Oct 28

Rouzbeh Akhbari & Behrad on: woodworking, sustainability & social allegories

Posted on October 28, 2014 by Shamina Chherawala

Over the summer 2014, the Office of Diversity, Equity & Sustainability Initiatives worked with OCAD U Students Rouzbeh Akhbari and Behrad, to create wood sculptures to share with incoming students and faculty during Fall Orientation. They were tasked with a challenging project: to come up with an object that conveyed the concepts of sustainability, diversity & equity through its structure or function, could be scaled to 1000 hand-crafted pieces, and was different from the usual orientation week ‘promo’ item. We reached out to Rouzbeh and Behrad to tell us more about the project.

[Image Description: photo of wooden sculptures that also function as tea-light holders]

“New ways of retelling an already established narrative, of course, is precisely the intersection of political resistance and social allegories that we explore in these objects.”

SITE-SPECIFIC: How did you come up with the concept for the wooden cubes and how does that narrative connect to concepts of equity, diversity and sustainability?

ROUZBEH AKHBARI: The idea of re-purposing scrap wood came from a constant exposure to a culture of recycling and reusing that is prominently exercised in our studio in OCAD U. Lisa Hampton, the class assistant in the wood shop, has formed a fascinating practice that revolves closely around the obsessive acquisition of wooden off cuts and creating meticulously designed furniture and objects of art that contain a collective narrative. Her continuous encouragement for all the students, including both of us, to think more critically about issues around sustainability and waste management resulted in a form of awareness that positively informed our individual practices. When we were tasked to create a series of objects that could potentially be fabricated in large quantities, tie the notions of diversity and sustainability together and hold some sort of functional value we immediately thought of the common point in our practices, which is essentially the notion of handling disregarded or rejected materials in ways that facilitate the production of objects that tell new narratives by re-contextualizing old ones.

“To bring all these pieces together again in new compositional forms allows for a fresh way of looking at the “unwanted” and the “unseen” as they rearrange and historicize their original referent (that being the original project/piece they came from) within a totally separate context.”

New ways of retelling an already established narrative, of course, is precisely the intersection of political resistance and social allegories that we explore in these objects. Metaphorically speaking, when one looks at a pile of various species of wooden off cuts, it is quite easy to respond to it as simply put “just a pile of scraps,” which instantly subjects all these materials to a certain set of value systems and assumptions about their significance in the bigger economic scheme. They are almost always overlooked and thought of as an alternative option with complete disregard for the conceptual significance they carry, especially as rejected parts of other individual’s art pieces. To bring all these pieces together again in new compositional forms allows for a fresh way of looking at the “unwanted” and the “unseen” as they rearrange and historicize their original referent (that being the original project/piece they came from) within a totally separate context. That conceptual approach of analyzing and interpreting materials in connection to the way knowledge, narratives and histories are constructed is mainly what we intend the audience to receive from looking at these objects.

[Image Description: Photograph of three students in the OCAD U Wood Shop creating wooden sculptural pieces. Right to left: Behrad, Rouzbeh Akhbari, and a friend assisting with inlay work]

S: How did you create 1000 individual hand-crafted pieces within less than two weeks?

A: To be frank, that required a tremendous amount of time dedicated to planning and figuring out the logistics before we began with even touching any physical material. After all the details were laid out in front of us we spent couple of hours constructing a few jigs, which functioned mostly as moulds for gluing up smaller pieces to fabricate bigger chunks that were more easily workable on heavy machinery. After the lamination process was actualized, all the pieces were mitered and prepared for a series of glue ups that took about 5 days to finish. To put it briefly, the whole process was a time-consuming repetition of cuttings and gluing back that allowed us to move from small off cuts to larger lumber and back to small cubes that were very close to the final results that we envisioned. After the structural construction of the cubes, we spent a few days working on the decorative inlays and sanding that lead us to the last step, which was finishing.

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Sep 18

Fatimah Tuggar on: visibility, flexibility, and critical pedagogy

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Olga Goroshko

SITE-SPECIFIC: What does critical pedagogy mean to you? How has your art-making practice informed your approach to pedagogy? Conversely, how does your approach to pedagogy inform your art-making?

FATIMAH TUGGAR: At the heart of critical pedagogy is thinking. Learning to think critically, which should result in taking actions and responsibility for yourself and on behalf of others. In my classrooms, I encourage thinking on various levels; through production and a dynamic of constructive peer to peer exchange in order to create a community learning environment that is safe but honest. This can inspire students to view their peers and planet as evolving resources, and reinforces the skills of self-directed, life-long, independent, and collective learning. Through this students are empowered to challenge dogmas, including their own.

I am committed to teaching as a personal expression of my professional goals and values. These values include expanding the territories that art and artists explore. The goals include pushing back the boundaries of the studio and the classroom to include a greater global community. The system of mutual learning and teaching is synonymous, for me, with the creative action of taking responsibility. Creative action through teaching is my way of ensuring that there will be ongoing meaningful dialogues with other artists, and their work, throughout my own practice.

