CAAD faculty members hold exhibition

An exhibition featuring the work of some faculty members in the Department of Art and Design of the AUS College of Architecture, Art and Design (CAAD) opened yesterday, September 19, at the CAAD Gallery. The exhibition comprised work done by the five participants during their summer break.

Riem Ibrahim, Assistant Professor, provided a glimpse into the on-going process of curating the 2016 Design House exhibition. In its fourth edition, Design House will showcase projects that respond directly and specifically to the context of Sharjah, offering solutions to existing problems in order to highlight the functionality and social utility of design.

The work done by Senior Lecturer Phil Sheil, who spent some of his time this summer taking photographs, focused on investigating things such as scale and narrative. Salem AlQassimi, Assistant Professor, presented scans, email conversations, screenshots, pages of PDF documents, photographs and sketches of things related to the work he was engaged with over the summer. The re-presentation of these artifacts was a literal response to the call of the visual communication program in setting up the show. The collection is, in fact, a self-portrait that highlights the process of thinking, writing, pitching, proposing, planning and organizing that takes place before, during and after completing a design task.

Professor Mark Pilkington showed three photographs made this summer on the island of Gozo, Malta. These photographs represent his latest engagement in intervening with landscapes. The work references a romantic attitude and explores notions of longing and or belonging. Featuring watercolor paintings from the UAE, Syria and Lebanon, Professor Martin Giesen's work continued to seek ways of subtly altering known reality by enhancing spatial tensions, compositional contrast and chromatic complements.

"Many people think of summer as a time to relax, but this exhibition shows that summer is a time for faculty to engage in an important aspect of their job-creative production. This exhibition demonstrates how much time and effort is put into their work," said Dr. Varkki Pallathucheril, Dean of CAAD.

The exhibition is open during usual university hours until October 5.