Skip to content Skip to main navigation

2024 Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition

An annual exhibition celebrating the diverse artistic excellence of undergraduate students enrolled in visual studies programs across the University of Toronto’s three campuses.

Curated by Kate Whiteway

The Artists

Olive Wei, Joanna Konopka, Julia Collett, Anella Schabler, Jannace Bond, Carrie Lau, Victoria Lee, Huan Chen, Hafsa Murtaza, Catherine Luu, Victoria Haseung Jung, Jessica Zhang, Alexander Denis, Treasure Fatile, Arthur Yuanqiansheng Cui, Zhenqi Huang, Donny Chenyu Wang

The 2024 Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition is adjudicated by Theresa Wang, Director & Curator of Mercer Union.

The 2024 Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition provides an opportunity to showcase the work of University of Toronto undergraduate students. As an alumna of the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies program, I was thrilled to guest-curate this year’s exhibition. This iteration is the fourth to take place virtually and is composed of a selection of 17 works from 134 submissions across the three University of Toronto campuses that each attend, in disparate media and approach, to fragmentation and partial perspective as a generative mode of artistic creation.  

I am grateful for the support of Art Museum staff Barbara Fischer, Noa Bronstein, Marianne Rellin, and Natasha Whyte-Gray. I would also like to acknowledge the steadfast support of project mentor Dr. Liora Belford, juror Theresa Wang, editor Hana Nikčević, videographer Dominic Chan, as well as campus professors Gareth Long, John Armstrong, and Arnold Koroshegyi. I hope you enjoy the exhibition!  

— Kate Whiteway, 2024 Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition Curator

Olive Wei, make_empty.psd, 2023. Video, 00:04:19. Courtesy of the Artist.

2024 Award Winner

Olive Wei
make_empty.psd

—
Campus: St. George
Fourth Year, Visual Studies

Watch video profile here.

Olive Wei’s make_empty.psd is an eerie yet poetic video that uses generative AI technology to subvert the ideological biases of the classic American western film genre.

Wei selected stills from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Searchers (1956), highlighted all forms of human life within them and gave the computer the command to “make empty.” The Adobe generative AI tool interpreted this by conjuring strange, surreal images before managing to remove the figures from the frame. 

Characters flicker out to the subtle hum of blowing wind and rolling tumbleweeds, all provided by an AI sound generator asked to compose “ambient western” sound effects. Periodically, the recognizable musical motif from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly plays, heralding original, unedited stills. The sound clip cuts off abruptly when the image changes to a digitally fabricated one. Wei’s rhythmic editing was inspired by the many famous “face-off” scenes in western films, building a slow, tedious tension towards a climax that, in this work, never arrives. The pace also references the slowness of the desert, where time seems to slow. make_empty.psd takes up the settler-colonial myth of the North American “west” as an empty place – or a place requiring emptying – and asks us to think about how the ideology of frontierism might be encoded in the media and technologies we use in the present.  

Joanna Konopka, Flight Path, 2023. Screenprint on paper, matboard, masonite, 24 x 24 in each. Courtesy of the Artist.
Joanna Konopka, Flight Path, 2023. Screenprint on paper, matboard, masonite, 24 x 24 in each. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Joanna Konopka, Flight Path, 2023. Screenprint on paper, matboard, masonite, 24 x 24 in each. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Joanna Konopka, Flight Path, 2023. Screenprint on paper, matboard, masonite, 24 x 24 in each. Courtesy of the Artist.

2024 Award Winner

Joanna Konopka
Flight Path

—
Campus: Mississauga
Fourth Year, Art & Art History

Watch video profile here.

Joanna Konopka’s Flight Path addresses the persistence of anxiety around aviation in the artist’s life.

