Off the Norm continues at Museum London (421 Ridout Street North) until September 20. For more information, call 519-661-0333.
Lordy, lordy, look who’s forty: Off the Norm at Museum London
London, ON - Over the years, London’s vibrant cultural community has cultivated the creative young minds of many ambitious artists. The result is often new and unconventional pieces of work that stimulate the public imagination while encouraging more artists to continue pushing the boundaries of traditional practices.
In Museum London’s Off the Norm exhibit, Fanshawe College alumni celebrate 40 years of the school’s Fine Arts program by showcasing their work. The three-year advanced diploma program gives students a hands-on approach to visual arts, which has produced some of the most promising professional artists in the country - many of whom have exhibited their art all over the world.
“What I got from talking with the artists is that they had the freedom to do their own work [at Fanshawe],” said Robert McKaskell, guest curator of Off the Norm. A Windsor curator and art historian, McKaskell had previously been involved with Museum London. “Museum London has had the privilege of working with Bob on past exhibitions,” noted Carol Kehoe, partnerships manager at Museum London. “He has a unique understanding of this community and its artists, and we welcomed his insight on this exhibition.”
With nearly 60 art submissions to select from, McKaskell filtered the first collection to 21 pieces and then narrowed it down to a final seven. MacKaskell said it was difficult to really encompass the range of diversity and talent in Fanshawe’s program.
Many of the submissions were proposals for works the artists hadn’t yet created, which McKaskell was interested in exhibiting, rather than including ready-made pieces straight out of their studio. “I thought having people making new things would be a better idea,” he said.
Most of the pieces he selected were installation art, with materials ranging from bound fibers to obscure objects like typewriters and liquor bottles. Take Kevin Curtis-Norcross, for example - a 1985 Fine Arts graduate, who made his mark at the London Ontario Live Arts festival in 2007 with his massive fly-image projection work, BLOW.
In Off the Norm, Curtis-Norcross used several packing boxes for his installation. “That’s pretty unconventional,” McKaskell said. “What makes [the boxes] unique is the fact that they come from all over the world—they show the global economy.” Other artists in the exhibit include Daniel Glassford and Micelle McGeean, Patricia Deadman, Ann Marie Hadcock, Greg A. Hill, Farhang Jalali and Karen Bondarchuk.
Bondarchuk’s sculpture work in the exhibit resembles black crows created from scraps of blown out tires she collected from the sides of Interstate 94 in Michigan, where she works as foundation area coordinator and associate professor at Western Michigan University’s School of Art.
“I've always been a scavenger and I have often thought that the roadside tire detritus is animal-like, so I began making tire-collecting excursions. Crows and ravens are scavenger as well, so it seemed to make sense to make a corvid out of scavenged materials,” said Bondarchuk, who graduated from Fanshawe in 1988. She wanted to demonstrate the correlation between the highway’s dead zone and the crow or raven as the purported “harbinger of death.”
“The drawing work, in contrast to the sculpture, is intended to capture a sense of the individual personality of these amazingly intelligent creatures, and I wanted to convey a sense of a regal, even royal, portrait,” she explained.
Though it has been many years since Bondarchuk graduated from Fanshawe, she said she “has maintained a lasting love of material manipulation and process from her experiences at Fanshawe.”
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