Gibsons Public Art Gallery exhibition proves Sunshine Coast youth are full of art

An exhibition of works by young artists at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery offers insight into the kaleidoscopic perspectives of the first generation born in the 21st century. 

The SHOUT OUT exhibition features mixed media artworks by contributors aged two to 18. Each year, Sunshine Coast youth are invited to submit two creations to the gallery for the popular show. Members of the gallery’s curatorial committee and its volunteers organize and hang the exhibits. 

The exhibition includes individual and collaborative submissions as well as projects inspired by classroom initiatives.  

A series of sculptures by students at Cedar Grove Elementary School evoke steampunk eyewear. The goggles, fashioned from paperclips, shells and household bric-a-brac, transform their wearers into visionaries intent on metamorphosis. 

Zia Johnson, an eight-year-old student in the Forest Friends program of the Sea to Sky Outdoor School, worked with her classmates Goldie, Isla and Giselle. Their piece, City Cats, was fashioned from acrylic paint, felt marker, glue and adhesive tape. 

“We thought it would be cute to have them [the cats] on a brick wall,” said Johnson. “I don’t actually know how we got to cats, but we were thinking it was important that they were touching cats.” 

The tails of two of Johnson’s cats, which are shaded with intricate patterns, graze affectionately. Facing a star-speckled sky, the felines draw the viewer’s gaze toward the cosmos. “I didn’t think I was going to do this,” she said. “I don’t love drawing very much.”  

Although dance is Johnson’s primary métier—she appeared in December’s Nutcracker performance by the Sunshine Coast Youth Dance Association—she found a way to translate her instinct for movement into the inky gyrations that fill her canvas. Keen-eyed visitors will spot the names of two family pets secreted in the Escher-like designs. 

References to the animal kingdom are common throughout the exhibition—from a furry, bewhiskered face exploding through three-dimensional newsprint in Ayla Suffron’s Newspaper Burst to Keeli Gower’s flock of placid ewes in Sheep Crossing. London Allcock’s Salmon School expresses the scarlet frenzy of a West Coast spawning stream, while the long-necked, languid equines of Sophia James’s Horse Life inhabit placid pastures. 

There are subtle influences of pop culture, as in the manga-style painting Narato Uzumaki by Indra Bains, and a clay rendering of rapper Travis Scott (Demon and Travis Scott, by Cedar Grove School’s Che). Anthropomorphic portrayals, when they appear, are distorted or distended—as in Spencer McIntosh’s Untitled, a humanoid whose exposed musculature dwarfs a miniature head. 

The face of the female figure in Sharlene Johnson’s painting Missing and Murdered is obliterated by a blood-red handprint. Athena Qureshi’s acrylic work Fall from Grace features a reclining nude with umber-hued skin, simultaneously in repose and in torment. 

A written submission by Cole Turner, 12, of Gibsons Elementary School, is one of the few works to highlight textual elements (another is Grow Tall and Stay Strong, inspirational posters for dinosaurs by Milo Stahl and Isabella). Turner’s poem Four Seasons personifies the passage of time: “Think of that moment when fall comes, trapping the grass with / leaves that have given up.” 

“At the start of our school day in Grade Six, we would read someone’s poem and we would circle all the interesting words in it,” said Turner, who visited the gallery—still in uniform—after his return from a retreat with the Sechelt army cadets. “When I imagine people reading my poem, I want them to think, and say wow—this is really good, and learn that sometimes small things make the world beautiful.” 

The SHOUT OUT exhibition remains at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery until March 20.