Student Art Award Archives - ��ܽ��Ƶ

��ܽ��Ƶ announces the 2024 Student Art Award finalists

Andy Murdoch — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 16:31:33 +0000

��ܽ��Ƶ is excited to announce the ten finalists of the 2024 ��ܽ��Ƶ Student Art Award. The award recognizes the exceptional works made by ��ܽ��Ƶ students across ten disciplines at the university. The winning artist receives a $5,000 purchase prize, with their artwork added to a special section of ��ܽ��Ƶ’s Permanent Collection. The remaining nine finalists will receive $1,000 each. This premier award provides young artists with visibility and promotion as they embark on their careers.

Meet the finalists

a. laurel lawrence – Our sap fills the mouths of hungry saints

Our sap fills the mouths of hungry saints is a short film described as “a queer fantasia” by lawrence, a queer artist from New Brunswick. The eight-minute video is an experimental film shot on a 16mm camera. Inspired by ancient funerary traditions, where cannibalism is considered an act of love and worship, the film explores the intimacy between queer bodies navigating love and desire, while drawing comparisons to eating and hunger. Using analog filmmaking techniques, lawrence depicts love and desire as a hunger for another person that cannot stop. The film stars M. Black and Sof Kreidstein as the actors. ��

Chris Sampson – Sananguatik | Carver

When a person sees a sculpture, whether sitting on a shelf or in an art gallery, they tend to look at it from all directions — except one: the bottom. Sananguatik | Carver is a series of Inuit carvings that focuses on the bottom and “underside” of the artwork. As a Labrador Inuit artist and photographer, this project is close to Sampson’s heart as a means to connect with and understand his Inuit heritage. Rather than place emphasis on the carvings that have commodified Indigenous culture, he wanted to focus on the marks of the makers, the texture and colour of the stone, and the indents left behind, compelling viewers to see the sculptures from a different perspective. By using soapstone and serpentine from the Labrador landscape, Sampson celebrates his home and the resilience of Inuit artists.

Daria Herashchenko – Dissolving

��پ��Ǳ��Բ� is a chalk pastel and watercolour drawing inspired by an intermediate drawing assignment during Herashchenko’s time as a student at ��ܽ��Ƶ. She was given a photograph of people swimming at the beach and decided to rearrange the narrative to tell a different story. Dissolving depicts a woman who is watching a man sink and slowly dissolving into the water. The Ukraine-born Herashchenko wanted to create a contrast between the worries of the outside world and the inner peace within oneself. She uses sharp lines to depict the woman’s apparent concern, and soft flowing lines to show the man’s acceptance of the rising waters.

Kalani Chen-Hayes – Operatic Macbeth

Inspired by William Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ and Taiwanese opera traditions, Operatic Macbeth falls between the realms of costume and wearable art. The clothing is made from hand-woven tartan with a silhouette that is reminiscent of a Puritan ensemble. Symbols of masculinity are playfully inflated, asserting themselves against bold colors, which is further queered by the tailoring of the garments to a bound chest. Chen-Hayes wanted to make a garment that viewers would be able to connect to and instantly understand who the character is just by looking at them. It was an opportunity for Chen-Hayes to combine their love for weaving and fashion together in one package.

Kate Dong – Hymns

Hymns is an installation that reflects on the issues of contemporary culture from the perspective of the Christian faith. As a devout Christian, Dong wanted to express the heartbreak and loss of modern society, using ceramic art and sculptural work to create delicate flowers, and climbing vines as a path to salvation. The installation is made up of more than 30 flower branches, arranged in a way that leads viewers to a cross. Dong uses objects and materials in her artwork —such as seeds, branches, and stones—as symbolism for people in different roles in life. The first part of the work took 10 months to complete, which Dong sees as a form of humility and surrender to art as a form of gospel. She hopes her work will help people understand the serenity and safety that Jesus’ love brings to his followers.

Page Cowell – Construct

Construct is a series of mutoscopes (an early motion picture device) made from kitchen utensils and tools used in carpentry. As an artist from Tillsonburg, O.N., Cowell was inspired by the mundane parts of daily life; such as frying an egg, peeling an apple, grating cheese, and other small tasks that take up parts of our day. The machines also spark a conversation about gendered workspaces and the similarities between the two false dichotomies of gendered tasks. Cowell describes the work as a “symphony,” as the animation dances across the machine while the viewer winds them into motion. The action of winding the machine becomes an act of care and service by the viewer, regardless of gender.