The work is divided into two image treatments. The first, on white background, are screen printed images of planes, one per segment, that are directed concentrically toward the centre point. The second, on rA paper wheel, when turned, reveals in its cut-out windows the two series of images interspersed on the circle below. One series portrays individual airplanes, screen printed in black on a white background, each pointing toward the centre. The second series, on a red background, features planes intersecting at odd angles, each segment dominated by the number forty-nine. The two treatments, one ordered and one chaotic, are revealed and concealed ad infinitum. Evoking a propeller and a roulette wheel, the work attests to Konopka’s family history with flying and addiction. The number forty-nine holds significance as a recurring age of death. If a flight path is a plane’s designated, predetermined route, Konopka’s Flight Path presents two graphic treatments that cannot fully co-exist. The composed and the crashing planes can’t be seen fully at the same time, one always obscures a part of the other, and the viewer has to be moving on from one to know that the other is coming.  

Julia Collett, Transient Layers, 2023. Graphite, ink pen, coloured pencil, 28.4 x 14.2 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Julia Collett, Transient Layers, 2023. Graphite, ink pen, coloured pencil, 28.4 x 14.2 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Julia Collett, Transient Layers, 2023. Graphite, ink pen, coloured pencil, 28.4 x 14.2 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Julia Collett
Transient Layers

—
Campus: St. George
Second Year, Visual Studies

Transient Layers by Julia Collett portrays the transformation and decomposition of a grapefruit from multiple perspectives.

Sliced in half, the grapefruit appears in the upper right corner; below, peeled, globular segments of citrus are pulled apart by a pair of muscular hands; further down, scraps of skin and rind curl and dry up. Juice seeps out in red ribbons, dripping from various crevices before turning black. A single segment, enlarged to show its pores and juice sacs, arcs across most of the artwork’s centre.  

Collett’s grapefruit also appears in the abstract, in particular as colour. It generally applies that the redder the flesh, the sweeter the fruit. The red colour of grapefruits has often been intensified by using radiation to trigger mutations, a tactic of “atomic gardening.” The colour of grapefruit associated with broad commercial success is “Ruby Red,” a 1929 American patent. It is the stand-out colour in Collett’s image. The ruby red appears richly pooled in the shape of crescent slices, complemented by hints of a softer, peach pink. Areas of dense and inky black suggest negative space, allowing the viewer to focus on the exploded subject as it is peeled, pulled apart, and juiced. 

Anella Schabler, Distinct, Instinct, Extinct, 2023. Acrylic paint on hand-cut wood panel, 5.1 x 14.6 in, each. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Anella Schabler, Distinct, Instinct, Extinct, 2023. Acrylic paint on hand-cut wood panel, 5.1 x 14.6 in, each. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Anella Schabler, Distinct, Instinct, Extinct, 2023. Acrylic paint on hand-cut wood panel, 5.1 x 14.6 in, each. Courtesy of the Artist.

Anella Schabler
Distinct, Instinct, Extinct

—
Campus: St. George
Third Year, Visual Studies and Art History

With its red, fleshy fragmentation, Anella Schabler’s Distinct, Instinct, Extinct resonates with the two previous works, extending their meditations on inheritance and the passage of time. Here, three hand-cut and -painted wooden forms represent three rainbow trout.

The fish are sliced into puzzle-like pieces in what Schabler describes as a “child-like, incorrect butchering.” Schabler associates rainbow trout with their upbringing in British Columbia and with the persistence yet fragility of childhood memory.  

Part of the work’s charm lies in its evocation of a genre of folk art, often recognizable for the use of common, inexpensive materials like wood and the representation of subjects that are readily available in the maker’s surrounding environment – in this case, fish. Schabler demonstrates a strong acumen for painting in their rendering of the fish’s colourful flesh and bulbous forms. The work, in its purposeful dissection, calls to mind a series by Anishinaabe artist Michael Belmore where large stones are cut, their newly exposed sides painted with a glowing copper pigment and reassembled into poetic, puzzled formations. 

Jannace Bond, POV: You are walking in Sheung Wan, 2023. Oil on canvas (triptych), 17 x 12 in each. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Jannace Bond, POV: You are walking in Sheung Wan, 2023. Oil on canvas (triptych), 17 x 12 in each. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Jannace Bond, POV: You are walking in Sheung Wan, 2023. Oil on canvas (triptych), 17 x 12 in each. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Jannace Bond, POV: You are walking in Sheung Wan, 2023. Oil on canvas (triptych), 17 x 12 in each. Courtesy of the Artist.

