Too much stuff in one room
Too Much Stuff in One Room ran from Nov. 18 to 22 in Zavitz Gallery. The exhibit featured the work of eleven artists in third and fourth year sculpture courses at the University of Guelph. I wandered through the gallery with my friend, Ara Khanamirian, an Animal Bio major, talking about each artist’s work in turn. This is a selection from that conversation:
Chelsea Sousa – Three coloured plastic frames, mounted along the wall at shin height, spouting long black hair.
Ara: I don’t get this. Is the wall growing hair or is it supposed to be something else? Like, are these supposed to be mirrors, like plastic toy mirrors? And the hair is black, kind of like the evil from the reflection. I have no idea what I’m saying.
Allanah Vokes – In the back right corner, close to the ceiling, a number of metal paper airplanes stuck in the wall by their points.
Ara: These are paper airplanes, but not paper. And they’re stuck in the wall. Is this like a reflection thing, like you’re supposed to look at the shadows? But there’s no, like, special lighting for it, so I guess the piece can change at any time if it is the shadows. They kind of look like pieces of a coffee filter, like if you were to line them all up in a circle.
Ashley Freake – A stack of small blue pieces wedged in the back left corner of the room.
Ara: It’s just a stack of blue bricks.
Will: It looks like children’s blocks.
Ara: Yeah, like the ones you’d find at like a doctor’s office or something. It’s blue. I guess it’s, like, mould, maybe?
Will: What do you think of the emotion of the colour blue?
Ara: Calming. Peaceful.
Will: Or, sad.
Ara: No. Not for me.
Lauren Irwin – A structure made of cut and fused metal rings rising to about waist height.
Ara: It’s so frustrating when they leave it all up to you. There should be a plaque saying “The Universe,” or something.
Will: Does it look like the universe to you?
Ara: Kind of? It’s chaotic.
Rachel Kopacki – Strings connected to a speaker are looped through a row of screw eyes and taped to the wall.
Ara: Is this supposed to be an instrument?
Will: I like the look of all the green tape on the wall.
Ara: They kind of remind me of birds. But what’s the purpose of the speaker then?
Will: Maybe something happens when they hit the wall. They’re transformed.
Ara: That’s pretty intense. I was kind of thinking it was like music, and whatever you see on wall is the sound waves, and the birds are like the freedom of music.
Katie Holmes – Two pillars, almost aligned, supporting two roughly cubic structures which contain different things.
Ara: I get the feeling that the piece is supposed to be this guy looking at him and vice versa. And it’s not really supposed to matter about the person looking at the whole piece. You don’t know which side you should look, you don’t know if they’re looking at each other, and you don’t know what to do – and it kind of seems like they don’t know what to do either.
Emma McClure – A large, lumpy, pink mass with something protruding from its side and a hole in the top.
Ara: This kind of looks like a tongue, but that doesn’t look like a face. This kind of reminds me of something but I don’t wanna say it. [Mouths the word “Vagina.”] I don’t know. You said “flesh,” there’s pink, it looks weird.
Will: Do you think it’s sexy?
Ara: No. I’m just confused as to what it’s supposed to be. Maybe it’s a shoe.
Will: Who would wear this shoe, though?
Ara: Probably a really big giant. I have no idea.
Clare Binnie – Beige, paint-splattered coils hanging from a metal pole.
Ara: Well, this one definitely looks like it’s melting.
Will: I was going to say that it looks like a bunch of intestines.
Ara: I was thinking it was more like unmade pizza, with all the stuff on it, like the cheese.
Will: What about the pole?
Ara: I honestly think the pole is just to hold it up.
Katie Hamill – A frame hanging from the ceiling with what look like glass bulbs around it and a foil square at its centre.
Ara: So, at first, I thought you had to look at it from straight underneath, just because of the angles. And then I realized that it’s not perfectly straight, like the squares. So it’s kind of like an optical illusion, because it looks straight from the peripherals, but once you get right in it, like right in the eye of the project—is that a term? Kind of like the centre of the tornado—you can tell that it’s not centred. I don’t know if it was supposed to do that. It’s pretty cool.
Nicole Jacobs – Two loose-knit fabric sacks with a heavy round object in each, hanging from frames to the ground.
Ara: That one kind of looks like a uvula.
Will: I thought it kind of looked like a scrotum.
Ara: I was going to say that, but then it has only one ball. I’m just looking at the shadows now. Even for the frame, the shadows kind of match the actual centrepiece. It’s weird. Maybe it was meant to be put that way.
Will: Or maybe it was totally accidental.
Ara: You never know with art.
Sarah Graham – Huge, intersecting square frames with yellow tubes snaking around them.
Will: I’m thinking of these two [Sarah Graham and Lauren Irwin] as companion pieces, because that one [Lauren Irwin], even though it’s metal, is very smooth and organic looking and this one is sort of the opposite.
Ara: That one definitely looks more frail or more fragile. This one kind of looks like, no matter what you do to it, it’s not going to budge. It’s a fact. That’s what it is. It’s not going to change because that’s what it is. Or it could be an interpretation of rules. Wait, you’ve got to hear me out on this. A rule is supposed to be something solid, something you should always follow, but it always has the back door, the exception to the rule, and that’s what I think these tubes are.