Although the fine arts graduating students’ exhibit is an annual event, one would be mistaken to characterize it as repetitive. This year, the show features several talented soon-to-be alumni exhibiting their “swan songs,” as per the title of this iteration of the exhibit. While each piece is unique in subject matter, medium and content, they are united by their shared experiences and contexts.

The experience of putting together an exhibition, in and of itself, is a valuable one for students. “I think it’s a really great opportunity to share our work on a platform that our peers and the broader community can

access,” said exhibiting artist Lucy Koshan. “It also feels really good to see the work out of the studio.”

Several students’ work addresses subject matter they’ve worked through both in their studies and personal lives over the course of their degrees.

“While gathering for this show, I chose work that I feel speaks largely to how I am continuously working – not just on this series but also looking at much of my work,” said Jennifer McKelvay on her exhibited work. “As through most of my work that I have created in my last two years at Mount Allison, I have been looking at relationships: between myself, friends, family and men.”

McKelvay, who is showing a selection of images from her larger series titled This Is Where My Heart Breaks, said that her photographs “look at the theme of the mundane.”

Gabrielle Johnson, another graduating student, is also exhibiting work that speaks to larger themes in her life.

“Over the course of my time at Mount Allison, I was able to go spend a summer in Iceland on a program … that aims to reconnect people with Icelandic heritage back with their roots,” said Johnson. “I was reconnected with distant family and this experience has had the greatest impact on my art practice.” She has returned to Iceland more than once since her original trip, and new bodies of work have resulted from each visit. “The Mount Allison fine arts program has allowed me to explore my connection with Iceland through painting, sculpture and most recently photography,” she said.

Other students, including Sarah Rollins and Andreas Fobes, are showing work that speaks to their exploration of specific subjects and media.

“This works encompasses the themes of sentimentality and nostalgia which have appeared in a lot of the work I’ve made during my time at Mt. A,” Rollins said of her vividly colourful painting.

Fobes’s work epitomizes his experimentation with stop-motion animation throughout his degree. “With this project I wanted to try and make something a little slower and simpler. As far back as second year I’d had these vague ideas of animating some kind of musical performance,” Fobes said. “Those ideas eventually developed into this project, with the ‘performer’ being this puppet of myself and the music being audio of me practicing my guitar, which I had been recording in various locations for around a year.”

Logan Milne’s work is connected with the wider Sackville community as well as the student presence in town. “Someplace in Sackville and 110 Days of Walking reprsesent one year’s worth of self-exploration through a daily commitment to walking in Sackville,” explained Milne. “I chose the Sackville landscape as my focus because the memories made here are both emotionally and physically connected to the land itself.”

Milne said she worked to depict the connection she held with the physical world around her. “I believe that the body is an extension of the landscape, and as rug hooking demands a lot from the body, I view each hook that I make with wool to be a declaration of love, a continuous pursuit to understanding exactly what went on during my time here.”

Sylvan Hamburger’s piece consists of 42 jigsaw prints fitted together. Although they are displayed together at the Owens, Hamburger’s work involves the larger Sackville community as well. He has reproduced individual prints to be posted in various locations in Sackville as an engagement with the wider cultural community outside of the University.

The Sackville community welcomes students for the duration of their degrees and its role is easy to spot in the work they create. However, the way students affect the town can be less apparent. While their presence here is often temporary, students’ work can impact the nuanced relationship between university and town, as well as individuals both in and outside of Mt. A’s academic bubble, long after their departure.

See Swan Song on the second floor of the Owens Art Gallery until June 24.

In co-curator Jay Wilson’s words, The Closer Together Things Are “is about nearness. It started with this idea of there being slight away-ness which is something, as a designer, [he’d] always thought was really interesting.” This exhibition at the Owens Art Gallery, which opened last Friday and will run until Feb. 21, is an exploration of everyday objects that are present in our lives, how they relate to each other and how they relate to us, their users and, ultimately, their destroyers. The show also depicts relationships between people and the ever-present distance between them. This concept was explained by co-curator Shannon Anderson as the “tension between knowing someone really intimately but then also being removed in some way.… You can never just become somebody else.” The exhibit, curated by Wilson and Anderson, featured work by Kathleen Hearn, Ève K. Tremblay, Laura Letinsky, Micah Lexier, Dave Dyment, Roula Partheniou, Rhonda Weppler, Trevor Mahovsky, Luke Painter and Chris Kline.

The exhibit navigates between figurative and direct depictions of these illustrations of space, creating a complex narrative out of seemingly mundane subjects. One of the pieces in the atrium is Roula Partheniou’s Twofold, a collection of everyday objects doubled and set at angle with each other. These, Anderson explained, demonstrate “very deliberately a mirroring that happens in the work. You see the same objects one way and the other … but it’s not until you spend the time studying [them] that you realize in what ways they’re different and what’s happening between one set of really simple objects and the next.” This is meant to be an entry point into the rest of the exhibit, as it illustrates in a very straightforward way the pairing and contrasting of objects which is present in many of the other work.

