are made to start from nothing and find ourselves faced with the anxiety, and strange promise, of the blank page—the origin of so many stories.
“Creativity takes courage,” wrote Henri Matisse, and it is in this context of encountering ones fears and finding strength in artistic creativity that I invite you to experience the works presented in this exhibition. Collectively, these projects represent stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell each other, and stories that help shape the disjointed narratives of who we are.
Dorothy Barenscott, Art Historian Fine Arts Department