Concordia ceramics students have turned a broken locker into a dynamic gallery space. | Photo by Marilla Steuter-Martin.
Tucked away on the second floor of the Visual Arts (VA) Building sits an unexpected find: a broken-locker-turned-gallery space. This little gem fits in perfectly with the spirit of the Faculty of Fine Arts’ enthusiasm for creating art in spaces of all shapes and sizes.
“I think in contemporary art there’s quite a large movement in found spaces for showing work,” says Linda Swanson, an assistant professor of ceramics in Concordia’s Department of Studio Arts, who spearheaded the project. “I think the students really like the idea that space has another meaning and another function.”
That’s certainly the case with the locker gallery. The space, which opened in April, is about 45 centimetres wide and 75 centimetres tall and lit from above by a soft yellow battery-operated light. Before being converted into an installation space, for years the locker stood broken and without a door among the rows of the regularly used, robins-egg blue student lockers. Now, glass panelling serves as a barrier to protect the artwork on display from damage.
“We beautified it in a way, taking the broken locker that was actually collecting a lot of debris and junk and dirt and tried to make our space that we live in all the time, as students and faculty, more interesting,” says Swanson.
Linda Swanson, an assistant professor of ceramics, led the locker gallery project. | Photo by Marilla Steuter-Martin.