CUPFA art slated for new downtown building

Holly King‚s winning entry in the CUPFA art competition will be at the foot of a staircase.
Photo by Kendra Ballingall

On the heels of the giant exterior mural commission won by Nicolas Baier, a competition was launched early this year to create a major work of art for the new Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex.

The site is in the pedestrian concourse at the métro level of the new building, to quote the organizers, this is “a critical juncture where public and private spaces intersect.”

The shortlisted artists, all members of CUPFA, are Eva Brandl, Harlan Johnson and Mosaika, Holly King, and Lorraine Oades.

Eva Brandl’s entry is a large-format photograph of a majestic tree. Harlan Johnson, together with Saskia Siebrand, co-founder of Mosaika Art & Design, conceived panels in rich colours of an image of a plant, roots, stem and leaves, climbing up a wall near a staircase.

Lorraine Oades based her entry on Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic experiments of a figure in motion. She wanted to show the high value placed on learning and communication. She also wanted to combine the visual arts with new technologies, with references to the York Cinema (Muybridge was a movie pioneer).

However, it was one of Holly King’s large-scale photographs of an imaginary landscape that was chosen as the work that will be installed next spring.

Holly King builds miniature landscape objects in wood, plaster and clay that are arranged on a table surface.

“The sky is painted on a board, which is placed at the back of the scene, and powerful studio lamps light the fabricated landscape. Using a large studio-format camera, I photograph the set-up. The final photograph is partly believable and partly shows its artifice.”

Four maquettes of the site, each with one of the above proposed works, were on display at the Oct. 16 anniversary dinner, and CUPFA president Maria Peluso said the competition was a fitting celebration of the creative spirit that marks Concordia’s substantial part-time faculty complement.

This CUPFA commission, together with the re-mounting of the York Cinema artifacts from the 1930s and the installation of the huge glass mural by Nicolas Baier, is an effort to reinforce the university’s commitment to the arts on the Sir George Williams Campus in Quartier Concordia.