Inter-NoUs features diverse artistic mediums, shows off arts department community
A new exhibition in Gallery 115 at the University of Ottawa puts student-professor collaborations at the fore to highlight the influences, partnerships, and shared creativity between different generations of artists. It’s also an exhibit that explores how artists shape and represent the spaces around them.
The name of the exhibition, Inter-NoUs, is a bilingual play on words that captures that relationship across different artistic practices and generations. On display in the gallery are collages, oil paintings, photography, and audio-visual work.
The gallery was curated by Collectif 4519, the collective name for the students of ART4519 Le commissariat en art contemporain. The course teaches students how to curate a gallery. Inter-NoUs is the class’ final project.
“We wanted different artists, different mediums, different types of arts, because we wanted to create an interaction between teachers and students and all kinds of media,” said Rachel Goulet, a fourth-year French literature and art history student, and one of the curators of the gallery. “We have collage, painting, virtual reality: we really wanted to create a connection between all those different types of art.”
The curators wanted to emphasize the close-knit community aspect of the visual arts department in their exhibit, which is why they wanted to bring together students’ diverse works with pieces by professors.
“It’s just to put all the work in the same room … so we can have a whole community interacting together,” said Goulet.
Each wall is devoted to a different theme. Body-Identity is a study of how we perceive ourselves; the second wall is called Sensorial-Landscape and features two artists from different countries whose work centres around travel; Pop-Body is a series of collages that show interactions between the human body and objects in the contemporary world; the fourth section is Inner-Landscape and demonstrates interior travel and how we’ve come so far in our lives.
“The general goal of this exhibition was to share. It was a communal place to share with others your experiences and thoughts,” said Goulet.
The gallery features eleven artists, three of whom are professors. The collaborative theme was partly inspired by the ART4519 class since the students worked so closely with their professor, Analays Alvarez Hernandez, to design the exhibit. Alvarez Hernandez is a professional curator and it is her first time teaching students how to build an exhibition.
“We wanted to create that interaction between teachers and students, but most of the respondents were students,” said Goulet, offering a great chance to show off the student talent in the Visual Arts department.
Inter-NoUs runs until April 4 at the University of Ottawa’s Gallery 115.
