{"id":22281,"date":"2018-11-22T10:34:53","date_gmt":"2018-11-22T15:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=22281"},"modified":"2018-11-22T10:34:53","modified_gmt":"2018-11-22T15:34:53","slug":"students-descend-into-realm-of-dreams-and-nightmares-in-apparitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/students-descend-into-realm-of-dreams-and-nightmares-in-apparitions\/","title":{"rendered":"Students descend into realm of dreams and nightmares in Apparitions"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

We all know the feeling of waking up with a start, but we don\u2019t always know what we were dreaming when that happened.
\nAndrew Basso, a Grade 11 student at Dr. G.W. Williams Secondary School, didn\u2019t have to dig too deep in trying to remember a nightmare. His nightmare involved lying in the middle of the road, unable to move other than to roll, with a big truck coming straight towards him.
\nHe always woke up before knowing whether he was able to roll to safety, but the image stuck with him \u2013 and it is one image in which he had the chance to dig deep as one of three area students working with Aurora artist Troy Hourie on his latest exhibition Apparitions.
\nApparitions, which wrapped up Saturday at the Aurora Cultural Centre, was billed as \u201can immersive mixed-media installation composed of The Bed, The Attic and The Writing Cabinet\u201d inspired by Benjamin Britten\u2019s opera The Turn of the Screw.
\nBringing in a collection of found \u2013 and often macabre \u2013 objects, married with video components and other interactive displays, it was an installation in which viewers could fully put themselves in the middle \u2013 and thanks to a grant from the Ontario Arts Council, Mr. Hourie was able to take some students along for the ride.
\nMr. Hourie facilitated two workshops to coincide with Apparitions which allowed the three participating students \u2013 Basso, along with Meagan Puopolo and Jacob Shwarze \u2013 to explore the creative process and their interaction with space and technology and create their own \u201ccabinets of wonder\u201d hinged on the themes of dreams and nightmares.
\n\u201cThe important part of this workshop became about explaining the term \u2018intermediality\u2019, which is a way of working where it means the connections of the body moving in space, interacting with tools, whether pencils, projections, or paint, and creating an artwork,\u201d Mr. Hourie told The Auroran on Saturday at a mini-exhibition allowing the three students to show off their work alongside the larger installation. \u201cIt can be for theatre, it can be for architecture and the visual arts, it is a very broad practice and there aren\u2019t a lot of us who practice right now.
\n\u201cWithin the Ontario Arts Council, there is something called Inter-Arts [for] artists like myself who practice across a variation of the arts,\u201d he said. \u201cIn this piece, I wanted to take the students through my basic idea of the Cabinet of Wonder and show them how to use collage to represent ideas and personal reflections on the idea of dreaming and nightmares and looking back to their childhood, and memories. Then, [teaching about] representing that visually in some way and connecting it to technology. Within this, we began with a one-day workshop just on creating an assemblage cabinet, which is a cabinet of wonder. Then, on the second day, I took them into the actual space.\u201d
\nWhen Andrew first learned this exhibition was called \u201cApparitions\u201d he immediately thought of ghosts and other spooky things, but was intrigued when he learned it was more about nightmares and dreams.
\n\u201cI just started going through my own nightmares and the dreams I remembered, how spontaneous they are [in the moment] and then, when you really think about them, they are not really that scary thing,\u201d said the student. \u201cIt is really that feeling of helplessness because you\u2019re stuck. Dreams are similar, but you don\u2019t feel stuck.\u201d
\nThe image of the truck coming towards him as he was stuck on that road is one image he couldn\u2019t shake and this feeling of being \u201cstuck\u201d was represented in his work, which features images of an individual swimming and stuck in the middle of a wave, and another person, also stuck, hanging above.
\n\u201c[Troy] told us to bring in 15 images of our nightmares and dreams and I thought, \u2018that doesn\u2019t seem too hard,\u2019\u201d Andrew recalled. \u201cThen, I spent about three hours looking on the internet for something that worked. What seemed at first super-easy was a lot harder than you think. Then, when I got here, I thought I would be overwhelmed with work. When I started getting into it, I realised if I just finished it I could make something great.\u201d
\nAt the end of the day, he\u2019s satisfied with his work and hopes that it will raise questions with viewers, rather than people just \u201clooking at it, thinking \u2018that\u2019s cool\u2019 and walking away.\u201d
\nA techie guy at heart, Andrew said he particularly enjoyed working with the video technology components Mr. Hourie brought into the process, and is now eyeing a possible future with possibilities that flex his creative muscles.
\n\u201cIt was just so much more fun because you can create your own thing,\u201d he said, comparing the artistic process against math and science, his two academic specialities. \u201cYou\u2019re not following a set of rules, so moving forward I like the narrative that we made with the video and stuff like that. I loved making narratives and creating things that people are interested in.
\n\u201cMoving forward, you shouldn\u2019t be overwhelmed by something. If something comes along, take the opportunity because you don\u2019t get a lot of those. When you have the opportunity, do what you can with it. Listen to people who know what they\u2019re doing, let them tell you that, take what you\u2019re going to take, and move forward with that knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We all know the feeling of waking up with a start, but we don\u2019t always know what we were dreaming when that happened.
\nAndrew Basso, a Grade 11 student at Dr. G.W. Williams Secondary School, didn\u2019t have to dig too deep in trying to remember a nightmare. His …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":22259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/2018-11-22-11.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5Nn","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-05 13:08:43","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}