“Representation matters because meaning and interpretation depends on access to power and knowledge. Since, we don’t all have access to the same level of power and knowledge, we have to be mindful of the impact of our own bias and privileged accesses.”

S: Where do you begin when talking about the critical issues of representation in art? What about representation should artists and designers be mindful of in their practice, and why does this matter?

T: Representation is how human beings create and share meaning for both the imagined and tangible aspects of existence. It is therefore, critical to the production of all creative cultural workers including visual artist. Our relationship to meaning or cultural signification is an emotional one. There is a constant struggle for meaning and ownership of signifiers. Artist and designers have the responsibility of both using and creating cultural signification that is both effective in communicating intended meanings and at the same time being culturally sensitive enough so unintended meanings and readings do not get ascribed to their cultural productions.

Representation matters because meaning and interpretation depends on access to power and knowledge. Since, we don’t all have access to the same level of power and knowledge, we have to be mindful of the impact of our own bias and privileged accesses. We have to ask ourselves in the making process, who is being represented? How are they represented? Who is the interpreting audience and what are their biases? In other words, meaning matters in time, place, how and why. The artist has to be aware that life experiences; individual backgrounds, cultural context, beliefs, psychological states, social and economic status, etc. all affect meaning.

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May 01

Yijin Jiang, Julie Buelow, Arief Yulianto, and Taghreed Al-Zubaidi on: Reimagining Accessibility

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Shamina Chherawala

“We must understand and practice an accessibility that moves us closer to justice, not just inclusion or diversity … We need to think of access with an understanding of disability justice, moving away from an equality-based model of sameness and “we are just like you” to a model of disability that embraces difference, confronts privilege and challenges what is considered “normal “on every front. We don’t want to simply join the ranks of the privileged; we want to dismantle those ranks and the systems that maintain them.”
– Mia Mingus, Changing the Framework: Disability Justice

[Image Description: Reimagining Accessibility Design Challenge finalists with the Countess of Wessex, Lieutenant Governor of Ontario David C. Onley, and Dr Sara Diamond]

Yijin Jiang, Julie Buelow, Arief Yulianto, and Taghreed Al-Zubaidi, all students in the Inclusive Design Graduate Program at OCAD University, were finalists in the 2013 Reimagining Accessibility Design Challenge hosted by OCAD U. The design challenge’s intent was to create an inclusive logo to replace the traditional International symbol of access – a solid blue square overlapped with an image of a white stick figure – a wheelchair user.

[Image description: traditional International symbol of access – a solid blue square overlapped with an image of a white stick figure – a wheelchair user.]

Jutta Treviranus, director of OCAD U’s Masters of Design in Inclusive Design program, introduced the 2013 Design Challenge: “Symbols we use are not passive statements… (rather) powerful means of framing our attitudes and promoting specific points of view. Accessibility has a human face… it is active, social and requires our evolving creativity… something benefiting us all individually and as a society.”

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Jan 28

Renzi Guarin on: inclusivity, technology, and accessibility

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Danielle Nicole Smith

Renzi Guarin is an AV Support Specialist through the IT Services Department at OCAD University.

SITE-SPECIFIC: Tell us about what you do here at OCAD University.

RENZI GUARIN: Our office deals with the circulation of audio and visual equipment for faculty, administrative staff and students. We ensure that the faculty have the technology to help them teach effectively in our classrooms and that admin staff are properly prepared with tools to aid them with hosting meetings, seminars and in carrying out the day to day operations of the University. For students, we offer a variety of equipment and services to facilitate their creative projects and curriculum work throughout the year.

Part of my job is to oversee the audio-visual and technology aspects of special events for OCAD University. In the past couple of years, we’ve worked on various events providing AV support where accessible technology is involved. Most recently, OCAD U hosted the 3rd Accessibility Camp Toronto conference, an event centered on assistive technology with workshops and seminars regarding the landscape of inclusive and accessible design.

” Whether it is a guest speaker, an exhibition opening, a town hall meeting or even a lecture in a classroom; If everyone is able to come away with the opportunity to become inspired, informed or educated then I think we’ve done our job.”

S: Some people differentiate between accessible media and all other media. You seem to work from the premise that all media is accessible with some ingenuity. Can you comment?

G: Whether it is a Guest speaker, an exhibition opening, a town hall meeting or even a lecture in a classroom; If everyone is able to come away with the opportunity to become inspired, informed or educated then I think we’ve done our job. Ultimately it should be the goal of anyone who organizes an event on campus to see accessibility included in the initial planning stages of the event rather than an after thought or on a case by case basis. For event organizers, there might be hesitation when thinking about the complications that might arise when including things like ASL interpreters or captioning services, but I think that it is up to us to take that challenge head on and just find a way to be able to provide appropriate alternatives for any setup that is required or asked for.

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