USE 2021 online programming

About Imagined Topographies

The FOFA Gallery has now been closed for over six months and will remain closed for the Winter semester. Alas, this year, the annual Undergraduate Students Exhibition (USE) will not be presented in its traditional format. This interdepartmental undertaking celebrates the talents of numerous creatives: visual artists, writers, designers, and contemporary dancers. Although the FOFA staff shifted gears and is working towards coordinating an engaging online programming, there is still a lingering feeling of loss. In the process of re-imagining USE, there was also the mourning of its material and physical aspects. With the current global pandemic, it is required from all parties involved to be resourceful, patient, flexible and open to the ever-shifting circumstances under which we co-create this experience as collaborators. While processing movement constraints and practicing social distancing, the works selected for USE 2021 prompted reflections about self-orientation and alternative mapping methodologies. I pondered about the cognitive and sensory markers that ground our daily lives while we increasingly coalesce on online platforms or via technological devices. Imagined Topographies, as a conceptual umbrella unifying the works, underlines the deep entanglement of language, bodies, natural and cultural environments necessary to worldmaking. The complex connective social tissues and liminal spaces mapped by each body of work ask; how one creates points of reference from which the self joins a collective? What is the role of memory, displacement, and vernacular landscapes in world-building? How does one connect the dots between a myriad of intersections such as kinship, cultural knowledge and rituals, colonial inheritance, and interpersonal boundaries? Lastly, what is the material translation of the symbiotic relationship between culture and technology? Imagined Topographies highlights the conceptualized and embodied spaces interconnecting the self and others.

Featured Artists:

Anahi M. Arciniega, Pedro J. Barbáchano,Marissa Sean Cruz,Reihan Ebrahimi, flora fauna, Chris M. Forsyth, Ryth Kesselring, Carolina Larrosa, Vân Thúy Lê, Le Lin, Wendy-Alexina Vancol, Leah Watts

Featured Writers:

Mackenzie Aker, Renata Critton-Pap, Laurie Sévigny-Couture, Emmanuelle Desrochers, Sarah Elizabeth Dirks,Maria Escalona Hannah Ferguson, Anastasia Koutsogiannis, Charlotte Perreault, India-Lynn Upshaw-Ruffner, Kari Valmestad, Laurence Williams

Éditor (catalogue essays):

Chloë Lalonde

Visual Identity and catalogue design 

Ola Bailoun,Theresa Hoang, Andrew Kerr, Vanessa Trifonopoulos, Taylor Reddam-Woo