Young Voices Elevated
A Peek into the Kids Take Over Exhibit at The Vancouver Art Gallery
By Tyra Schad
A substantial portion of The Vancouver Art Gallery’s visitors are young students and children, yet it seems as though they have been left out of the fray. Often art is perceived as a complicated subject containing cultural history, advanced visual symbols, and complex backgrounds—even to an adult viewer, certain genres of art can be intimidating.
This doesn’t have to be the case. The Vancouver Art Gallery’s most recent third-floor exhibit, aptly titled, Kids Take Over, applies the written and visual responses of school-aged children to a curated selection of professional artists. It elevates their perspectives and interpretations and presents them alongside the artist’s work with equal importance.
With closer viewing, gallerygoers can see a handwritten section containing the response of students along with the standard text placards that can be seen beside each piece in the gallery. For older audiences reading and viewing these youth’s writings, it reminds us that art is not only a reflection of the world around us, but also an opportunity for us to share our own rich personal experiences with the work without preconceptions.
Creating this uniquely collaborative exhibit required a significant change in the classic process. Despite already being a show with various professional artists’ voices, the gallery’s fantastic Program Coordinator, Susan Rome spent two months making weekly visits to classrooms around Vancouver to connect with the younger collaborators who would be equally part of the exhibit. Rome spent this time gaining insight into the student’s perspective on various works and educating them through artist talks and photographs.
Her methods are unique. I had the chance to tour with her and experience the same programming she presented to her students. During our tour with her, she gave our adult group some of the same prompts as she had given the students. In one example, we were encouraged to select a piece in the room and use our bodies to replicate the piece. Some groups picked images with people in them and copied their poses. My group was left with four pieces of Bottari strewn by the artist Kimsooja.
Bottari are made of large fabric bedsheets used to wrap up fabric contents (similar to the kind tied to the end of a stick when a child character from an old movie decides to run away, only larger and placed on the floor). So each one of us slouched into a ball on the ground, placed our hands on our heads, and stuck our fingers into the air in our best efforts to copy the shape of the complicated tie on top of each bundle.
Susan Rome then asked us what the activity had shown us about the work. Mimicking the form of the pieces was something I had never experienced, and each of our groups attendees attitude towards the works had been lightened by the exercise. If you enter the room to the right of the entrance, you can see a large photo printed on the gallery wall of children practicing the poses in the works they chose. If you are a particularly confident gallerygoer, you can try this unique aspect of Susan Rome’s programming. Do your best to copy an artwork with your body to see if it changes how you look at it.
The contents of this show are thematically diverse; the curator does not shy away from themes of race and gender even to a younger audience of viewers. Some of the show’s highlights for me were Gathie Falk, Chantal Gibson, and Eric Cameron, each a representation of their field—abstract, political, and conceptual. The diversity of work presents a small but potent look at the variety of art that can be created in response to different aspects of our culture. As described by a gallery team member, the show is “a lovely balance between all fields of the painting [and sculpture].”
As you enter the show, the first work you see is Environment for Reading Recycled from 110 Sweaters by Evelyn Roth. Colourful knit fabric is attached to the gallery’s ceiling, creating a tent-like drape with a small cozy interior. With a vertical section removed to act as a door, a hanging light can be found inside. Here are a few of the responses from first and second graders when presented with this structure: It looks like a city and a sunset. Feels like you’re going into a cave. It looks like a sunset and a mountain and something magical. I wonder if it is an elephant or a mammoth? It makes me feel like I want to be an artist. Along with the particular charm these children’s interpretations have, reading them brings an adult viewer into the more vulnerable open frame of mind that these children bring to all of their observations. In some ways, it takes away the intellectual preconceptions that we sometimes have when viewing art, that it somehow requires an informed mind to be enjoyed—feeling as though the artist's history and meaning are far more important than our personal experience with their work.
Behind Environment for Reading Recycled from 110 Sweaters, the large gallery wall is filled from end to end with pastel and pencil crayon renditions of a figure resting beneath a tree. Each of these works was created by a student in response to an original piece called Woman Under Tree by Evan Lee. From this first room the work cannot yet be seen. This wall marks the visual response element that the children were able to participate in. Each of their drawings holds different parts of the original work as personally meaningful.
Some students felt most connected to the colourful nature of the work choosing to use as much vibrancy as possible. For others, special care has been taken to the form of the human figure. A personal favourite of mine takes nearly none of the stylistic aspects of the original painting into account, yet somehow captures the energy of the pose perfectly. Still, by the student choosing to use their own stylistic sensibilities, the enjoyment of creating the work is palpable.
When a gallerygoer is supported in sharing their personal experience with art, it expands our own ability to observe from a new frame of mind. It gives us the opportunity to have epiphanies that may have only been possible from viewing work alongside others without judgment.
The importance placed on the student’s preceptive, youthful, creative responses creates a more supportive gallery environment for visitors of all ages. This exhibit highlights the voices of young people, and gives many of them their first opportunity to interact with art in such a way—it gives them the open and accepting environment to become the future generation of young art lovers.
Kids Take Over exhibit runs until September 11, 2022, at Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby St, Vancouver. For more information visit Vancouver Art Gallery website here.
