Art School, First Day

There’s about 300 new first-year students enrolled at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver this September. In fact the full-time population is only 1,500, which to some people I’ve chatted with (like Ellen, the school’s front-desk receptionist) seems pretty big, but which seems more like a large family to someone coming from even a modest-sized university.
Apparently this is a large (the largest?) crop of Foundation students, as we’re called, and the feeling of family is intentional according to the welcome speech given by ECI’s president, Ron Burnett, at the orientation session last Thursday. It also helps that all Foundation students are enrolled in the same classes, and will pretty much share the same experience until we choose our specific art/design stream in second year.
Burnett also emphasized the prestige of our new home, citing it objectively as the best of the four major art schools in Canada.
And there was this slight pressure–or call it an objective–he wished to distill in us: a sense of pride in our renowned institution, but more so a sense of responsibility in representing the art community as a whole. We are the public face for the art and design scene and it’s up to us to educate the public about how important our role is in communicating our culture’s ideas.
It’s an ongoing and common issue, and an important one, but I also get the feeling ECI is trying to change, or maintain, its own image as a premier art school, and that some of the responsibility for doing this rests on our shoulders. Like, we’ll be graduating with ECI on our resume so we are of course the most qualified artists and designers entering the community and need to uphold a certain level of success to meet the school’s reputation, all of which I can’t get too convinced about before my first class even starts.
On the other hand, maybe that’s the kind of rah-rah that will help push us to excell.
The speech only partly patted us on the backs. I like the way Burnett framed this theme later, calling it context: that artists and designers give our culture’s trends and ideologies the context—and he uses concrete examples here like packaging and advertising—they need to be understood and consumed by the general public. And it’s up to us to show this public that artists aren’t just a bunch of “weirdos doing their own thing.”
Overall I think the primary theme of the welcome speech was to emphasize how artists and designers play a direct, measurable and essential role in our communities. Burnett talked of ECI’s provincial mandate as a public school to educate in such a manner, and the majority of the orientation session on Thursday was presented by two local artists/activists working in the media arts (creating a music-oriented TV show) to promote social change in the third world.
I’ve also noticed, in its press releases and literature of late, a new emphasis at ECI on developing its research and academic areas, in particular expanding its campuses and population and introducing a graduate program. Burnett devoted a portion of his welcome speech to this new research component, which I find interesting from an academic undergrad background, but a bit outside the scope and desires of a first year arts student (myself included).
So I’ll stay little weary of the potential for elitism ECI may instill. We probably already have big enough heads just from getting in. All 300 of us were pretty nervous but also very excited in the auditorium Thursday morning and throughout the day of presentations, lunch, and a small creative exercise (we were asked to draw a “map” of how we got Emily Carr).
When another administrator told us the ratio of applicants to acceptances for first year were ten-to-one there was a definite feeling that we were now part of a privileged (a term used repeatedly by the faculty) group, but just as significant–if unspoken–we’re now part of an elite group via our very association with ECI.
Finally, some pictures from that creative assignment we were given. The instructions: create a map, or path, of how you got to Emily Carr. Use an 8×10 piece of cardboard and represent your path any way you see fit. Then they posted all 300 in the Foundation hallway.

The wall of completed “Path to Emily Carr” pieces by the Foundation students. The guy on the far right, Camal (sp?) turned out to be a skiier (snowboarder?) and film maker, also in first-year, who happened to know an old friend of mine and now top extreme skiier from Nelson.

I liked how this student gathered a number of diverse found objects (marble, crystal rock, newspaper/magazine). Not terribly well done, but there’s evidence of a process. I think.

Ha, pretty cool. There was an airplane another student made as well. I even heard a couple of the instructors and senior students who were posting the works mention how the majority assumed a landscape orientation, with a smaller group using portrtait and maybe two or three constructing in 3D.

Ha, I liked this one a lot.