Tyler Durbano: Fascinate

Tyler Durbano, Polaroid-050, 2021, Polaroid Photograph. Image courtesy of the artist.

Fascinate
An Exhibition of Work by Tyler Durbano

Curated by Francisco-Fernando Granados

February 13 – March 22, 2025
Opening Reception: February 13, 5 – 7pm
The Campus Gallery, Georgian College, Barrie ON

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.

This exhibition is in partnership with the Museum and Gallery Studies Department.

“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, Untitled Viewfinder 1, 2024, Pencil crayon on Fabriano paper. Image courtesy of the artist.

About the Artist and Curator

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 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 Museum and Gallery Studies Program at Georgian College

As a student of the one year, post-graduate Museum and Gallery Studies program, you will acquire a comprehensive foundation in museum and gallery work. You will develop capabilities in the main technical areas common to all museums and galleries: conservation and collections management, exhibition design, public programming, interactive technology, and administration. By advancing your existing knowledge through a blend of engaging academic instruction and experiential learning opportunities such as technical practice and a co-op work placement, you will be prepared to understand the legacy of museums and galleries while being a part of the change that moves this field of study forward. Connecting theory with practice, the Museum and Gallery Studies program focuses on curatorial sustainability, equity and diversity in curriculum and action, and instilling collaborative approaches to problem-solving. You will receive hands-on experience working with The Campus Gallery and Georgian College’s extensive art collection. Networking with museum and gallery professionals, historians, and artists, you will create off-site exhibitions with local cultural institutions. After your coursework is complete, a four-month co-op work placement will prepare you for the next steps in your career in Museums and Galleries. Applications are being accepted for Fall 2025!

Museum and Gallery Studies Program

About The Campus Gallery, Georgian College

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, Georgian College
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.

Contact the Director of The Campus Gallery, Amy Bagshaw
amy.bagshaw@georgiancollege.ca

Facebook @DVAcampusgallery
Instagram @thecampusgallery

Accessibility:
The Campus Gallery is fully accessible. For more information, please visit Georgian College Accessibility

The Artist would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario