The Campus Gallery
Georgian’s Campus Gallery is a vibrant multi-disciplinary exhibition space where students in Design and Visual Arts programs and established artists showcase their work. The Campus Gallery hosts a variety of exhibitions and artist talks that reflect regional, national and international art, craft and design.
On this page:
Exhibitions
Fascinate
An exhibition of work by Tyler Durbano
Curated by Francisco-Fernando Granados
February 21 – March 22, 2025
- Opening reception: Friday February 21 5-7pm
Artist Talk in The Campus Gallery: Thursday March 6, 10am
About the exhibition
“Fascinate” explores the practice of looking and desire through recent drawings and analog photography by Tyler Durbano. Using pencil crayon on archival paper, abstract drawings reveal a rich visual vocabulary of geometric and organic forms that move between transparency and opacity, flatness and texture. Complementing and contextualizing these, Polaroid photos map queer histories and spatial intuitions in the Barrie region. Motifs such as trails, silhouettes, and suggestive objects evoke cruising as a practice of reading between signs and traces. Together, the works explore intuition and reflection, using visual framing as a metaphor for thresholds between self and world, form and feeling, abstraction and queer experience.
Durbano’s works on paper contour luscious compositions that open onto inner landscapes, the photographs trace his body’s movement through private and public spaces that map queer histories in the Barrie region. The double movement of his multidisciplinary method and its simultaneous showing creates a dialogue between drawing and analog photography that alludes to thresholds of vision and passage.
Francisco-Fernando Granados, Guest Curator
Tyler Durbano has contributed and championed the Arts community in this region and beyond in a variety of meaningful ways. With Fascinate, The Campus Gallery is thrilled to support Tyler as an artist and celebrate his stunning work. Collaborating with Francisco-Fernando to bring focus to the importance of visibility in Queer communities makes this exhibition even more profound.
Amy Bagshaw, Director of The Campus Gallery
Tyler Durbano
Tyler Durbano (he/they) is a queer visual artist and cultural worker based in Barrie, Ontario, on Treaties 16 and 18 Territory. They hold a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Western Ontario undergraduate degrees from Acadia University and NSCAD University. Their interdisciplinary practice locates a queer ethos and intuition embedded in the regular, within and beyond erotic tropes associated with queer art. As a visual artist, Durbano’s work has been exhibited throughout Ontario and Nova Scotia, including at ArtLab at Western University (London, ON), the Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax, NS), and Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax, NS). As a cultural worker, he has been an instructor in the Design and Visual Arts Department at Georgian College, and was recently Curator at Latcham Art Centre, Stouffville, ON. He is currently Interim Artistic Director at the MacLaren Art Centre.
Francisco-Fernando Granados
Francisco-Fernando Granados was born in Guatemala and lives in Toronto, Dish With One Spoon Territory. Since 2005, his practice has traced his movement from convention refugee to critical citizen, enacting abstraction site-specifically and relationally to create projects that challenge the stability of practices of recognition. His work has developed from the intersection of formal painterly training, working in performance through artist-run spaces, the study of queer and feminist theory, and early activism as a peer support worker with immigrant and refugee communities in Coast Salish Territories. This layering of experiences trained his intuitions to seek context-responsive approaches, alternative forms of distribution, and the weaving of lyrical and critical propositions.
About the gallery
Location
The Campus Gallery is located in room 140, D building (Helen and Arch Brown Centre for Design and Visual Arts) at the Barrie Campus, Georgian College, 1 Georgian Drive.
Hours of operation
Effective Sept. 21:
- Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- Saturday to Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.
For more information, please contact us.
The Campus Gallery objective and mandate is to deliver a diversity of visual to the City of Barrie, its immediate region and within the Georgian College campus community.
The exhibitions celebrate emerging, mid-career and established artists, designers and craftspersons, as well as students within post-secondary arts education. The Campus Gallery will support the exhibition objectives with informative artist lectures that will be open to the immediate community, high schools and the college community, thus creating an environment of critical thinking, insight and appreciation.
Through outreach and exchange, the Campus Gallery will host and present international exchange exhibitions and lectures as well as exhibitions of community outreach at our partner venues. We exhibit our significant collection and bring visual arts to distinctly different audiences, facilitating and encouraging a dialogue and awareness of the arts in our community.
The Campus Gallery is committed to delivering a diverse program of exhibitions by visual artists, designers and crafts people to the Barrie and the Simcoe County arts community. A policy of inclusivity guides our programming, giving equal voice to emerging, mid career and senior artist with diverse practices.
The gallery space allows artists to realize special projects, surveys or retrospectives, and to see large groups of work together in an excellent facility, sometimes for the first time.
We are committed to furthering the knowledge of contemporary practice to the community with our on going artist lecture series, which has consistently featured insightful dialogue form the frontlines of creativity by exceptional regional, national and international artists.
The Campus Gallery identifies its exhibition roster three years in advance and books its artist lecture series on a yearly basis. We provide a diversity of visual arts programming to the community and continue to foster an environment of learning, engagement and dialogue in the visual arts which is only available in one other Barrie location.
The Campus Gallery provides a laboratory space for our Museum and Gallery Studies graduate certificate students to engage with artists, the campus collection, and to develop programming in locations outside of the gallery, based on the Campus Gallery Collection. This offsite programming allows us to bring unique, contemporary art to an even more diverse audience, creating another level of dialogue, awareness and engagement.
Over the past years, we have partnered with the Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH), Five Points Theatre (formerly The Mady Centre for the Performing Arts) and the Barrie Courthouse to create exhibition space and thoughtful, unique programming from some of over 2,500 works in the Campus Gallery collection.
The Georgian College Art Collection holds over 5,000 diverse artworks of local, regional, and international significance. The collection has grown over the span of 50 years, as artists have crossed paths with the college’s Design and Visual Arts Department and contributed artworks. The artworks are preserved and displayed in college offices, libraries, and The Campus Gallery, as well as in community venues. The collection space also acts as a learning environment for students of the Museum and Gallery Studies program.
Art from the Georgian Collection Collection can currently be viewed at the Royal Victoria Hospital David McCullough Hearts and Minds Gallery “Healing through Art: Nature’s Comfort” featuring paintings by Christina Luck and curated by students in the Museum and Gallery Studies program. On view until early June 2024.
“Hidden Gems” features art from the Georgian College Collection is on view at The First Floor Gallery at City Hall in Barrie, curated by Collections Assistant, Yasmeen Kazak. On view until mid-June 2024.
Contact us
If you have questions or require more information, please email Amy Bagshaw, Director, The Campus Gallery.