A whimsical or bizarre — depending on viewpoint — student art show is on display at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery.
The young artists were inspired to create silk-screen prints based on an old creative game called cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse).
In this game, popular in the 1920s, participants took turns drawing on a sheet of paper that they then folded to conceal their contributions. The paper would be passed on to next players for further contributions.
This collaborative technique was adopted by artists of the Surrealist movement as a way of generating unique images, said Marnie Blair, a visual arts instructor at Red Deer Polytechnic.
A similar process was also used for visual arts students from Red Deer Polytechnic in their The Exquisite Seriography joint show, on at the MAG until March 17.
These collaborative works were jointly created by 14 student artists from Marnie Blair’s ART 393 2D Strategies and Technologies II class. Disparate images were assembled into fantastical compositions that will make viewers wonder at their meaning and aesthetic.
Blair believes the viewers’ ultimate reactions to them are part of the artistic process.
There will be a First Friday reception for the show held on the evening of March 3.