One of the pieces unique to this showing of the exhibit was two pages of the Sackville Tribune Post, pinned to the wall to draw attention to two advertisements showing Sam Rockwell in the film Moon. There are four sets of these ads, each one unique to the respective local newspapers of the four towns in which the exhibit is shown. Each ad is “specifically looking at doubles, doppelgangers or actors who have played themselves in a film of some kind.… It’s re-splitting something that was originally split and spliced together and separating it again just to underscore the artificiality of it and to emphasize the double-ness of it,” said Anderson. This concept was created by Micah Lexier and Dave Dyment.

Rhonda Weppler, another of the artists featured in the exhibit, was also present at the opening. Her collaborative work with Trevor Mahovsky is especially concerned with the notion of “trompe l’oeil.” One of their sculptures, The Visitation, showed a small, dilapidated room which was created from a single continuous surface of wooden veneer. Its back faced away from the doorway, hiding the fact that the sculpture, like most of Weppler and Mahovsky’s work, is hollow. Their other work in the exhibit, Music of Chance 4, displays hollow casts of found objects in aluminum foil. This piece is one in a series of ephemeral pieces made of aluminum foil that are designed to exist for the exhibition and then be recycled. At the Owens, the objects casted were antique hand mirrors, the type of objects that “fit into [a] family’s long history of material, and how it’s just that material and [a memory] connected to it,” explained Weppler. Her intention is to bring to light the temporariness of objects in our everyday life and “fast-forwarding that whole [process of destruction] because everything [she and Mahovsky] make is very fragile and only here momentarily.”

This exhibit takes the time to provoke questions about objects in our everyday lives which we often take for granted. As Anderson said, it brings to light “something kind of random and everyday but interesting and important in a lot of ways.”

The doorway to Struts Gallery, Faucet Media Arts Centre and START Gallery, under bright yellow mouldings, stands out against the semi-industrial landscape of Lorne Street. Although it may seem out of the ordinary to find a gallery here, this place is just that: extraordinary. START’s fall exhibition showed the works of student artists Marissa Cruz, Breana Darlison, Madeleine Hansen, Meagan Chaput and Evan Furness. The works were shown between Oct. 29 and Nov. 11.

A sense of catharsis was an undertone common to several of the exhibits, especially those done by Hansen and Chaput. The artists found ways of expressing their emotions non-verbally. Hansen’s exhibit, titled I am Not Me, This Body is Not Mine, consisted of a series of drawings of what she described as “very strange, amorphous human figures that are made up of human parts, but not quite recognizably human forms.” Going further into detail about the meaning of her work, she explained that it “centres around the idea of body dysmorphia and this idea of viewing your body in a contorted sort of way.” The work, epitomizing some of the struggles Hansen has faced, holds a great deal of meaning to her, as does the medium itself.

“I’m not very good at verbally expressing myself,” said Hansen. “But I feel much better at visually expressing how I’m feeling and I feel like these drawings are like a very visual representation of a specific time in my life and the mental illness that I’ve struggled with for many years … [which] came together for these drawings.”

Reverie, Meagan Chaput’s exhibit, consisted of a series of small objects made as a reaction to “two different and opposing relationships I’ve had and kind of idealizing them and trying to make these things that hold a lot of meaning.” To her, it is very important that the audience understands that “there is some sort of narrative” behind her work. Chaput also prioritizes being selective about what she includes in her work. “Not telling the whole story, I think, [is] really important,” she explained, “because sometimes you can say too much and then the work doesn’t mean what you want it to mean.”

Breana Darlison created Hicks, an exhibit based on the curation and arrangement of found objects. She says that she “started to recognize things in certain areas that I was picking stuff up in … rural, Canadian areas…. I started recognizing patterns with addiction and poverty and xenophobia and stuff like that.” Her exhibit centred around bringing these ideas to light.

“I’m from a rural area but I lived in a big city, Montreal, for [about] ten years,” Darlison said. “I kind of have that separation from that xenophobic ideology [more present in rural areas] now. When I go back home and I see those things, it’s really obvious to me, and concerning too. So that’s mostly what the piece is about.” She went on to apply these themes, which have become such salient issues in the political climate of North America today, to her work. “Mostly, I’m interested in bringing light to what I see as the real world.”

Marissa Cruz’s work also connects to a representation of the “real world,” as she addresses the representation of gender, race and sexuality. The work shown by Cruz during this exhibition, Clean Passes, epitomizes these themes using a variety of media. She explained that her work overall, which is primarily videography but also engages in sculpture and performance, functions mostly “as a way to reconcile the complexities that [are] being femme and also a mixed-race Filipino woman. So it kind of bounces around in there, and talks about the absurdity of games and rituals too.” Cruz said that her favourite topics to address in her work implicate humour, sex, race and gender – topics which often intentionally create tension in her audience as she works towards sparking conversations around acceptance. Cruz uses her art as a way to address taboo topics, given that the “stuff that I talk about [through art] isn’t the kind of stuff you can talk about in real conversations. I don’t know if I’m really trying to say anything, but at the same time I’m making it really explicit.”

