Fanshawe Fine Art Studio 4 Exhibition Opening Reception

Join us on March 10th to view the work and meet the artists. All welcome! Free event.

Close to heART, PHOBIA, as subject for paintings has been delegated by these students. Painting PHOBIA takes into consideration the skills,

application, tools, manner of paints, while simultaneously forming an image: Imagined? Experienced? Feared? Together, self-reportage and/or ideas, materials and/or mirrors, accumulate and/or erase, process and/or time, becomes their silent forms within the making of a painting that generates what is felt into what is seen.

DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) defines phobia “as a marked, persistent fear of a specific object or situation that is irrational, causes significant impairment in daily functioning, and triggers immediate anxiety, leading to active avoidance.” On his 1974 music album, Fear, John Cale sings|screams, “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend”.

To become a creative apparatus to making a painting about the subject of a personal phobia, these two seemingly opposing quotes draw attention to the intensity of the endeavour proposed. How do you mine a phobia as young art students developing their first exhibition? Balance internal terror and the love of making? Triggering emergency a-void-dance, all part s of their painting process, painting image, can be seen as a personal, almost heroic, positive gesture.

The realis index reels from real to reel to bear witness, caught in the headlights, a spider’s web, above the mould, at dawn’s daylight. Deep are the dark waters on thin ice. Spherical fires burn paranoid holes with giants, clowns abound. Flying high ceiling of the sky falling down. Possessed with skeletons with organs with bodies with family-blood-birth-death with disconnect insanity dreams. Paint out, throw out, individual, cultural, timed-out female images. Dog|god growled ...got a perspective now?

Images are not for everyone; an image of the unseen, perhaps even more. This painting exhibition, a pictorial PHOBIA index, may or may not activate or expose undesirable feelings to/in an empathetic viewer. It may or may not, either, cure the artist of their PHOBIA. It seems a context of self that holds the PHOBIA, the fear, is far from the triggering object or situation. The psychology of the person is where the phobia resides – somewhere between the perception and signifier; a zone of unseen. A place to hide? A place to open? A place to mobilize spirits? A place where artists reside?

This exhibition is in the Main Gallery from March 10 to March 21, 2026.