Interdisciplinary Art Media and Design MFA graduate student Elyse Longair’s thesis works are to be included in the group exhibition Seeking the Periphery, presented by The Paul H. Cocker Gallery and curated by DAS instructor, architect, visual artist, and musician Dimitri Papatheodorou. With special thanks to Graduate Students: Sana Kadri, Andrea Bickley & Emily Phagoo, with support from Stephen Jones and Jack Hache.
Elyse Longair is an emerging artist currently completing her MFA degree in the Interdisciplinary Art Media & Design program at OCAD University, Canada. Her work has been included in group and solo exhibitions nationally. Presently, Elyse is an RBC Emerging Artist at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Primarily working in collage, her work aims to explore how fragmented worlds of a reconstructed past may question our notions of time and reshape our thinking of the future.
The virtual reception for Seeking the Periphery will be taking place, tonight, March 11th, at 6:30 PM on Zoom. Please register here.
Seeking the Periphery includes work by artists working on the periphery of architectural discourse. Within the walls of this exhibition architecture becomes a wider field of inquiry. The exhibition is a shared space containing multitudes. The work is curated in such a way as to avoid possible errors in categorization. In other words, the work can be categorized in many ways. Judgement is suspended with purpose; we are here to see, listen and learn from the many voices contained within the Gallery. There is a flow to the work, established by our student co-curators, but it is not immediately apparent – the curation is a silent aesthetic exploration.
About the Exhibition:
Iconic architectural photography disseminated global Modernism and canonized utopic design principles, shaping Internationalism while erasing local cultural practices. The carefully composed advertising-ready image was instrumental to the new message; the Image folded snuggly within the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, expanding the Factory to employ a complex hierarchy of production from top to bottom, from design to delivery. Internationalism was (is) an aesthetic that flowed through and replaced place. This aesthetic is still dominant while peripheral nodes of resistance emerge.
The Paul H. Cocker Gallery invited submissions that redirect the eye away from the iconic photographic image toward new forms and representational culture. The aim is to assemble and display alternative representations that lead away from homogeneity toward an architecture and culture that claims no specific centre. The abolition of the centre, and its replacement with the void is a position in architecture and culture that redirects perception to the Periphery.
