2018 University of Toronto MVS Studio Program Graduating Exhibition

The Art Museum at the University of Toronto is pleased to exhibit the graduating projects of the 2017 Master of Visual Studies graduate students Rouzbeh Akhbari, Sam Cotter, Andrea Creamer and Noah Scheinman.

Produced in the shadow of Canada’s controversial 150th anniversary, this year’s graduate students directed their attention to historically based research that critiques our ideas of nationalism. Rouzbeh Akhbari’s hallucinogenic narrative investigates the serpentine history of the petrochemical industry within ancient chimeric forces. Sam Cotter considers the parallax views of mechanized transport / mechanized time via the Canadian railway engineer who was also the inventor of international time zones. Andrea Creamer paired her karaoke bar of 1980s Toronto punk music videos and video art alongside a community reading room. Noah Scheinman investigated Canada’s historic national park Algonquin by complicating the myth of the natural and resource extraction. The exhibition is accompanied with a catalogue with essays by Swapnaa Tamhane and a foreword by Visual Studies program director Charles Stankievech.

Rouzbeh Akhbari is a Tehran-born artist whose practice is research-driven, often interventionist in approach and situated at the intersections of postcolonial theory, cultural economies and critical architecture. Akhbari has co-authored a book chapter for Unsettling Colonial Modernity, as well as contributions to Prefix Photo, LEAP Magazine, Society+Space and MIT’s upcoming Projections 13.

Sam Cotter is a Toronto-based artist and writer whose practice exists at the intersection of research, text, and image. Cotter regularly employs photography, film, and installation to examine issues of visual representation and artifice. Central to the construction of all of his projects is an embedded documentary element mediated through a self-reflexive filter. Sam is represented by Zalucky Contemporary.

Andrea Creamer is an interdisciplinary artist and community organizer currently residing in Toronto. Her works investigate spaces of contestation, counterpublics, and notions of site-specificity. Often articulated in the form of text, painting, sculpture or video, her material practice reflects on forms of protest, the mechanisms that produce social spaces, and the ephemeral and always shifting character of socially-based practices.

Noah Scheinman is a visual artist, designer, and writer. His work combines a background in architecture and urban design with an emergent language of sculpture, installation, collage, photography, and video. Current research is focused on the relationship between form, site, and the political economies that drive material and geographic transformations.

This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Visual Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto.