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

A persona, and some Americana

The graduates are in. Meet Emily O'Brien, recent Goldsmith grad. Yep, Goldsmith. Screw the economy kids, do what you really love. A recent OCAD grad, O'brien specializes in building tiny pieces of Americana. For her thesis project O'Brien constructed recreations of scenes of American life, and plotted the miniatures out on a giant map of the U.S.A.

If I could squeeze into the America in O'brien's head and pancake tour across it, all of my Kerouac fantasies would come to fruition. Luckily, I have O'brien, a Rochester native, to lead me through the well journaled journey. Placed poignently on a blue-green map of the land are tiny pit-stops; the most miniature scenes of American life jewellery can hang on.

Oh yeah, there's jewelerry, too. Hanging on and hidden in the work is another art: the accessory. Earings, necklaces, and pendants top off the mapped mini-architecture. It's functional art and fashion, anchored in America.

But before O'brien got art-school-cool, there were the elementary years. Back then, O'brien was the only female member of the school Star Wars club. No, she wasn't Princess Laya, if that's what you're thinking. Some male member snagged that role, leaving her with Chewbacca (a position she filled proudly).

Now O'brien's a goldsmith, and a jewelery grad. The last we heard from the Laya-kid, a twister had passed through town and he was never seen again. Americans, you've gotta love them.

*When I said "Monday Morning" in yesterday's post, I meant Monday evening, when this was written. The London Stock Exchange went on a break, and so did I.