Jannace Bond
POV: You are walking in Sheung Wan

—
Campus: St. George
Fourth Year, Architecture

Jannace Bond’s POV: You are walking in Sheung Wan takes the form of a triad, similar to the previous work in the exhibition. This triptych of oil paintings reflects the artist’s experience of walking through the streets of Sheung Wan, a neighbourhood in Hong Kong where Bond grew up. 

Bond’s studies in architecture no doubt inform the work’s focus on the buildings and streets of Sheung Wan, which is near the city’s financial district. The left panel features a narrow alleyway with mid-rise, mixed-use buildings common to Hong Kong. The middle panel depicts glass skyscrapers along Des Voeux Road, Sheung Wan’s central artery. The right panel takes sloping vendor stalls as its subject. 

The paintings employ a single point perspective, where the viewer’s eye is drawn toward a central vanishing point. The second-person address of the title – You are walking … – implies that Bond’s images communicate an embodied perspective, yet each painting depicts its scene from what appears to be a position slightly above ground level, creating a kind of floating perspective. Pairing an impressionistic treatment with a somewhat disembodied POV asks about the sources and perspective of memory. The Impressionists famously painted momentary, transient, and intangible subjects, like light itself. It is now understood that they were also concerned with fog, smoke, and other environmental effects of the pollution that was a product of the rapid industrialization of Europe at the turn of the century. Bond’s paintings could be said to take up some of this same strategy, capturing Hong Kong as a rapidly developing city alongside the soft, childlike memory of its many pasts. 

Carrie Lau, Yellow, 2023. Photograph. Courtesy of the Artist.
Carrie Lau, Yellow, 2023. Photograph. Courtesy of the Artist.
Carrie Lau, Yellow, 2023. Photograph. Courtesy of the Artist.
Carrie Lau, Yellow, 2023. Photograph. Courtesy of the Artist.
Carrie Lau, Yellow, 2023. Photograph. Courtesy of the Artist.

Carrie Lau
Yellow

—
Campus: Scarborough
Second Year, Studio Art and Art Management

Staying with Hong Kong as a subject, Carrie Lau’s photographic series Yellow directly addresses the increasing political conservatism of the city.

In 2020, the government passed a new national security law that vastly prohibited democratic civil liberties like the freedom of assembly and speech, including the ability to protest and criticise the government. Millions of people engaged in a series of protests and organization efforts between 2019 and 2020, the largest in the history of Hong Kong. The period is now sometimes referred to as the “Water revolution,” a name taken from Bruce Lee’s martial fighting advice to “be like water.” Lau’s photographs reference a nameless Hong Kong protester martyred for their opposition to the government’s extradition bill. As protesters, activists, and artists were indiscriminately imprisoned for their opposition to draconian law, Lau’s series stages political will and refusal. The images show a figure shrouded in symbols of the resistance, including an umbrella, a yellow raincoat, and post-it notes referencing the Lennon Wall. Staged within the brutalist concrete architecture of the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, Lau’s images evoke anonymous presence as a tactic of organizing resistance within the ideological and physical terrain of urban infrastructure. 

Victoria Lee, The Umbilical, 2024. Photographic image on solidified oil, tin box, 6.7 x 4.7 x 2.2 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
Victoria Lee, The Umbilical, 2024. Photographic image on solidified oil, tin box, 6.7 x 4.7 x 2.2 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Victoria Lee, The Umbilical, 2024. Photographic image on solidified oil, tin box, 6.7 x 4.7 x 2.2 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Victoria Lee, The Umbilical, 2024. Photographic image on solidified oil, tin box, 6.7 x 4.7 x 2.2 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Victoria Lee, The Umbilical, 2024. Photographic image on solidified oil, tin box, 6.7 x 4.7 x 2.2 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

2024 Award Winner

Victoria Lee
The Umbilical

—
Campus: St. George
Fourth Year, Visual Studies and Architecture

Watch video profile here.

Victoria Lee’s The Umbilical preserves an emulsion lift of a Polaroid image inside layers of solidified vegetable oil.

