A new exhibition in the FINA Gallery, organized as part of the Art History and Visual Culture program’s fourth-year experiential learning Curating Contemporary Art course, opens on Friday October 25 at 6pm with a reception welcoming the friends and family of the twelve student curators responsible for organizing the show, and printmaking lovers from across the UBC Okanagan campus and beyond.
Drawn from the UBCO Printmaking Teaching Collection, PR/12NT features the work of twenty-two former—and one current—printmaking students, many of whom are graduates of the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies’ Bachelor of Fine Arts program. But also included are screen prints, lithographs, and works in intaglio and relief techniques produced by students from across the campus’ many degree programs, and also visiting printmakers.
Artists as recent as UBCO MFA graduate Natasha Harvey (2023), and also BFA graduates Lacia Vogel (2012) and Laura Widmer (2011), lead the creative and accomplished fine arts alumni whose works were selected by the curators for their unique mark-making and layering. These skills are owed to the deft instruction of veteran printmaker and UBCO professor, Briar Craig, and his decades-long commitment to collecting and safeguarding student print works:
“The UBCO Printmaking Teaching Collection now holds in the vicinity of 800 prints and we are able to host exhibitions from that collection, but primarily those prints are taken into classes so that students new to the various print media can learn from and see the possibilities inherent in these unique forms of art making.”
As Craig notes, one of the benefits of making prints is that they tend to be created in multiples—multiple originals—rather than copies of an already-existing art work: “within the context of a university art program, the creation of works as multiple originals allows the program to collect examples of print-based work to use as teaching aids for future classes.”
But PR/12NT is not only about students learning printmaking. It is also about a new cohort of students learning the art of curation.
Over the past eight weeks, the twelve nascent curators enrolled in the learning-by-doing course have been navigating both the theory and practice of contemporary art curating, asking themselves what it means to curate hands-on and from the ground up beginning with an original collection of works conveniently located just down the hall.
Left to right: ARTH 420 student curators Sam Rennie (back), Paul Bryden (front), Megan Pahl, Kelly Yuste, Hannah Head-Rapson, Kiera Dorner, Ains Reid, Mariia Kondaurova, Maritza Botha, Amy Lucich, Hannah Palomera, and India Barnett.
From learning how to handle paper—you need to two-hand ‘float’ each sheet, lest you crease the paper and permanently damage the work—to learning how to spot the various printmaking techniques, students began by organizing themselves into four groups divided by media, and narrowing an initial selection. Next, the full class came back together to ‘negotiate’ a final body of work. And then came the task of learning how to take high-quality photographs of each print for the accompanying exhibition catalogue, and the arduous mission of registering each work with full and complete artwork identifications—not an easy ask for a collection that dates back to the eighties, and when not all artists sign their work. The result of this collaborative creative and critical process will be on view beginning Friday: twenty-six works by twenty-two printmakers ranging from UV screen printing, to lithography, to etching and aquatint, and also linocut. This is printmaking at its very best, and it is all UBCO’s own.
Final artwork selection process.
Among the longest-standing works from the UBCO Printmaking Teaching Collection on display is the work of Tim Nash, a graduate of the University of Alberta’s BFA program—his For Victory Over the Sun was collected by Craig when he was a graduate student in the 1980s. Nash’s textured grid was selected as the lead image for the show: the striking black-and-white etching/aquatint that Craig uses to demonstrate the possibilities of the medium to incoming students immediately caught the eye—and imagination—of the twelve budding curators. “It was always Tim Nash that students wanted to preface the show, even before they knew the artist’s name,” says Nathalie Hager, and Art History and Visual Culture lecturer who has been guiding these curators-in-training through the course.
With the selection and cataloguing of works complete, next came the process of making meaning of the selection by planning the physical hanging and display. To the rescue came a 3D mock-up model of the FINA Gallery space by fellow student curator Paul Bryden, himself a UBC Vancouver MFA graduate. Rejecting technology in favour of an old-school tactile approach, Bryden painstakingly miniaturized the gallery’s four walls into a curatorial planning ‘white cube’. Come see how Bryden and his fellow curators planned and plotted the show’s hanging within the scale model of the FINA Gallery, complete with miniature versions of each artwork.
For Ains Reid, a visual arts minor—and both a curator and one of the printmakers featured in the exhibition—PR/12NT marks his first experience balancing the dual roles of curator and creator. Reflecting on the unique opportunity of curating a show for a university gallery:
“As an artist, I had been unacquainted with the process of putting together an exhibition—my focus has been on producing artwork rather than collating it to display in a gallery setting. Co-curating PR/12NT has given me a new lens through which I have been considering the roles of artists, curators, and visitors within the gallery and in the art world. My experience as an artist has been integral to my curatorial decision-making and going forward my new experience as a curator will inform my art making because I now have a more interdisciplinary and holistic approach to both.”
Supporting students throughout the curatorial process is a talented team of gallery exhibition and installation experts: Technical Director Philip Wyness trained students on the art of the gallery hang, using a level and a measuring tape as well as good measure of common sense; Media Technician Sam Neal worked with Maritza Botha, who designed so much of the exhibition’s marketing, offering tips and tricks on designing, scaling, and adhering vinyl lettering for title wall; and Marketing and Communications Strategist Shauna Oddleifson, a UBC Okanagan BFA graduate, coached the events team on the finer nuances of planning and executing a flawless opening night reception.
And then there is Briar Craig, drawing on his long and colourful institutional memory to bring to bear the weight of a collection gathered from teaching, for teaching:
“Within the digital age we have become accustomed to looking at art on the screens of our computers or phones but there is no real substitute for viewing art in the flesh. Students can dive into a close study of the textures, layers, and subtleties on a real piece of art rather than seeing that work in a less than ideal resolution on a screen.”
Under development is an in-gallery brochure, and also a full-colour catalogue of works that will be gifted to all artists featured in PR/12NT.
PR/12NT: One Exhibition/Twelve Curators is on view in FINA Gallery until November 8, 2024.
Follow