Broken Phone
January 23–February 7, 2009

Broken Phone was a collaborative, mixed-media group exhibition by first year Master of Fine Arts students.

The Broken Phone technique employs strategies from the childhood game of altered story telling —emphasizing how information transforms from one person to the next through verbal communication.

For this exhibition, each MFA candidate created a work which was then passed on to colleagues, so that everyone had an opportunity to respond, build-upon, manipulate, alter, etc. the object. The exhibition touched upon many contemporary artistic practices, such as artist collaborations, conceptual and process-oriented work and responses. In addition to the exhibited collaborative works, the exhibition included documentation and information to allow audience to navigate through the artist’s ideas and processes, as well as a round-table discussion of the process led by Dr. Lee Rodney and Prof. Jennifer Willet of the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Visual Arts and MFA candidate Laura Shintani.

The nature of the show is based on the gesture of contribution and rotating starting points.

On November 20th, each grad student brought in a piece of work that they have newly created to act as the point of origin. Then each modified piece was passed along on a bi-weekly basis until the rotation is complete. There was no uniform order, the only rule is that we must modify each piece and document the before and after of the process. Changing the medium of the work can occur. The exchange happened each Friday at 3:00 pm before Lee’s seminar. In the case of holidays the exchange was arranged individually. A statement accompanied with each piece, and was changed to justify each modification. After 10 weeks we completed the cycle and each piece was finalized. For the exhibition each piece was accompanied by the modified documentation.