Lee cut open the photograph and placed the image membrane in water before transferring it onto a layer of hardened oil. She let it dry and then poured on another layer of hot oil, which fried the image emulsion slightly. The image is inspired by the Two of Swords from the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. The archetype sits blindfolded, balancing two swords crossed on her shoulders. As a divinatory tool, the Two of Swords represents calmness and intuition, and meditation over action. Her posture and surroundings suggest that she blindfolded herself, that she is in control, her lack of vision heightening her other senses.  

The Umbilical exemplifies Lee’s inventiveness of form and interest in experimenting with unconventional materials, in particular oil and fat. Lee was inspired by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Civilization Pillar (2001/19), a totemic sculpture made from human fat collected from plastic surgery clinics that, in Yuan and Yu’s words, prods the limits of morality in viewership. Lee in turn associates oil (and, in other works, margarine) with cultural excess, extraction, and consumption. The Umbilical, in Lee’s words, evokes the complexity of environmental dilemma, where the image trapped within layers of hardened oil portrays a heightened and protracted sense of stasis.  

Huan Chen, Passage, 2023. Oil on canvas, 60 x 66 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Huan Chen, Passage, 2023. Oil on canvas, 60 x 66 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Huan Chen, Passage, 2023. Oil on canvas, 60 x 66 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Huan Chen, Passage, 2023. Oil on canvas, 60 x 66 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Huan Chen
Passage

—
Campus: Mississauga
Fourth Year, Art & Art History

Huan Chen’s Passage is part of an impressive series of Huan Chen’s Passage is part of an impressive series of large-scale paintings on unstretched canvas. The painting’s subject is the disappearance of siheyuan, or courtyard house, a historical type of residence that dates back thousands of years in China.

According to some sources, Beijing was a city of entirely courtyard houses until 1949, which have, since the rapid modernization of the 1990s, become extremely rare. The courtyard, which would have been at the centre of a four-sided structure, is an important shared symbol of cultural preservation, referencing a way of urban living that prioritised communal space and shared leisure. This is valued in contrast to the individualism and alienation encoded in prevailing contemporary building priorities, from Beijing to Toronto. Chen paints an alley entrance to the house, positioning the viewer outside of the central courtyard, perhaps suggesting its increasing inaccessibility. Towards the bottom left of the painting the scene dissolves into an abstract whiteness, as if the image itself is receding from memory. Meanwhile, the top right of the canvas is overtaken by a storm cloud of paint representing the tangled branches of a tree. In Chen’s words, the cityscape is presented as a “wounded body,” and this intense fungi or vine-like vegetation takes over the image to symbolise death, decay, and eventually regeneration.  

Hafsa Murtaza, Bagh-i-Ashiyana, 2023. Acrylic on Japanese Chiyogami paper, 18 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Hafsa Murtaza, Bagh-i-Ashiyana, 2023. Acrylic on Japanese Chiyogami paper, 18 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Hafsa Murtaza, Bagh-i-Ashiyana, 2023. Acrylic on Japanese Chiyogami paper, 18 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Hafsa Murtaza, Bagh-i-Ashiyana, 2023. Acrylic on Japanese Chiyogami paper, 18 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Hafsa Murtaza, Bagh-i-Ashiyana, 2023. Acrylic on Japanese Chiyogami paper, 18 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Hafsa Murtaza
Bagh-i-Ashiyana

—
Campus: Mississauga
Second Year, Art & Art History

While the previous work in the exhibition deals with the disappearance of the Beijing courtyard, Hafsa Murtaza’s work imagines a fictive garden in the CCT Courtyard at the University of Toronto Mississauga. The work is inspired by the traditions of the Islamic Paradise garden and Persian miniature painting.

The latter lends the pictorial space its typical flat perspective. Murtaza has named her garden Bagh-i-Ashiyana, the Garden of Home and Togetherness. It incorporates elements from diverse cultural contexts, including the chahar bagh, or, four gardens, quartered by a fountain in the centre. In Murtaza’s words, the imagined garden also incorporates the domed architecture of Mughal chhatris and bangla roofs, as well as central Asian pagodas, Turkish drinking fountains, and North American Indigenous planting principles known as the “The Three Sisters.” The garden is portrayed simultaneously in both summer and winter. As the Islamic garden is imagined here as a multifunctional space for social interaction, the work reflects the desire for leisure space on campus that reflects the diverse cultural background of the student body. 

