Studio art program works on display at Zavitz
The annual Juried Art Show, in which the studio art program’s upper-year undergraduate students present their work to be juried and exhibited, was held this past Friday on all floors of Zavitz and in the painting, sculpture, and extended studios. Curator Sarah Robayo Sheridan, architect Marcin Kedzior, and conceptual artist Kelly Mark, juried the works.
Ranging from assemblage, video art, drawing, and sculpture, the top 10 winners were studio art students Allanah Vokes, Ryan Grover, a piece by the F***ing Young Canadian Artists (FY-CA) collective, Melina Panara, Dylan Evans, Maya BenDavid, Rory Steels, Katie Owen, Katie Schulz, and Emma Carney. The reception for the exhibition will be held at Zavitz Hall on Thursday, March 26, at 5:30 p.m.
Some of the top 10 winners’ work – Alannah Vokes’s UFC 184: Ronda Rousey vs. Cat Zingano, Dylan Evans’ Cyber Lovers (After Felix Gonzales-Torres), and Melina Panara’s Gingham – are presented in this week’s arts edition (see centre).
One standout installation is Maya Ben David’s video art piece, THE THREE LAWS, which mediates popular culture signifiers and tropes such as 80s and 90s cartoons, Microsoft Windows screens (the computer game Wolfenstein, XP load screens, Solitaire cards), found footage, and overlaid clips from the films Metropolis and Scanners.
The work is explained in-depth by Ben David’s artist statement, which reads, “THE THREE LAWS is a modern interpretation of Isaac Asimov’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics,’ introduced in 1942. Through collage, it shows the depiction of the hypothesized consequences of breaking Asimov’s three laws in popular media. It poses the question: what happens when machines become sentient beings, yet are still treated as objects? THE THREE LAWS is, in many ways, a portrait of theories of artificial intelligence throughout history, but particularly the emergence of 90’s internet culture that Maya grew up with and was exposed to at [a] young age. She stretches the definition of robotics and artificial intelligence to be relevant to her personal experience with technology and machines. This includes old Macintosh screensavers, the Microsoft Word paperclip animation, and internet popups.”
On the inspiration for the piece, Ben David says, “The work began with a scene from the movie The Brave Little Toaster. In the scene, the air conditioner goes on a melancholy rant about his existence as a machine stuck in the wall and ultimately becomes so upset he explodes and dies. This scene really stuck with me.” On the dark sense of humour pervading the video collage, Ben David said “I think humour is a great tool for making uncomfortable subject digestible, but also for creating tension with the viewer. Humour and playfulness, I think, is a lot more present in art then you may think. If you look around the room in the top 10 show in Zavitz right now, I would say that all of the works are playfully exploring and taking apart the conventions of the mediums they are working in.”
Also taking up nearly a full wall of the Zavitz Gallery is Art (Tentative Title), by the FY-CA collective, an assemblage piece that seems to make material the pervading sense of irony and cynicism of internet culture in a sometimes playful, sometimes striking way. The “FY-CA wall” collage, as it is colloquially known, is eye-catching and reactionary enough as a whole, but getting into the particulars of the material used, its arrangement and the political procedures found in this arrangement, the viewer is invited into a sort of materializing of mash-up culture, and the work draws on a number of socio-economic codifiers such as pizza boxes, images of Drake’s face, and other tongue-in-cheek phrases and images.