Leah Watts at the FOFA Gallery

USE 2021

Each year, the annual undergraduate exhibition aims to represent the diverse art practices and research interests occurring within the Faculty of Fine Arts. Collaborative at its core, this interdisciplinary initiative culminates in an exhibition, publication, and performance event, and combines the efforts of many students, staff, and faculty members. Ultimately, the undergraduate student exhibition aims to foster community among students, while encouraging them to work together through different practices and thought processes.

The works selected for USE 2021 prompt reflections about self-orientation and alternative mapping methodologies. Imagined Topographies, as a conceptual umbrella, underlines the deep entanglement of language, bodies, natural and cultural environments necessary to worldmaking by shedding a light on the conceptualized and embodied spaces interconnecting the self and others.

The complex connective social tissues and liminal spaces mapped by each body of work ask: how one creates points of reference from which the self joins a collective? What is the role of memory, displacement, and vernacular landscapes in world-building? How does one connect the dots between a myriad of intersections between kinship, cultural knowledge and rituals, colonial inheritance, and interpersonal boundaries? What is the material translation of the symbiotic relationship between culture and technology?

The FOFA Gallery will remain closed for the Winter semester; therefore, our annual Undergraduate Students Exhibition (USE) will not be presented in its traditional format.

Instead, from January 21st to February 11th 2021, FOFA will be dispatching weekly newsletters featuring a grouping of artists’ profiles exploring different facets of the curatorial thematic Imagined Topographies.

Check out Leah Watts’ work here