Inspired Cities exhibition at Vaughan City Hall
On until April 18

yorkregion.com
Feb. 24, 2016
By Tim Kelly

It’s decades from being fully built, but the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre at Jane and Hwy. 7 is a true work of art at Vaughan City Hall right now.

Artists across the Greater Toronto Area were asked to imagine the VMC and 161 submissions were received for the Inspired Cities art integration project, now On the Slate in the atrium at City Hall until April 18.

The three-panel jury selected 19 works to appear in the atrium and those pieces represent a wide diversity of pictures, paintings and other media that imagine the VMC in very different ways.

According to Sharon Gaum-Kuchar, public art curator for the city of Vaughan, the whole point of the exercise was, “to do greater engagement with the VMC through the window of art. We wanted the public to experience what the VMC could be.”

Gaum-Kuchar said the works picked by the jury were non-representational, “when mean that they’re abstract… it’s really the spirit… not really elements of landscape or architecture that they’re conveying.”
She said she felt it was important to focus on the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre because it’s a major undertaking for the city of Vaughan.

“It’s going to have a huge impact. It’s going to be the heart or centre of the city and everything radiates from the core.”

Chosen “best in show” by the jury was Thornhill artist Suzanne Metz’s piece, Cityscape, an acrylic and mixed-media painting she completed in 2015.

A native of Johannesburg, South Africa, who has lived in Thornhill since 1986, Metz has been painting all her life. She earned a fine arts degree in her native land and has a long history of appearing in arts shows and displaying her work in York Region and Toronto. She has also taught art in a number of locations including the Lebovic campus in Vaughan.

“I wanted to represent suburbia really, but with the inclusion of urban buildings,” she said about her work in the exhibit.

“It’s given me a feeling of both, a representation of buildings amongst different grasses. It feels like a combination...of urban and rural; colour for me is really important, this neon glow for me represents downtown city lights,” she said.

The colours are vibrant and expressive, blending together to form quite a palette.

“I love colour. It’s a riot of colour; I go wild. There’s a style of artists called the fauvists, Matisse was part of that, the wild beasts, that’s what I’ve become,” said Metz.

She said she appreciates the opportunity to exhibit at the City Hall site she calls, “an incredible space. It’s great that they encourage art and get the public to be more informed about it. This is a wonderful opportunity.”

The show is on at in the City Hall atrium at 2141 Major Mackenzie Dr., Vaughan, until April 18.

For more information on Suzanne Metz, check out www.suzannemetz.com