Student exhibit explores urban experiences in Hamilton

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/youarehere1.jpg” caption=”YOU ARE HERE: Mapping Hamilton opens at the SkyDragon Centre on Friday, April 11. Image designed by Tina Yp Chu.”]McMaster University students are asking the public to ponder their experiences in and their relationship with Hamilton.

YOU ARE HERE: Mapping Hamilton is an exhibit hosted by McMaster's Cultural Studies & Critical Theory students that explores the urban experience.

The exhibit examines theories and practices of space, place, mapping and psychogeography through a variety of mediums, including sculpture, mobiles, photography, video and performance art.

Students travelled throughout the city to learn about the people and places that make Hamilton a multi-faceted city. They tackled topics on topophilia (a love of discovering new places) and topophobia (a fear of new places) in relation to place; examined the banal and the unusual; sought to understand how we experience space and how we perform in the space we're in; and explored the various communities in Hamilton and how we, as an urban population, fit within them.

“We have examined a range of topics, themes and concepts in visual art and culture, with particular emphasis on contemporary theoretical practices and with a focus on urban contemporary spaces,” says Maria Whiteman, sessional lecturer in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, and instructor of the Practicum in Contemporary Visual Culture course.

The seminar course requires students to take the theories and ideas they learned about space and visuality and put them into practice. This year's students chose to display their works in a public exhibition at the SkyDragon Centre on 27 King William Street in downtown Hamilton.

“The purpose of the course was for students to develop a better understanding of the multifaceted and ever-changing spaces and places in which we live, and to do so by exploring the particular contribution of forms of visual culture to contemporary social, cultural and political processes,” says Whiteman. “The students generated new maps of the City of Hamilton — maps that don't simply go along with the infrastructure of roads, but which generate new pathways through the city that place it in a different light.”

Everyone is invited to attend the free exhibit this weekend at the SkyDragon Centre, 27 King William Street: