Creative community

Destroyed Violin by Zeqirja Rexhepia, a Dalhousie staffer with Facilities Management.

Every December heralds the Student, Staff, Faculty and Alumni Exhibition at Dalhousie Art Gallery. This year brings the 57th annual edition, an explosion of talent from the Dalhousie community ranging from etchings to sculpture and subject matter from lighthouses to Che Guevara.

Students in a wide variety of fields demonstrate that they possess talents not necessarily associated with their field of study, including Kate Hazell, ESS (Environment, Sustainability and Society) student, with her pen-and-paper portraits of Ursula K. Le Guin and Agatha Christie. The portraits, done in a deceptively straightforward style, used minimalistic means to convey the strong personality present in the two authors’ faces. Chemistry student Wai-Ho Lo’s photographs were also striking, particularly a candid close-up of a chinchilla titled Pikachu. Artists also found inspiration in the apparently everyday; Electrical Engineering student Mohsin Khan’s photograph Henry Hicks Building captured the edifice haloed by a threatening, kaleidoscopic sky straight out of The Wizard of Oz (post-cyclone, pre-Glinda), and alumna Joan Chandler’s Barrington Street depicts the downtown thoroughfare in warm, forgiving watercolors.

Professors also got their chance to further intimidate students with their brilliance. Richard Brown’s (Faculty, Psychology) two separate series of three photographs are especially clever: entitled kid and weed and same kid, same weed, one month later, Dr. Brown’s images demonstrate the impossibility of trying to recapture a moment from the past. The kid and weed photographs show a little girl beaming as she sits on a street curb in the midday sun next to a sprouting weed, but same kid, same weed, one month later depicts the girl glum and sullen-faced, the weed in flower in the setting sun’s light. W. Ford Doolittle (Faculty, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) also favored photography; his The presumption of the Mind with Respect to Time was an eerie series of three digital photographs. Particularly striking was his image of white curtains billowing perilously close to a heater: a suggestion that form had been considered by whoever hung the curtains, but not function.

While watercolors, photographs, and other traditional artistic media were popular, the exhibition’s artists also demonstrated a willingness to branch out into more unconventional materials. The Dal Art Gallery's Peter Dykhuis shows off some of his own work: evocative, yet abstract images daubed on maps and envelopes. (The piece is entitled Doers and Dreamers/Scopes and Crosshairs, 1 and 2.) Matt Cole, a master's student in Library and Information Studies, also plays with medium with his two pieces Copyright and Creative Commons; Copyright is sparkly, colored and under glass, which the Xeroxed pen-and-ink Creative Commons is reproduced countless times, perhaps encouraging visitors to take a copy away. Philosophy student Alyssa Robichaud’s Untitled (which appears to be two bemused goats whirling in a violet vortex) was created with a mix of oil paint and wood burning. Mathematics student Grant Pardy’s mental health, vol. 1 is not a mountable “piece of art” at all, but rather a scrapbook into which he has pasted interesting photographs; he has then used a sharp knife to etch around the photographs, creating designs of his own.

Mixed media projects such as video recordings and audio pieces are absent from this year’s exhibition; perhaps future instances will see the Dalhousie community go even further in what they consider “art.” The exhibition as it stands, however, is an inspiring display of the talents, fascinations and obsessions of Dalhousie’s most creative members, and art appreciators would be well advised to nip down to the gallery no later than Sunday.

The Dalhousie Art Gallery is located on the lower level of the Dal Arts Centre. Hours are Tuesdays to Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.