Tucked away at the back of the exhibition space, Evan Furness’s Old Wood & Steel Songs created a “shed vibe,” as he put it, bringing the natural world indoors. Now in his fourth year, Furness has been working on presenting a plot of land owned by his family and creating this sense of place for the exhibit over the course of two years. He has created many iterations of this exhibit, from drawings and prints to “the pared down video/sculpture/zine relationship,” present at the gallery, which he decided worked best. The exhibit is meant to address his “interest in how place kind of holds memory but only reveals it to people who know about it.… If you just drive by or walk by that lot when there’s nothing on it, it’s just like this empty space that has no meaning to anyone except for the people who know that there used to be something there.”

START itself is an idea fairly unique to both Sackville and the Mount Allison community. The initiative allows students to gain experience hosting their own shows, something that those in larger communities may not have the opportunity to do. “In the fine arts department, we work towards having things completed for submission dates and things like that just like anyone in non-fine arts does,” explained Darlison. “A lot of people, as they are working on these projects in class, they’re also working on work outside of that, and this is a really special place where, you know, you can actually show what you’ve been doing. Being able to show [your work] and have feedback and be able to watch people’s reactions to your work can really make you grow to appreciate your own work.” Darlison expressed a sense of gratification that came with the final product of the show and all the work that she had put into it: “I’m not happy that it’s out there, I’m happy because I put it out there.”

Furness emphasized the importance of having a place where it’s safe to experiment with exhibitions and potentially be unsuccessful: “Having a place where students can actually experiment with exhibiting and showing work is really important.… It’s kind of an interesting challenge to put work together in a space and make it actually function the way that you want it to.” Places like START “really provide an opportunity to mess up and have it be totally okay.” It’s safe to say, however, that no one messed up this time around.

The most difficult part of any career path isn’t deciding exactly what it is you want to do, it’s having the guts to follow through with it. Just ask Michelle Hart, who graduated from Mt. A in 2014 and has been in the chaotic business of improv since she left Sackville. She has just finished a trans-Canadian alumni tour with the Canadian Improv Games where she was putting on shows and running workshops for current and past players. Now, having finished her hiatus, Hart is settling back into the Toronto comedy scene with her all-female improv group, the Lebron Janes.

Hart credits Mt. A with teaching her how to “prioritize such a big workload [between classes] and then doing all [her] side improv” even before Presents was structured formally at the school. Hart was  heavily involved in the early stages of Presents. In her first year, she watched it evolve into FLiNT under the leadership of Justin Collette. Hart attributes the growth of the improv and drama scene in town to Collette, thanks to workshops he ran as part of FLiNT and the numerous improv alum he brought into Sackville.

After Collette had left the school, she and her best friend Becky Lockert “slowly took over the improv, [and] turned [it] back into Presents: the Improv … [We] were so busy that we couldn’t continue running the classes the same way he could,” she said, referring to the change in direction of the improv troupe.

Between her involvement in the school’s improv scene and her time on the orientation committee, Hart became a familiar face on campus. She was also a go-to host for events on campus, including the Ascars and the holiday banquet. She also ran the New Brunswick and PEI improv team, explaining that her improv involvement was more in the community rather than just at the school.

“Being in Sackville [allowed] me to run a bunch of these different things,” Hart said fondly.

Now, Hart is booking regular performances with the Lebron Janes, but she’s worked hard to get to where she is today. She arrived in Toronto fresh off the convocation stage and ready to take on the professional comedy scene. Her routine was to appear nightly at various comedy clubs, simply introducing herself as a new face to booking agents and managers.  Eventually, she was booking three to five shows a week. She then began growing her own improv troupe.

“[I realized] that I can’t go to a city and not know anyone and expect to be in shows. You kind of have to make your own team,” Hart said on the origins of the Lebron Janes.

From there, the Lebron Janes began to apply to many shows around the city. Yelling and dressing outrageously clearly captured the public’s attention and, to some extent, admiration. Known for the habit of going “buck-wild” during performances, the Lebron Janes began to book more and more frequently as they quickly became a Toronto hit.

For a while, Hart became so busy onstage that she began to doubt herself.

“I ended up doing so many shows that I was like, ‘Did I like that show? … Is this fulfilling?’ ” Hart said, explaining her decision to take a step back from comedy for a bit. She quickly came to the realization that she was in fact in the right place, and returned to improv with renewed conviction.

When breaking into the theatre business, Hart emphasized the value of persistence most of all.

“If you audition for a play and you didn’t get in, it’s not the end of the world. You should make your own shit – make your own stuff and produce it,” she said. “It’s a lot riskier and it’s so much more rewarding.”