College Art & Design grad show available in virtual tour

By KELLEN TANIGUCHI on March 24, 2021.

ktaniguchi@medicinehatnews.com@@kellentaniguchi

The Medicine Hat College Art and Design grad show exhibit will open to the public April 9 – but you will only be able to walk through it virtually.

A 3D video walk-through of the gallery will be recorded, and the virtual exhibit will be available on freeformshow.ca for visitors to navigate.

“The change to a virtual exhibit was definitely hard for us to wrap our heads around at first,” said Mell Davison, team manager of the grad show. “This is probably the closest we can get to actually experiencing the gallery together as a community and it means a lot that we’re still able to put it on in this kind of way.”

There will be art on display from all 11 graduating students and Davison says there is a wide variety of material for visitors to see. She added there will be interactive exhibits, including videos and motion graphics.

Davison says the team is choosing to look at the bright side of the show being held online.

“One thing we’re really proud of is that it’s technically an international exhibition,” she said. “We can now share this exhibition with everybody, including our family that might live outside of the country and wouldn’t be able to make it otherwise.”

Kira Vlietstra, part of the show’s motion and graphic design team, says the pandemic has put them in a different circumstance from past shows.

“We chose to not directly highlight that in our show’s theme because we all know our situation right now,” she said. “We decided on Freeform because we all work in so many different mediums and since we’re such a small group, there’s an impressive variety of work.”

The students worked on individual projects at home this year and will have them installed at MHC.

“I’m proud of what we have done with the challenge of communication. We’ve barely seen each other in person, we made a whole grad show and we all made this collective thing that exists online which is pretty cool. I’m just proud of everybody and their work. It’s exciting,” said Vlietstra.

Davison hopes people will leave comments for the artists, or the show in general, on their Facebook page, @gradshowmhc.

“We would really like some feedback on it, and it would mean a lot to hear from the community because that’s something that we don’t get to do this year,” she said.

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