Curating A SoCA Student Photo Display at AWE

Phoebe Findlay, Curatorial Intern at AWE, and a third year BFA Visual Arts student at the University of Windsor.

As part of my internship at Art Windsor-Essex, I have been given the opportunity to curate a display of images created by students at the University of Windsor’s School of Creative Arts (SoCA).

I attended the class critique for the assignment. It was a new experience participating in a critique as a curator rather than as an artist. My role as curator at the critique was to decide which single image from each student’s series would be in the display. I asked what their concept was, which image was most successful in conveying their concept, and why. I did not pick photos based on the photographer’s favorite, but I wanted to be aware of the intentional decisions that the students were making.

With a broad assignment that allows for creative freedom, there were many different ideas explored. This posed a difficulty to me as a curator, trying to make all these images fit together. As I was taking notes, I wrote down patterns that I noticed. in the classes’ images. Even though the images were all very different, common themes emerged. I used these to organize photographs. Many students referenced time, leading me to have images to form a line. I also wanted to group images to play off against each other. The display varies between groupings and pathways. It tapers off as it stretches out from the center while mirroring itself.

The display can be found on the second-floor staircase at AWE.

VSAR2900 Students:

Avery Blazevich, Brayden Jones, Cindy Lai, Danish Niazi, Elise Potma, Gioia Greco, Hannah King, Haylee Ouellette, Heather Bezaire, Jay Newman, Jilian Christie, Jingying Wang, Julia Serek, Julianna Szeto, Julianne Gabucan, Katherine Brooks, Lianxingzi Xue, Maya Rice, Naomi Mcguffin, Parker Mosey, Sarah Smitherman, Shayla Coppola, Victoria Shalton, Nicholas Tracey, Omar Al-Faouri.