Rayce Min – Expressions

Expressions is a series of five jewellery and metalsmithing pieces all formed from copper sheets and cast bronze. The pieces are inspired by Min’s upbringing in a masculine household; where he was not allowed to show his true emotions. He uses his work as a form of expressing his inner thoughts and feelings, designing each piece based on human facial features and emotions. The pieces include: “I Roll My Eyes Like a Gambler Rolls Dice” the cup, “Mood Swings, I’m Either Happy or Upset,” the vase, “Hold On to the Light of Your Life” candle holder, “Smoke a Cigarette, Take a Break,” the incense holder and “Breakthrough,” the wall piece.

Silas Wamsley – His Grace

His Grace is a diptych inspired by late Medieval and early Renaissance paintings. As a trans-masculine artist, Wamsley wanted to explore their relationship with femininity and how the trans body is legitimized and presented in art. His Grace is reminiscent of devotional paintings from the Christian religion and the complex history of gender-crossing saints in Europe, who were mostly female-assigned people living as male monks. The painting becomes a medium, turning the transitional experience many trans people go through into a spiritual one. The diptych depicts Wamsley as a figure of authority but also in a state of vulnerability, wrapped in lavish fabrics. By bearing their chest, Wamsley pays homage to the gender-crossing saints who often met violent ends where they had to bare their chest to prove they were not who they claim to be. This begs the question of who decides how these gender-variant bodies are presented and why. ��

Sunny Babcock – Breathless Ensemble

Breathless Ensemble is an interactive sound sculpture created as a form of “queering technologies” and exploring intersectional sound practices. As a queer artist, Babcock uses media as a mode of expression and started Breathless Ensemble by collecting raw speakers over the last year. The sculpture is installed on a large sheet of steel mesh, with the speakers, wires, and circuits hanging off or running through the mesh. The artwork explores the relation between sound technology and the voice, specifically queer voices. Placing a microphone against their larynx, Babcock records the sounds of their glottal stop—also known as vocal fry — and plays them back on the speaker. The vocal fry is commonly stereotyped as a “queer voice” or a queer way of speaking, however Babcock reclaims that label and turns this sculpture into a dialogue between human and non-human sound sources.

Yongxuan Zheng – Moveable Type��

Movable Type, is a hand printed woodcut collage composed of more than 600 squares of random movable type that have been flipped, making them difficult to read. The work uses ideogrammatic forms to construct a layered metaphor; the Chinese cultural signifiers represent the challenges many immigrants face after arriving in Canada. The form of the work is simultaneously a wall, and a landscape; it is based on research into ancient Chinese printing technology as a culturally significant material form. The work is intended to express the duality of the artist’s evolving immigrant experience.��

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��ܽ��Ƶ announces the 2023 Student Art Award finalists

Andy Murdoch — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 18:57:32 +0000

��ܽ��Ƶ is excited to announce the ten finalists of the 2023��ܽ��Ƶ Student Art Award. This award recognizes and promotes exceptional work made by ��ܽ��Ƶ students across ten disciplines at the university. The winning artist receives a $5,000 purchase prize, with the artwork added to a special section of the permanent President’s Collection at ��ܽ��Ƶ University. Nine finalists receive $1,000 each. This premier award provides young artists with vital visibility as they embark on their careers.

Meet the finalists

Ada Denil – Aeolein City

Aeolian City is a site responsive installation consisting of 9 wind-activated harps installed on street posts in the city. Aeolian vibrations (named for Aeolus, the Greek god of the wind) are the source of the sound: Strings of equal length and varying thicknesses are strung and tuned to the same pitch. When they vibrate in the wind they produce mysterious harmonic overtones which float and dissipate into the general soundscape, at times consumed or overridden by the noise of the city. The artwork itself is carried in the air, resonating and alive, ephemeral and intermittent. The visually subtle components are installed throughout an area to create a network of auditory experience.

Claire Drummond – Emily Davidson, Margie and Thando

Emily Davidson, Margie and Thando is a painting from a series entitled Art Work Care Work, which represents artist/m(others) as a protest against the long-held idea in the art world that one cannot be both. M(others) in this work include the “other”: queer and gender non-conforming folks who see themselves as engaged in nurturing and sustaining life. Artist and activist Emily Davidson is pictured working alongside her mother Margie, who works primarily in textiles, while Emily’s son Thando plays. Emily and Margie’s studio is a living room strewn with toys, the ordinary flotsam of caring for a young child, and the viewer can sense that a disruption of their work is close at hand amidst the chaos of the ordinary. The painting is left deliberately unfinished in an effort to mirror the ways in which the conditions of maternal creativity are often of interruption and disruption. This body of work seeks to render visible the challenges of making creative work while m(othering), inviting the viewer to reflect on how the cohabitation of art and care work can create space for a more communal vision of what it means to be an artist, and what it means to be human.