Catherine Luu, We Have Unfinished Business (Dear Catherine), 2023. Ballpoint pen on Somerset paper, 4 x 6 in each. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Catherine Luu, We Have Unfinished Business (Dear Catherine), 2023. Ballpoint pen on Somerset paper, 4 x 6 in each. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Catherine Luu, We Have Unfinished Business (Dear Catherine), 2023. Ballpoint pen on Somerset paper, 4 x 6 in each. Courtesy of the Artist.

Catherine Luu
We Have Unfinished Business (Dear Catherine)

—
Campus: Mississauga
Fifth Year, Art & Art History

Catherine Luu’s We Have Unfinished Business (Dear Catherine) centres on an experience of personal grief. Luu created fifty-one drawings in ballpoint pen that index the process of seeking structure and purpose after sustaining an unmooring loss.

The drawings depict scenes from the underbrush of gardens: decaying plants, crumpled flowers, dead branches, and gnarled roots. Luu wanted to bring attention to the undesirable and overlooked parts of the life cycle of a garden. Each drawing is the same size as a vernacular photograph (4 by 6 inches), imbuing the series with the familiar feel of a collection of mementos.  

Victoria Haseung Jung, Invaded, 2024. Drawing on foil paper, 33 x 8.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Victoria Haseung Jung, Invaded, 2024. Drawing on foil paper, 33 x 8.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Victoria Haseung Jung, Invaded, 2024. Drawing on foil paper, 33 x 8.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Victoria Haseung Jung, Invaded, 2024. Drawing on foil paper, 33 x 8.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Victoria Haseung Jung
Invaded

—
Campus: Scarborough
Fourth Year, Studio Art and French

Victoria Haseung Jung’s Invaded continues the focus on plant life present in the previous two artworks. The drawing, in the artist’s words, explores the idea of movement with the power to be invasive.

Invasiveness implies taking over a space designated for something or something else. Jung chose aluminum foil, an uncommon material, as the substrate of her drawing. The result is a softly illuminated column, reflecting, mirror-like, both light and viewer. Jung was drawn to the idea that the viewer would see themselves in the piece, effectively invading the work with their own image. The delicate silver substrate contrasts the electric drill Jung used to impress it, lightly, with coils of ivy. The inspiration for the work came from the ivy that grows fervently and dies each season on Jung’s window, blocking the outside from view. 

Jessica Zhang, Untitled, 2023. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 72 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Jessica Zhang, Untitled, 2023. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 72 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Jessica Zhang, Untitled, 2023. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 72 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Jessica Zhang, Untitled, 2023. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 72 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Jessica Zhang
Untitled

—
Campus: Mississauga
Third Year, Art & Art History

Jessica Zhang was inspired by Trinidadian-Canadian painter Denyse Thomasos (1964–2012), whose large canvases depict apparatuses of confinement including slavery, incarceration, and poverty.

Creating her work Untitled, Zhang thought about the disparate infrastructures of poverty and homelessness in Singapore, in contrast to what she observed in Toronto. Zhang took several source photographs of tents, coffee cups, garbage, shopping carts, clothing, and other everyday objects, and then recomposed these images into a mutable collage in her imagination.  

Zhang applied washes of acrylic with a wide brush at the base of the canvas. This thinned paint dripped down the canvas, evoking, in Zhang’s words, crumbling or decaying architecture. Zhang would then flip the canvas to reverse the motion of the dripping. On the foreground, she applied oil paint to create the representational elements. A vibrant green umbrella stands out toward the top of the canvas, at odds with the expressive, geometric abstractions evoking scaffolding or makeshift structures that dominate the rest of the work.  

Alexander Denis, Car Crash, 2023. Acrylic on canvas, 28 x 22 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Alexander Denis, Car Crash, 2023. Acrylic on canvas, 28 x 22 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Alexander Denis
Car Crash

—
Campus: Mississauga
Fourth Year, Art & Art History

Alexander Denis’s painting is a self-portrait made in response to a car crash. The painting defies traditional elements of the self-portrait in two ways.

