The Learning Zone

OCAD U Library presents FAR OUT Exhibition, curated by Emily Harrison and Marta Chudolinska featuring weird and bizarre artworks exploring unconventional and alternate realities.

It’s a multidisciplinary exhibition that includes everything from sculpture, photography and video, to collage and paintings, by a diverse group of OCAD U students and alumni artists — Adrienne Crossman, Ana Jofre, Andre Kan, Emily Waknine, Lucas Johnson, Marta Chudolinska, Petar Boskovic, Sam Pedicelli, Sarah Munro, Tara Dorey and Yan Wen Gillian Chang.

This diversified collection of artwork attempts to extend the boundary of creative communication which reflects the OCAD U Library environment, which encourages the investigation, questioning, and challenging of traditional forms of information and knowledge.

On until October 3rd.

June saw the launch of the OCAD Seed Library, an official branch of the Toronto Seed Library hosted in the Learning Zone.

The Toronto Seed Library (TSL) started their roots November 2012 by the Occupy Gardens of Toronto Collective and students from the University of Toronto and York University. The TSL has grown into a strong cooperative made up of a diverse membership creating a free, self-perpetuating seed library system. To learn more about the Toronto Seed Library please visit their website but to quickly get you started, visit the OCAD Seed Library today to borrow seeds, plant, harvest, and replenish the library.

How to access the OCAD Seed Library? The OCAD Seed Library is available to the OCAD U community with no cost or membership required — it’s an honour-based system. There is no limitations on how many seed packages you can borrow in one day or season, but remember that the seed library is a shared public resource, so take only what you will use this season.

We encourage the borrowers of the OCAD Seed Library to save some of their new seeds from this season. Check the TSL website for guidance on saving seeds. If you are a beginner gardener, focus on saving seeds from varieties that are easily saved such as lettuce, peas, beans and tomatoes. Seed saving is an important practice in sustainable farming, it builds a stronger future for the community — keeps costs down, improves the yearly production/preservation of healthy produce, offers diversity and food security. Unfortunately, seed saving practice is in jeopardy! The Canadian Government will be bringing forth Bill C-18, the Agriculture Growth Act August 1, 2014. Visit the National Farmers Union website and read how you can STOP Bill C-18.

Looking for gardening inspiration to help get you started? Visit OCAD U’s Dorothy H. Hoover Library, which carries a great selection of gardening resources that would appeal to any green thumb. Here are a few titles:

Incredible Edibles: 43 Fun Things to Grow in the City by Sonia Day

Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing by Lorraine Johnson

How To Grow Food: A Step-by-Step Guide to Growing All Kinds of Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs, Salads and More by Richard Gianfrancesco

On Guerrilla Gardening by Richard Reynolds

Heirloom Fruits and Vegetables by Toby Musgrave

Also, available in the OCAD Zine Library is a copy of The Seedy Zine published by the Toronto Seed Library.

Last year OCAD U Dorothy H. Hoover library retired the Picture Files from their collection. Picture clippings sourced from magazines, newspapers, calendars and other ephemeral materials, collected and organized by subject headings. Hundreds of black & white and colour images, filed in large manila folders with subject names manually labeled.

This was a treasured resource that countless art & design students sifted through for inspiration, long before electronic databases that now store and facilitate access to a myriad of images in countless subject tagged categories.

The latest exhibition at the Learning Zone, called The Ex-Files asks the question Where do images ultimately end up? In this exhibition, the picture file no longer serves as reference material, but is repurposed as subject material.

The Ex-Files curated by Emily Waknine, presents a collection of forty-five sets of duplicate images titled Duplicates (The Same but Different) which incorporates her practice of duplication for the purpose of study.

All these Cats are Dead, incorporate selected images from the library’s picture file subject category “1980’s Cat Photographs” retains the patina of 1980’s magazine ink reproduction technology, reinforcing the notion of capacity for recollection that is gradually aging, fading.

Come to the Learning Zone to see The Ex-Files on display for the summer.

Personal Inventory by multidisciplinary artist Cotey Pope, is the latest exhibition to be screened at xpace: External Space located in the Learning Zone until July 2nd.

Pope’s Personal Inventory is a collection archival family footage, layered with personal audio recordings recounting telephone conversations, doctor’s appointments and the recalling of childhood memories.

Your sense of self is defined by the collection of memories. The work explores the process of archiving the remembrance and questioning fidelity and authenticity of how we remember the things that define us.

The media recordings referenced in the piece serve as notes that we reference against, like a mental archive of our existence.

Through the collection of archived memories, Personal Inventory explores nostalgia’s inner workings, and the way memories fade and change despite our best efforts to hold onto the past”

—Alicia Nauta

On until July 2nd