The unfathomable drives next generation of artists

How we’re feeling about our place in an uncertain world is evident on art school walls.

This is where the next generation of emerging artists grapples with the shape-shifting natural and built environment, consciously or subconsciously.

The increasingly puzzling, distracted, technically fraught visual field reflects students’ reactions and responses to the relentless and devastating images of catastrophe and the bombardment of data-graphics, encompassing everything from micro-surgical robots to data-graphics on global human migration patterns.

It’s all enough to make a person retreat to a quiet corner to knit or knot. Or draw. Or collage. Or build. 

Dallas Duobaitis‘ recent work in his first year Masters program deals with some of those topics — maybe. That’s the beauty of abstracted images;  they engage the ideas and thoughts of the viewer who is also negotiating this particular, uncertain time and space. This artwork resonates because it is of our time. 

Monique Motut-Firth (disclosure: friend) also grapples with those themes in her first-year Masters installation, part of the It’s Not You, It’s Me show at the Concourse Gallery.  Her found print images of largely domestic objects (including pictures of women) are meticulously constructed into robot-esque clusters that hover on the gallery wall, in conversation with Duobaitis’ work that includes a motion-sensor-activated oculus/dream-catcher contraption (see below).

This emerging genre of work is not created in a Vancouver vacuum but is in conversation with creatives all over the world, in reaction to innovations that provide answers to problems but also more questions, as seen  in this documentary from Japan on the future of robots in our daily lives and this one on the horrifying/banal reality of surveillance in the UK.

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The Emily Carr University gallery walls have since been transformed for the annual Foundation Show, often the very first showing of work from the university’s first year students as young as 18 and from all over the world.  The Foundation Show continues to April 26.