The first, the facture seems to foreground neither the represented individual nor simply the paint itself, instead evoking the shock of the experience through almost literally representing splatters of blood. The liberated application of vibrant fuscia dots of paint evoke the shock of the experience.  

The second defiance of classic self-portrait tendency is the composition of the image itself. Self-portraiture often depicts its sitter in a durational pose, reflecting the subject spending time painting themselves either from a photograph or mirrored reflection. In contrast, Denis’s portrait depicts a split-second instant, raising his arm to his face in response to the impact of the crash. The subject is difficult to make out, only really emerging if the viewer knows what to look for. The figure clutches the back of his head with one hand and presses the other hand against his nose. The implied perspective is not exactly the first person that is common to self-portraiture, but rather a kind of third person perspective, perhaps suggesting an out-of-body experience of shock. 

Treasure Fatile, Ìyàwó Rere (Good Wife), 2023. Oil and stamped prints on canvas, 20 x 16 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Treasure Fatile, Ìyàwó Rere (Good Wife), 2023. Oil and stamped prints on canvas, 20 x 16 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Treasure Fatile, Ìyàwó Rere (Good Wife), 2023. Oil and stamped prints on canvas, 20 x 16 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Treasure Fatile, Ìyàwó Rere (Good Wife), 2023. Oil and stamped prints on canvas, 20 x 16 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Treasure Fatile
Ìyàwó Rere (Good Wife)

—
Campus: Mississauga
Third Year, Art & Art History and Criminology

Treasure Fatile’s Ìyàwó Rere is a tender portrait inspired by the artist’s grandparents. This painting emerged from a period of experimentation in portraying culturally-specific, Nigerian patterned fabrics in painting.

Fatile took inspiration from adire, a resist-dyed textile often dyed with indigo made by the Yoruba people. Fascinated by the information contained in this textile, the two fabrics in Fatile’s paintings incorporate symbols representing long life and pillars of strength (for the grandmother), and the chieftancy symbol igi oye, roughly translating to the tree of knowledge (for the grandfather). Combining paint and print media, Fatile carved the patterns into rubber stamps and pressed them into the painted canvas.  

Compositionally, Fatile has chosen to centre the grandmother figure, a departure from the photograph on which this painting is based. This recentering of the subject is, in Fatile’s words, an attempt to delve into the weight of caregiving and the psychological and physical toll that love can exact. It explores the extent to which the caregiver role can involve foregoing one’s own identity and how a family structure can begin to unwind in the face of degenerative illness.  

Arthur Yuanqiansheng Cui, The last sip, 2023. Paper straws, Super Glue, 14 x 39 x 2 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Arthur Yuanqiansheng Cui, The last sip, 2023. Paper straws, Super Glue, 14 x 39 x 2 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
Arthur Yuanqiansheng Cui, The last sip, 2023. Paper straws, Super Glue, 14 x 39 x 2 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Arthur Yuanqiansheng Cui, The last sip, 2023. Paper straws, Super Glue, 14 x 39 x 2 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Arthur Yuanqiansheng Cui
The last sip

—
Campus: Scarborough
Third Year, Studio Art

Arthur Yuanqiansheng Cui’s The last sip is one of two sculptural works in the exhibition. The work offers a kind of visual proposition about collective experience forged through sound.

Made entirely from drinking straws, the work evokes the reluctant end of a shared night when, Cui says, the sound made by finishing one’s drink signals it is time to leave. The piece is suspended in space – in air, like sound – hovering around the height of a human ear. Built up into five joined planes, the cloud-like form evokes simultaneously the construction of a pipe organ and the visual of a sound wave. While the (plastic) straw has become a kind of feverish symbol of social and consumerist anxieties around climate change, Cui suggests that its invocation of individual experience could be rethought from the perspective of sound, proposing the capacity of sonic experience to permeate and shape collective consciousness.  