Benjamyn Orr – FAGGOTLAND

FAGGOTLAND is a one-act musical book and story by Benjamyn Garreth, with music by a. laurel lawrence. FAGGOTLAND follows three characters, You, Me, and The Other One, as they navigate their relationships to one another and to themselves. FAGGOTLAND is about the peaks and valleys of being gay and transgender. FAGGOTLAND asks you to hold on, because there is so much to look forward to.

Hrista Stefanov – Within These Walls

“Within These Walls” presents a series of latex impressions taken from the historic walls at ��ܽ��Ƶ’s Granville Campus. By stretching a sheet of cheesecloth on a surface and painting layers of latex across it, Stefanov builds up a relief negative that is peeled away once hardened. The latex and cotton gauze embossed objects communicate beyond the residues of history they capture in surprising details, the result of a great deal of material research. The resulting latex images are like ghostly mirrors of their matrix, and their eventual decay will embody future developments in the building. These objects — which are as defendable as prints as they are sculptures — memorialize the space and the narratives that have played out within it, viewing the building as a visual diary of everyone who has passed through it.

Jem Woolidge – Lucky Suit

Jem Woolidge’s handwoven Lucky Suit is the result of a fashion customization methodology in which an interview is conducted between the wearer and the designer to identify their personal set of lucky symbols, which are then incorporated into a customized garment. This work is an extension of a larger project exploring new methods of fashion design development in intimate collaboration with the wearer, which deploys traditional surface design techniques, context specificity, and a continuing dialogue on personal symbolism. Lucky Suit explores alternative fashion design process ��ܽ��Ƶes that take into account not just customization to fit a body in a tailoring sense, but also a person’s particular symbolic attachments.

Keely Hopkins – Artist’s Shroud

In Artist’s Shroud I used photogrammetry to build an image of myself as interpreted through digtal modelling. Hundred of images of my body in a supine position are used by 3d modelling software to build data points in virtual space. After exporting an image of the 3d model of my body from a through-the-floor perspective the point cloud was printed on Belgian linen, to further reference the classic death shroud. The photo-object produced specifically references the Shroud of Turin, which is a (false) record of a the trace left behind by the body. My body is composed of points of data in the shroud which are represented by circles, a strong symbol of infinity and cycles. As my body becomes literally translated into data the problem of big data in late capitalism becomes intertwined with bodily autonomy and consent. In Artist’s Shroud the boundary between space/body, death/life, artist/subject, and data/reality become confused.

Kate Solar – POND

POND is a three minute long animation produced by Kate Solar. In POND, digital footage of the river near the artist’s childhood home is laser-printed directly onto 16mm film, creating a shifting, liquified halftone; a kind of macro-film grain. Images of animals and figures emerge from this abstraction, then sink back into it. The memory of a specific landscape dissolves into the texture of time; it is impossible to return to.

Solar’s digital-to-physical process ��ܽ��Ƶ, a nostalgic foray into analog 16mm direct animation, exposes the paradoxes of celluloid film-making. Running the film through a projector decays the laser toner image even further. The imprecise, ultra-DIY printing process ��ܽ��Ƶ frequently bleeds onto the film’s optical sound strip. The harsh noise of the projector’s optical sound reader blends with the original field recordings. As the image is obscured, so is the soundtrack. In this bizarre dreamscape, cinematic conventions are overruled by the physical reality of the film medium. POND presents a winter wonderland of pixels and film grain.��

Mackenzie Reid – Stretch

Stretch��is a series of three hollowware copper vases based on the stretching of the artist’s body. These exaggerated forms are crafted to accentuate and celebrate parts of feminine forms which are typically overlooked; the artist reflects on the act of pushing and pulling metal into place with various hammering techniques as a process ��ܽ��Ƶ of representing the contortions that women’s bodies are often subjected to in society. The polished copper finish references this act of self-reflection while purposefully highlighting imperfections in the material’s surface. This traditional process ��ܽ��Ƶ has been used to create vessels and liturgical wares throughout history, but Reid masterfully uses these fabrication techniques in contemporary ways; Reid chooses her feminine gaze and through strong solder seams and even hammer marks builds a series of resilient corporeal vessels.

Maeve Mackinnon – Mary-Kate and Ashley

Guided by an all-seeing eye, crow sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley attempt to free themselves from a prison of their own creation. The work is stoneware ceramic and glazed.

