Art students find space on Main St.

Posted by admin on Nov 4, 2008 in Arts & Culture | 0 comments

It all started as an idea for a theme, which morphed in to Shifting Boundaries, an art showcase featuring the graphite works of Trinity Western University Art students Alysha Creighton and Alma Visscher, as well as local high school teacher and Emily Carr BFA Visual Art graduate Sande Waters. The North Vancouver Community Arts Council held an opening reception for the show, Thursday, Oct. 30.
The Arts Council shapes Shifting Boundaries around the formation of identity, relationships and community. The specific collaboration of vision between Creighton, Visscher and Waters is an encompassing approach to the significance of art practice; collectively, this is art that explores the body, the abstract layering of individuality and the gestures gathered to form structures and symbols that community abides in.

Creighton, a visual art major at TWU, displayed works that prolifically search for the identity of the human body through the language of its image. Creighton’s large canvas graphite work captures the wholeness of the human body and displays it like a vessel. With the support of professors, all but one of Creighton’s works were completed throughout her years at TWU. Her newest piece, created on a plywood surface, identifies several hand gestures in accordance to signs of Catholicism, confessing the language of body image.

Visscher received her B.A. in Art at TWU last year, and last displayed her work at the TWU Senior Art Show. With use of mulberry paper as the foundation of all the works present, Visscher layers her work with intricate contours, physical pressures in the medium and the constant reapplication of new levels of paper. There’s a sense of obsessive reevaluation in Visscher’s pieces, in which each address abstract considerations of individuality. Her work is not all based in gestures; also present is a consistent observation of white space that contrasts this abstract layering of individuality with a sense of freedom.

High school teacher and MFA Candidate of the San Francisco Art Institute Sande Waters adds the final element in this showcase, generating the significance that each piece has with the whole. Waters combines the use of beautiful lines bunched finely together to form oblongs and trapezoids. Highly interested in art practice with community involvement, Waters also uses the showcase to directly involve her high school students in considering the value of art in community and the influence artists, together, can accomplish.

Lastly, the showcase also features an interactive art piece open to the public, breaking the separation of the viewer and the autonomy of the gallery.

Based off of Main Street in North Vancouver, the CityScape Community Art Space is founded on building strong communities through the arts. It will be showcasing Shifting Boundaries through Nov. 22.