By Amanda Happé

An artist works on the installation Three Squares at META.

The curatorial statement for META, the graduating exhibition from Ryerson’s New Media students, makes some bold claims. “Through an exploration of ideas concerning the environment, the economy, family, scientific matter and even love, we have created stepping-stones into the future of art. We have changed the media, charged it with interactivity, and balanced innovation with the notion of conceptual beauty and artistic vision.”
While this may seem like a stretch for a group of students, the show is not only a collection of rather thoughtful and provocative pieces, but they have been put together as an exhibition into a cohesive and startlingly well-produced whole.

Stephanie Gauthier’s The Sleeping Buffalo at META.

Navigation through the show, on the third floor of the Burroughes Building on Queen Street West near Bathurst, is guided by a system of icons. Each piece has an associated light-box icon that hangs on the wall near the installation. These match up to the printed exhibition guide, but also to an interactive display, where visitors are invited to “make a connection” between two of the artworks. When a connection is made, those two wall icons shift their colours to be closer in the spectrum. The idea is to give a fast visual overview of the correlations that viewers are making between various works.

The icon for Carly Benkendorf’s inCENTive.

Highlights from the show are many, but one stand-out piece is Carly Benkendorf’s inCENTive. One the wall hang ten thousand pennies, each one printed with a wish. Benkendorf has been collecting the wishes since October. She began by asking people on the street for their contributions, and also had a friend who works at a hot-dog stand outside Mt. Sinai hospital keep a wish book at her stand in which customers were invited to write their wishes. In November, she launched a website to collect more.

Detail from inCENTive.

Asked why she chose pennies as the medium for these messages, she replied that they are often thrown away, discarded. “The only thing you can really buy with a penny is a wish from a fountain. I wanted to give more value to the pennies, by putting wishes directly on them.”
Below her wall-panel installation, she put an entire second set of the pennies in a pile on the floor. Visitors are welcome to take them away, and either save them or enter them into circulation. The idea of randomly receiving a penny, typically the worst denomination, with a mysterious wish on it is quite wonderful.
Another engaging creation is Ella Myers’s Hammerhead, an interactive sculpture that allows you to experience the world as a shark does. A viewfinder distorts your line of sight to peer out the sides of your head, and digital sensors alert you either audibly, or through vibrations, when you are approaching other objects in the room.

Rose Broadbent’s Of Plastic Circumstance.

The exhibition is, overall, at once slick, earnest, and honest; there is a palpable feeling that these students cannot wait to shake things up in the working world. META is located at 639 Queen Street West, and ends today, Saturday April 18, at 6 p.m.
Photos by Michael Chrisman/Torontoist.