Sync Resist

Sync Resist
P. Elaine Sharpe

This publication begins by considering notions of being in sync, and in particular the unrepeatable synchronicity of symbiotic relationships that occur at a specific time and place within any given community. The consensus would be that many streams come together within the proscribed boundaries of an undergraduate visual arts program: the visual, the textual, and the conceptual. While the emphasis is on ways of seeing in a school which is dedicated to mentoring and fostering a passion for that which is meant to be seen, it is no longer a pursuit that can be predicated in visual knowledge, in and of itself. There must be an eventual resistance against synchronicity itself in order to create a paradigm shift into new ways of thinking and perceiving.

Separate and autonomous structures and systems of both teaching and learning morphed into a buzz of actions and reactions that set the groundwork for points of emergence and the production of works in this book. The interactivity of the hive itself ultimately leads to an actualization of a new praxis and a defining creative impulse. The aggregate of ideas, actions, and interactions delineate but do not define the results or the eventual outcomes of time spent within this constantly shifting and synergistic boomtown.

The works in this publication are a small sampling of what and how young emerging artists know what they have learned to this moment, and represents what has become possible through their individual accumulations of many kinds of knowing. The rapid incursion of digital and social media into everyday life begs questions that must be asked of contemporary arts education in the 21st century, questions of what it is to know (knowing how, knowing what, knowing who). The institutionalized university environment in particular lends itself to a solipsistic discussion of what and how we teach as compared to the discussion surrounding what and how artists know what they know.

These parallel unique streams of what and how, as opposed to know-what and know-how, have a momentum and a logic of their own, and at the end of a student's tenure within the institution they must take both the world of knowledge, and that of knowing, and merge them together in order to begin their careers as artists within communities of their peers. The works contained within this volume are specific expression of those two worlds and of a specific time and relationships between faculty and students and the physical built environment of York University. It is a time that cannot be repeated; those students who have received material and intellectual guidance will move on, faculties will change, new infrastructures will become apparent.

What comes from this chaos, this inexorable chase to the end, determined through the artificial construct of a four-year degree? The presumption that learning has a beginning, middle, and end might more appropriately be considered as a period of time spent in search of a continuum which is not ending, but rather is quietly beginning. This publication presents the beginnings of a selected group of students who represent this syntagm, and the step outward into that brave world of more, of further, sync resists.

P. Elaine Sharpe
October 2009