FOFA's Annual Undergraduate Student Exhibition (USE 2025)
manifesting gardens
January 13 – February 21, 2025
The annual Undergraduate Student Exhibition (USE) is an interdepartmental undertaking that celebrates the talents of numerous creatives: visual artists, writers, designers and contemporary dancers.
This year, the theme seeks to care for the voices and seeds of those digging out, imagining, manifesting, planting, and standing up for thriving futurities and freedom(s). This exhibition is a reflection of our current times and captures a community platform where students cultivate their expression, their positions, their experiences, and hopes. It is fertile ground, a vehement ecosystem of voices, a garden to tend to and listen to.
Artists
About the exhibition
The works in this exhibition, as well as the accompanying essays and dance performance, inspire and aspire to be vocal about past and present injustices, everyday struggles, grief, and personal or collective liberation. More than outspoken vessels they are also chants; they are calls to act; to take action and make manifestations come true [...] It is fertile ground, a vehement ecosystem of voices, a garden, one of many, to tend to and listen to.
- María Andreína Escalona De Abreu, curator
Acknowledgements:
The FOFA Gallery Team:
Nicole Burisch, Director
Geneviève Wallen, Exhibition Coordinator
María Andreína Escalona De Abreu, Curator in Residence
Pierina Corzo-Valero, Communications Coordinator
Josh Jensen, Co-curator of Sustainability and Technician
Joé Côté-Rancourt, Co-curator of Sustainability and Technician
Hannah Ferguson, Assistant Technician of Sustainability
Philip Kitt, Technician
Adam Mbowe, Black Arts Series Coordinator
The USE 2025 Jury members:
María Andreína Escalona De Abreu (Curator in Residence) and Snack Witch Joni Cheung (Communications & Administrative Assistant) from the FOFA Gallery, Flora Nwakobi (Programming Coordinator) and Adam Gill (Technical Coordinator) from the VAV Gallery, and Helena Robbins (Student Representative).
Collaborators:
Lília Mestre, assistant professor in the Department of Contemporary Dance
Kevin Yuen-Kit Lo, assistant professor in the Department of Computation Arts
Arrien Weeks, Modular Plinth project lead
Dancers
Dancing manifesting gardens is a collective performance presented at the FOFA Gallery on February 20th by students in the class DANC 303 A – Scenography and Other Spatial Conditions in Dance faciliated by Professor Lília Mestre.
Mirroring the intention of manifesting gardens to use the garden as a metaphor for collective exhibition, these choreographies embrace the exhibition as a space for the coexistence of diverse approaches, techniques, and choreographic languages. The combination of these expressions—both material and immaterial—reflects the desire to create, from these differences, a sustainable, healthy, and nurturing ecosystem for "thriving futurities and freedom(s),"
- Lília Mestre, Professor
During the finissage of exhibition, the public was invited to view and participate in the dance performances by Yanik Savoie, Ajani Hasting, Etora Suedois aka YOR, Skkandaloza, Bailey Parkinson, Rory Patoka, Charlotte Alexander, Laïla Breger, Celine Blais, Su Seçkin, and Anmarie “A” Legault.
Press
- Read The Concordian article: Art as activism and reflection in FOFA’s annual undergraduate exhibition
- Read Concordia News' article: Concordia’s FOFA Gallery advances sustainable art curation with the Modular Plinth project
