Camosun staff art exhibit showcases diversity in mediums

Arts Campus September 21, 2016

Just because a piece of artwork hasn’t reached the traditional stage of completion doesn’t mean it’s not art that its makers can display with pride. At least that’s Camosun Visual Arts prof Mike McLean’s opinion; the R+D exhibit backs him up, and it’s up and running on campus until September 26.

McLean says that it’s really important that students see this work, which features the art of the Camosun Visual Arts staff. It’s not often that the college highlights the talent of its employees rather than its students, but McLean says the exhibit is essential in creating the creative independence aspiring artists often need.

“It’s something that we’re always challenged to do in terms of teaching,” he says.

McLean says that it’s always a challenge to create that delicate balance of having students “know where you are coming from” without having them unintentionally emulate the work they see in the early stages of the learning process.

The R+D art exhibit is up now at three locations at Camosun College’s Lansdowne campus (photo by Greg Pratt/Nexus).
The R+D art exhibit is up now at three locations at Camosun College’s Lansdowne campus (photo by Greg Pratt/Nexus).

“We really want our students to come up with their own ideas and have their own voice within the medium that they choose,” he says. “It’s one of those things where you don’t necessarily want to put your work on display too often…We really want our students to develop their own language.”

McLean is no stranger to outside-the-box art—he says one faculty member chopped off his own facial hair during a particularly passionate moment of performance art. Other mediums utilized at R+D include photography and video; McLean says that, within reason, there are no limits to what students here can explore.

“Not all of them are completely finalized work that you would normally see in a gallery. Some of the edges are still a little bit loose, but that’s intentional,” he says. “It’s been a lot of years since we put an exhibition [for the staff] together, to show not only the students but the greater college community what it is that we’re up to and what some of the things that we’re interested in exploring artistically are.”

Aside from more typical mediums such as photo documentation and performance art (where the shaving of the moustache took place), R+D features the work of one faculty member who, McLean says, “has been researching different types of plants and grinding them up to make pigments out of them.” That faculty member is Visual Arts instructor Brenda Petays, who spent much of her summer searching for indigenous plants to put in her project.

“I kind of see it as a relationship between myself and the land,” she says, regarding her pigment project. “I’m becoming much more conscious of our relationship with indigenous people.”

There are also sculptures and work shown on video monitors, which will add some “time-based elements” to the show, says McLean. One instructor uses poetry to explore a unique medium where photographs intertwine with the written word.

“It’s a really wide-ranging cross-section of what we do in the classroom,” says McLean. “I think how open the field can be is well represented in the show.”

R+D is on display now at Lansdowne campus between Young 111 and 117; in the entrance to the library; and in the second-floor library mezzanine.