College Amenities

By Jessica Plattner, Art & Design Program Coordinator

My new role as coordinator has allowed me to contemplate our program in a new light. As a team, Art and Design Faculty are an assorted group of creatives from different backgrounds, with distinct approaches to art and design.

Combined, we have over 125 years of teaching experience in higher education, and over 150 years of creating and displaying art and design across the world, including in Canada, the USA, Mexico, Italy, Japan, England, China, and Singapore.

As colleagues, we are united by a fascination with making things, and a common love of teaching. With such a diverse collection of works in the faculty show, it’s easy to tell the artists apart by our differences — contrasting approaches to colour, material, subject matter, and content. With closer contemplation, however, similarities reveal themselves. One unifying factor is an interest in layering, stacking, or juxtaposing images and materials to create new meaning. For example:

• Craig Cote’s work combines various printmaking processes like aquatint, intaglio, drypoint, and frottage. The resulting compositions are layered with imagery, enriched by the marks of overlapping frames of different printmaking plates.
• Melissa Johnston presents a medley of over fifty business logos designed over the past twenty years. Arranged all together in Johnston’s signature yellow and black palette, they create a composite portrait of her well-known branding and graphic design firm Flag 5.
• Koi Neng Liew’s sculptures present rabbit heads stacked onto human forms, creating strange new hybrid creatures. Combining several sculptural techniques, these characters challenge the possibilities of figurative clay sculpture.
• Ian Richmond’s exhibition poster highlights his interest in connecting vernacular or every-day visual elements with refined contemporary design. By placing these disparate approaches side-by-side, he makes us rethink our assumptions about the role of design in our lives.
• Dean Smale’s mixed media paintings are created by pouring molten bees wax over painted panels. When cooled, the wax forms a translucent layer that both reveals and conceals the painting underneath. Further imagery is added onto the surface with oil paint, producing a rich visual interplay between the different levels of the painting.
• Yulin Wang’s new work uses contemporary models to layer new meaning onto historical narratives. The Three Graces, goddesses in Greek mythology representing aspects of beauty, are portrayed by three recent graduates of the Art and Design Program, creating a bridge linking the past, present, and future.

My own paintings and drawings appear to be temporarily arranged with layers of taped-together papers that could be changed at a moment’s notice. But closer inspection reveals the use of trompe l’eoil (“fool the eye”), consisting only of layers of paint on canvas. 

We hope you will enjoy this exhibition both for its individual artworks, as well as for the visual conversations taking place between the pieces. Just as each artist’s work combines disparate elements into a cohesive whole, so the eclectic mix of personalities in the Art and Design faculty join to form a balanced team.

Jessica

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