Zhenqi Huang, Sea of clouds and mountains, 2023. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Zhenqi Huang, Sea of clouds and mountains, 2023. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Zhenqi Huang, Sea of clouds and mountains, 2023. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
(Detail) Zhenqi Huang, Sea of clouds and mountains, 2023. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Zhenqi Huang
Sea of clouds and mountains

—
Campus: Mississauga
Third Year, Art & Art History

Zhenqi Huang’s Sea of clouds and mountains is quiet yet exuberant. Inspired by the mountains Huang used to climb growing up in Wenzhou, China, the painting reflects on the beauty and uncapturable qualities of nature, as artists have done for a very long time.

The painting’s thick clouds and undulating, vibrant mountains have a musical quality, evoking, in Huang’s words, the boundless energy and kaleidoscopic colour of the natural world. The viewer’s perspective appears to be from high up, above the mountaintops, perhaps among the clouds. The mountain range here represented is the Yandang Mountains, known for vast, vertical rock faces and slopes with forests, bamboo groves, waterfalls, and caves. Several temples and shrines are built into the mouths of caves, and many were destroyed and some rebuilt after the Cultural Revolution. Huang turns to the medium of painting believing that certain ephemeral qualities of nature (and perhaps also destroyed culture) cannot be captured by the camera. 

Donny Chenyu Wang, The Great Heat, 2023. Video, 00:04:42. Courtesy of the Artist.

Donny Chenyu Wang
The Great Heat

—
Campus: St. George
Second Year, Visual Studies and Architecture

The exhibition closes with Donny Chenyu Wang’s The Great Heat, a video almost trance-like in its pace, soundscape, and richness of image.

In the Chinese lunisolar calendar, Great Heat is the twelfth of twenty-four solar terms. It is the last term of the summer season and generally the hottest of the year. The lunisolar calendar is used to determine which activities are considered auspicious or conducive to success – or not – at a particular time. As Wang’s video indicates, the time of great heat is favourable for repairing roads, bathing, avoiding additional tasks, and decorating walls. 

The video is divided into two acts: wood and water. The narrator of Wang’s video seems to embody each of these elements. A chorus of distorted voices replies to the narrator. Employing a striking tactic of filming printed photographs placed outside, the wood act largely features photos of water, and vice versa. Great Heat is commonly a time of thunderstorm and typhoon, and Wang uses images and footage taken at Lake Ontario. The physical images are vulnerable and ingested by the elements. One of the most striking images in the video depicts two white paper seagulls amidst the thin branches of a bush. Their wings teetering lightly in the wind, the paper gulls seem almost real. The image then cuts to two obviously printed photos of crashing waves, pierced onto the ends of branches. The video pulls back and forth between the meditative flow of natural imagery and the dramatized performance of film and sound.  

Juror’s Remarks

This year’s award winners highlight the importance of inventiveness and experimentation. Whether it is by critically examining the ideologies encoded within mediums (Wei), addressing the idea of incommensurability through form (Konopka), or evoking a sensitivity to process (Lee), the award winners understand the necessity to build new ways of knowing through different aesthetic approaches and representations of experience. It has been a pleasure getting to know the emergent practices of this year’s Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition cohort. Congratulations to all the artists!  

— Theresa Wang
Director & Curator, Mercer Union

Remarks from Barbara Fischer

The annual Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition celebrates the creativity and artistic excellent of undergraduate students in the Visual Arts programs at the University of Toronto’s St. George campus, UTSC, and the Art & Art History program jointly offered by UTM and Sheridan College. 

The Art Museum congratulates the 2024 award winners Olive Wei, Joanna Konopka, and Victoria Lee, as well as all of the artists selected this year for their illuminating visual insights into contemporary concerns. The three awards were adjudicated by Theresa Wang, Director and Curator of Mercer Union. Curated by University of Toronto alumni Kate Whiteway, this digital exhibition was produced in collaboration with University of Toronto alumni Dr. Liora Belford and faculty members Gareth Long, Alexander Irving, and John C. Armstrong, respectively.  

We gratefully acknowledge the continued support of the Honourable David Peterson, former Chancellor of the University of Toronto, and his wife, the actress and writer Shelley Peterson, for whom the award is named. For their support of the exhibition and digital publication, we also thank the Office of the Vice-President & Provost. 

— Barbara Fischer
Executive Director / Chief Curator, Art Museum at the University of Toronto