Art Star

October 7th marked the first showing of this year’s regional and national winners of the BMO 1ST Art! Invitational Student Art Competition. Each year, undergraduate-level students are nominated for the contest by their professors from over 100 schools in Canada. In 2004, a national award was added to the thirteen regional prizes. The national winner’s work becomes part of the BMO Corporate Art Collection, a unique addition considering most corporate collections are made up of works by established artists.

The works themselves are an impressive array of diverse media and exceptional talent. The winner, pictured here, “Untitled (Legs)” is a digital chromogenic print from Ontario College of Art & Design student Alex Kisilevich’s …and then you die series. The series is inspired by Alex's grandmother, who insisted on saving her good dresses for special occasions…and then she died. Kisilevich was also selected to be a part of Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward 2009, an annual book of emerging photo-based artists accompanied by a touring group exhibition in cities across Canada and the United States. The whole series will be on display from November to December at Toronto's Leo Kamen Gallery.

Another beautiful and worth-noting piece is Rachel Ludlow’s "$1945.29." Ludlow, from the University of Regina, used oil on canvas to create a painting so detailed and rich in saturated colour, that the work could easily be confused with a photograph. Ludlow says she owned the subject of her work (a pink sequined Prada bag) for three days and was hit with deep buyer’s remorse. She immortalized the splurge to illustrate the ambivalence she felt after tapping into such conspicuous consumption.

Another one of my favourite works was "Pink Codfish Doll" by Memorial University's Hope Clarke. The cloth doll combines Newfoundland's traditions of craftwork, humour and fishing in an almost adorable representation of a gutted fish. It is used to demonstrate the method of processing cod from fresh catch to the characteristic salt cod famous on The Rock. — Jessica Ford

The BMO 1ST Art! Invitational Student Art Competition 2009 exhibition runs at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (952 Queen St. W.) in Toronto until November 1^st.