Art school confidential

The student showcase season ends with the art kids. By now the class of twenty-ten has attended film showings, doc screenings, and fashion shows; read articles and zines. All spring long our peers have been putting their best work on the table, asking us to gather.

It’s been brilliant and inspired, clichéd and tossed together. OCAD was no exception. Upstairs designers showed solutions on bound booklet pages. There were simple shoes made from rubber and laced together to prevent impoverished feet from disease. Potted plants that grow indoors with the help of LED lights and bicycles to pack into thin boxes and ship to African families. Products for people, tailored to our lives.

Drop down a floor or two and find pictorials: paintings and photos on the walls. From fashion magazines Winnie Truong sourced images to draw, then on faces penciled in endless strands of hair. Winnipeg’s Evin Collis re-imagined the myth of how our west was won, mixed prairie history with daily life. And Sam Catalfamo slowed down the teenage beating heart, filmed young flesh plunging into unknown waters.

It’s into those unknown waters now we’ll have to go. With all and art over, we’ll soon slip signed and stamped papers under our arms and rush out into the world.

And as middle-aged man on the brink of breakdown once told me: this is what happens next.

Michael Fok's miniature

What Abi sees for the Scarborough suburbs

Slides of every colour

Furniture designed for my shoebox sized apartment

How the west was won (better photos here)

Winnie, one of my favourites in the show

Aircrafts anonymous

(coming to a head)

Alize's sound and light

Disco something or other

Actually, this is just a picture I took of the floor

Back to future nostalgia

On an island one subway stop away from the city lays the remains of 1967, the year the world turned its eye on Montreal. Built for Canada’s first world fair, the sparkling white dome that is the Biosphere is one of the last Expo 67 structures still standing.

As I wrote last summer in  Marketing, On April 27, 1967, nearly 700 million television viewers and radio listeners tuned in as reporters broadcast the opening day of Canada’s first world fair.

The six-month fair was an optimistic time for the nation and for Montreal, the host city. Sixty-two countries and a handful of businesses set up pavilions showcasing the best new technologies from around the world. Celebrating its 100^th birthday that year, Canada’s future seemed undeniably bright.

Optimistic as we were, the future failed us. As the historian Pierre Berton put it, 1967 was Canada’s “last good year.” After Expo was the oil shock, separatism, local terrorism from the FLQ, and massive economic decline. 

So much for the future. Still, standing in the centre of the dome with wind blowing through the Biosphere and across the frigid observation deck, it’s hard to think Expo wasn’t worth it. The mid-day sun is obstructing everything, so I squint and snap one last photo. Then I take the elevator down and walk out wishing I could slip into the alternative future the architects had imagined.