Exploring Guelph’s Juried Art Show

Students entered their works anonymously at Rozanski

Studio art students, Masters of fine arts students, professors, and jurors gathered in Rozanski at 7 p.m. on Friday, March 18 for the Juried Art Show awards ceremony. Jurors toured Zavitz Hall which was filled with studio art students’ work. The halls of Zavitz are coated annually with artworks of students participating in the Juried Art Show, but this year some spaces remained suspiciously empty. The Fine Arts Network e-mailed participants at 1:07 a.m. Friday morning inquiring about missing artworks and empty spaces. Regardless, most participating artists attended the awards ceremony hopeful to claim a prize. The awards were graciously DJ’d by the much beloved Fastwürms, a Canadian artist collective attributed to the creation of the Gryphon statue.

“It would be played at a club in underground Berlin, where there is only one light bulb and the bartender has an eye-patch,” said Claudia Rick, winner of two awards given by the faculty, when asked to describe the Fastwürms’ choice of music.

Jurors for JAS consisted of established Canadian artists Sarah Cale, Fiona Kinsella, and Miles Collyer. The MFA students served as jurors for the Jr. JAS show featured in Alexander Hall. Professors from each department also scanned the halls of Zavitz to award prizes for their department.

Grace Esford, a third year studio art student, described the atmosphere as “bubbly but tense” before the award ceremony began.

Emily Pittman and Katie Owen, the organizers for JAS this year, presented the awards with humor and class. They glided through the technical difficulties even as the projector flashed the slide containing the first prize winner’s artwork, a claymation video created by specialized studio student Kelly Zantingh. Owen continued to crack jokes about the faulty microphone introducing award winners and presenters, as Pittman blushed receiving two awards herself.

The ceremony consisted of two parts: first, the faculty awards given by professors who judge the students in JAS based on their hard work throughout the year, then came the guest jurors’ list of artworks, first the honourable mentions, then the top 10 who receive cash prizes. This list was created based solely on anonymous works submitted into the show.

Jurors Cale, Kinsella, and Collyer stood to announce ten honourable mentions for the show, awarding them a year-long subscription to Border Crossings magazine. This jury seemed to favour artworks relying heavily on their aesthetic qualities. Next came the actual top ten of JAS, which will be featured in Zavitz Gallery. Ninth place was held by two people, as the jurors considered them a tie: Sarah Demaline and Heather MacRae. Then came Carole Allison, Rachel Black, Rachel Meneguzzi, Lindsay Sisson, and Emily Mateyk, in order from eighth to fourth. The top three were Rebecca Daggett, a third year student, with her massive mysterious painting called “This is where we met”; followed by Carole Allison, a fourth year student, with a pencil rendering of a lamp aptly named “Lights.” Finally, Zantingh claimed first prize, winning $1,000 for her claymation video “Seascape.”

With a few exceptions, the top 10 winners followed the pattern of the 10 honourable mentions, with paintings or works with a “pretty” sensibility being featured. Many deserving works with hours of work and thought poured into them did not make the cut. Alexa Gargoum’s video piece, “INTRODUCTIONS,”  installed cleverly under the stairs in the painting studio, received no attention. A montage of ‘80s graphic introductions complete with funky music left the viewer entranced and laughing at the same time. Tim Hoover’s drawing “Runway” filled the staircase wall, so tall that it gave the viewer a kink in the neck. This subtle and beautiful drawing made neither the honourable mentions nor the top 10, though it was clearly deserving of some recognition. Ryan Grover’s video “Blackout” was installed in a closet beside the Extended Practices room and showed 10 screenshots of electronics during a blackout, which was amazing. Sonali Menezes’ video of her waxing her legs in the Arboretum was also ignored. Emma Green’s “Reno Porn” was pointed out by the sculpture department, but was not featured in the official jurors’ picks. Shannon Carie received an award from the drawing department for her clever drawings made from melted popsicles, yet her lovely collection of colourful drawings were not featured in either of the jurors’ lists. Christie de Vouno wrote out the iTunes terms and conditions by hand and displayed this scroll of text along the ceiling of a staircase in Zavitz. This time consuming piece was not featured in any of the prizes given on Friday.

There is a time and place for pretty artworks, and they deserve recognition for the skill and time put into them. Favoring classical technique and style is far past passé. Some great artworks were featured in the jurors’ choices, but a graphite rendering of an object surpassed so many beautiful and intelligent works made by other artists. Maybe it was because the jurors were unaware of the many hours put into some of the works left unmentioned, and students in attendance were well aware of their peers hard work, but many students felt uneasy with the works featured that night as they walked away from the ceremony. Contemporary artists can appreciate the beauty of works like Claude Monet’s impressionist paintings or Jackson Pollock’s abstractions, but there needs to be accomodation for Donald Judd’s or Vito Acconci’s work as well.