2021 University of Toronto MVS Studio Program Graduating Exhibition

In partnership with the Art Museum, the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto is pleased to announce an online exhibition of the graduating projects of the 2021 Master of Visual Studies students Oscar Alfonso, Simon Fuh, Matt Nish-Lapidus, and Sophia Oppel. The virtual exhibition documents the work by Fuh, Nish-Lapidus, and Oppel presented in the Daniels Building and its Architecture and Design Gallery and acts as a portal to Oscar Alfonso’s reading-performances and digital publication.

This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS Studio degree in Visual Studies at Daniels and continues an ongoing collaboration with the Art Museum.

Oscar Alfonso works with text, digital media, and installations. His writing, No estoy seguro en nuestros nombres / I’m not sure I remember all of our names involves the collection of stories from their relations—family, friends, mentors, colleagues, adopted aunts, and the occasional hook-up—all are brought together to share and inherit knowledge to a cluster of avocado trees. Born en La Ciudad de México and raised in Vancouver, Oscar Alfonso’s practice focuses on reconstructing a relationship to home. He is currently reflecting on what it means to “be away” and on who is not here.

Simon Fuh is an artist and writer that frequently makes temporary installations and collaborative projects that prod at both the potential and banality of being and thinking together. His research for the past year has focused on social memory and parties—in particular, how remembering together can be its own site for becoming. His exhibition presents a two-room immersive sound installation featuring audio of a close friend attempting to give directions to an after-hours venue over the phone while unseen speakers play the sound of dance music heard from the other side of a wall.

Matt Nish-Lapidus is an artist, writer, musician, and designer. He makes software, sounds, and texts probing the myth that computers need to be useful rather than beautiful. His current exhibition looks at the relationships between programming languages, computer cultures, poetry, and Kabbalah language mysticism. The installation A Path offers a real-time, computational micro-world meditating on the poetics and material of computation through recombination and repetition.

Sophia Oppel is an interdisciplinary arts practitioner and researcher interested in examining digital interfaces and physical architectures as parallel sites of power. Oppel deploys transparent substrates—glass, mirror and the screen—as a framework to consider the paradoxes of legibility under surveillance capitalism. Oppel’s current work, being both opened up and flattened, considers both the complicity with, and refusal of, biometric capture on a bodily scale. Referencing the streamlined, clinical aesthetics of airports and luxury retail establishments, the work explores the perverse desire to participate in the flows of commodified self-image.