Will Kwan, a graduate of the Arts Management program and current Associate Professor at UTSC, looks back to 2000, and describes his “Drawing In, Student Spaces” art installation in the Meeting Place, where he created a makeshift studio and invited those who passed by to draw their answer to the following prompt: if you could build any student centre, what would you put in it?
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0:03
So when I did come back [as a faculty member], everything [on campus] had completely changed. There was a, when I was a student, I was actually pretty involved in a lot of weird campus stuff.
0:15
And, I made this artwork, I forget which class it was for, because there was all this discussion about new buildings being built. This was when I was getting close to graduating. And, there was a discussion about a Student Centre being built.
0:36
So, I did this artwork where I set up a kinda makeshift studio in the Meeting Place. There was this large light box that I put on a dolly.
0:50
It was pretty big, it was like four feet by four feet. It was used in the studios, I guess, for photo students to look at negatives, which they don’t use now anymore.
1:05
But I had found that in the studio and I dragged that out there. I dragged in a bunch of drafting tables there. And then, made a bunch of partitions and signs, so it was like this little studio space.
1:18
Part of this installation was a bunch of drawing materials, like markers and pens. And then, I went to a drafting supply or art supply store to get these large pieces of vellum that architects use to make blueprints.
1:37
And, I set this up in the Meeting Place and um had it there over the course of, I forget now, maybe three days or maybe even a week.
1:50
And, every day I would go there and basically run this studio and people would walk by in the Meeting Place and, even back then, it was a very busy hub. And, I would invite people to sit down.
2:07
I had stools and things like this and tables and it was really like a studio. It was a lot of stuff there, so that people felt like it wasn’t just a little booth. It felt like there were drawing everywhere and every time someone made a drawing, I would put it up. It became a real kind of thing.
2:27
And, I would invite people to, and it was a very simple instruction, if you could build um any kind of student centre, what would you put in it?
2:39
And, I still have this set of drawings. I think there are 80 of them that I kept in the end. But some of them, they’re the most beautiful drawings I’ve ever seen.