Olivia Burns – Lineup

“Lineup: Pt. 2” is the second drawing in a series of three, depicting the largest and most recognizable predators found across Canada. Within the drawing is a life-size polar bear and a life-size grey wolf, standing against a stark, lined background. The polar bear, being a dangerous predator, is what you might call a threat, and simultaneously threatened. It stands over ten feet in the air, a striking sight, yet it leans back on its heels and lifts its nose in the air. On the other hand, the wolf stalks forward, showing a completely different kind of danger. Grey wolves have represented a much larger threat than any other carnivore to Canada’s post-colonial industries, with their evolutionary superiority and wit. This series is meant to confront our historic fear of these incredible animals, and to ask why they cause so much concern.

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Ivan Flores, 2022 ��ܽ��Ƶ Student Art Award Grand Prize Winner

Alvaro Perez — Fri, 06 May 2022 23:35:32 +0000

The ��ܽ��Ƶ community extends heartfelt congratulations to Ivan Flores, grand prize winner of the 2022 ��ܽ��Ƶ Student Art Award. Ivan is a textiles/fashion major from Windsor, Ontario. The Student Art Award finalists were celebrated tonight at a gala event held at Port Campus.

The award jury selected Ivan among nine other finalists for his submission, a collection of textiles titled “Sleep Spit”, 2022
The Student Art Award jury included David Diviney, Interim chief curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Frances Dorsey, artist and retired ��ܽ��Ƶ faculty, and Marianne Katzman of Katzman Art Projects. Ivan had the jury fully enthralled by his thoughtful and professionally presented submission, which was only amplified by the method of installation. The work is skillfully crafted and conceptually sophisticated, utilizing a complex material process ��ܽ��Ƶ to engage in a deeply personal and intuitive investigation of language.

“Sleep Spit” is a series of handwoven dream messages. According to the artist:
These pieces explore colour and texture through the conceptual framework of dreams, more specifically, exploring my personal intuitive and abstracted interpretations of the things that have been said ‘out loud’ in my dreams. These pieces are a physical manifestation of what these words and phrases mean to me as an aid for reflecting on the impact they’ve had. While using this concept as a way to interpret and better understand my own theory, that dreams force the dreamer to face the inner turmoil that they have been avoiding in their waking life, this project has also called on me to expand my personal colour language and build a similar language with texture. I do this by immersing myself into the dream and the feelings brought about by these words, and then interpreting them into colours and textures.

Piece 1 Chenille, mohair, worsted wool. 28.5″ (72.5 cm) x 12″ (30.5 cm) excl. fringe

Piece 2 Tencel, cotton, polyurethane floss. 41.5″ (105.5 cm) x 13.5″ (34.5 cm)

Piece 3 Metallic yarn, cotton. 14.5″ (37 cm) x 13.5″ (34.5 cm) excl. fringe

As the grand prize winner, Ivan is awarded a $5,000 purchase prize for his submission, which now becomes part of ��ܽ��Ƶ’s permanent collection. The remaining nine finalists each receive $1,000 for their entries and recognition of being the best within their respective disciplines. They are:

Grace Boyd, Tidal Urn, 2021 – Ceramics
Hannah Craig, Athame, 2021 – Jewellery and Metalsmithing
Amy Crosby, losing it!, 2022 – Drawing
Ada Denil, Visible Cities, 2021 – Sculpture
Ali Dixon, “They Shut Me Up in Prose”, 2022 – Film
Keely Hopkins, Halifax Pauper’s Grave, 2021 – Photography
Charlotte MacLean, Catharsis Machine, 2021 – Painting
Jean Serutoke, imprinted bodies, 2022 – Printmaking
Zehua Sun,��Trilogy of the Home, 2021 – Expanded Media

Follow Ivan on Instagram at . For more on the ��ܽ��Ƶ Student Art Awards, visit

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Student Art Award Archives - ��ܽ����Ƶ

��ܽ����Ƶ announces the 2024 Student Art Award finalists

Meet the finalists

��ܽ����Ƶ announces the 2023 Student Art Award finalists

Meet the finalists

Ivan Flores, 2022 ��ܽ����Ƶ Student Art Award Grand Prize Winner

Student Art Award Archives - ��ܽ��Ƶ

��ܽ��Ƶ announces the 2024 Student Art Award finalists

��ܽ��Ƶ announces the 2023 Student Art Award finalists

Ivan Flores, 2022 ��ܽ��Ƶ Student Art Award Grand Prize Winner