Graffiti Gallery unveiled Voluntary Withdrawal on June 19, displaying pieces by seven U of M BFA honours graduates. This year’s edition of the annual exhibition features interactive sculptures, photography and found objects to explore themes of selfhood and finding beauty in everyday objects.
Kamryn Skoczylas, who is Indigenous and Polish, is one of the contributing artists. Her piece “Player One: Choose Your Avatar” is a revolving sculpture inspired by video games and her mixed heritage.
“[The piece] draws from the character select screens I pulled from video games as a metaphor for my mixed identity, as I feel like it’s a great way to explain the shifting and fluidity of identity,” Skoczylas explained.
“Each side [of the piece] is [a] different version of myself, and so while people are spinning it, they are combining the different aspects of myself and recombining myself into whatever they see fit. I see identity as something that can be continuously assembled and not just a fixed thing.”
Skoczylas’s piece has also started a workshop at Graffiti Arts Programming where participants can recreate miniatures of the sculpture using paper.
“Player One: Choose Your Avatar” by Kamryn Skoczylas. Credit: Boris Tsun Hang Leung / The Manitoban.
The theme of identity is echoed in Brian Guevarra’s “playing in the rain,” a series of sandos (tank tops) cast in resin about a childhood memory during a visit to the Philippines as a Winnipegger of Filipino descent.
“There was this really heavy rainstorm in my mom’s neighbourhood that we were staying in […] I was with my brothers, and there [were] a bunch of neighbourhood kids as well, and we were running around under the gutters. We were all wearing the same thing […] the white tank top, which we call ‘sando’ in Tagalog,” Guevarra said.
“None of the kids or the people around us could tell that I wasn’t one of them, but if I spoke a word, they would [be] like, ‘Oh, this person doesn’t belong.’ And so that was my first experience of what I now know as a diasporic reality that I ended up living in throughout my entire life of being displaced or not fitting in any spaces or lines.”
“playing in the rain” by Brian Guevarra. Credit: Boris Tsun Hang Leung / The Manitoban.
“Homework” by Juca Aquino embarks in a different direction. By collecting and displaying 24 paint-splattered tabletops from the school of art and Art Barn, Aquino’s work brings the viewer’s attention to art in the mundane.
Aquino commented, “It makes you think what people were doing on [the tables.] One of them was maybe painted on all white. Why is that? Why did that happen? Or there’s some kind of pink going on, so someone must have been painting a lot with pink,”
“I want people to appreciate how interesting they are, because […] tables are just sitting in a studio, and you don’t really pay attention to them, so my goal with this body of work was to get people to pay attention to a mundane object.”
Voluntary Withdrawal is on display at Graffiti Gallery on 109 Higgins Ave. until Aug. 21. For more information, visit graffitigallery.ca.
