Some design students at the University of Alberta have really got it made. This is especially true for the ones who will be showcasing some of their exceptional pieces during a special exhibit next week.
One such talent is St. Albert’s Teague Shinkewski. Now in her final year of the design program, the 24-year-old artist has an industrial design piece that will be part of a larger celebration put on by a group called Media Art and Design Exposed (MADE). Her dresser called Eek is almost 150 centimetres long. She calls her highly original and unforgettable work an attempt to give furniture more animated personalities but from my perspective, it comes across positively spidery because of its arthropod-like legs. Eek indeed.
“The project was based around humanizing a piece of furniture, giving it human qualities. I tried to create something that, when you saw it, it automatically gave you an emotional response,” she said. “You could relate it to something real in life.”
Eek is one of the featured works in Out of the Bag, the exhibit put on by the U of A’s Student Design Association. This show is just one of several events going on in conjunction with a local arts festival.
It’s put on by MADE, the Edmonton-based non-profit organization that works to shine a spotlight on up and coming local talent in the field of design. Since this is MADE’s 10th anniversary, it is celebrating with a festival appropriately named Edmonton Design Exposed: How a Decade is M.A.D.E.
Out of the Bag is for current students and alumni alike to demonstrate the diverse range of work being produced in the fields of industrial design, medical design, furniture, product design, graphic design, typography, photography and integrative design. Shinkewski is trying to get the most of her educational career by dabbling in different fields to broaden all of her horizons.
“I first went through the industrial design route,” she said, mentioning how it showed her the concepts of how to think in three dimensions in order to build furniture. “I’ve actually spent the last year and a half of my degree doing visual communication design. That’s really based in graphic design which is anything from poster design to website design.”
The Edmonton Design Exposed: How a Decade is M.A.D.E. festival runs at various venues in downtown Edmonton from tomorrow until Oct. 23. One event held in conjunction with the festival is Prairie Excellence, featuring the exceptional work of acclaimed St. Albert rug hooker Rachelle LeBlanc, at the Alberta Craft Council’s Feature Gallery. That show runs until Dec. 18.
To learn more about the festival or about MADE itself, visit www.madeinedmonton.org.
