2009 University of Toronto MVS Program Graduating Exhibition

The University of Toronto Art Centre is pleased to exhibit the thesis projects of the 2009 Master of Visual Studies graduate students: Lorna Bauer, Nicole Collins, David Court, Mimi Gellman, Irene Loughlin and Josh Thorpe.

Lorna Bauer, with new works in video installation, questions how we know that we are actually here – especially when the visual (her visual) is imbued with (apparent) sleights of hand and phantom disappearances. Nicole Collins’ canvases speak to the physical repetition of an almost agricultural process, they have been dug, tilled and seeded; the results reveal the splendour of the earth itself, accompanied by a patina of sharp intellect. David Court, seeking to document the ‘by-the-way’ spaces of questionable use that (mostly) take our time and cradle our physical weight, reveals the surprising ability of these “no-wheres” to draw out meaning from the intersections that occur within them. With photographic ‘proof’ Mimi Gellman’s research into personal mapping intentionally misleads us into chance spaces of exceptional beauty. Performance-as-witness documents mark Irene Loughlin’s bespoke form of the here-and-now with her embodied sense of how pain forms words on the psyche as well as the skin. Seeking to disturb as little as possible, Josh Thorpe intervenes with threshold audio and visual experiences that ‘occur in passing’, opening the haptic to the experience of the artwork itself.