Current students, faculty, and staff
We're excited to announce collaborators Omar Tarek Zayed and Lin Juan Dai as the recipients of the DesignTO Exhibition at Stantec Window Gallery Career Launcher!
Omar and Lin's project, Tribute, will be on display for the 2024 DesignTO Festival.
Tribute is a large-scale textile installation that investigates Toronto’s lost river networks. Informed by data collected from the Lost Rivers Toronto organization and ArcGIS data, we are rethinking how cartography is made and represented, employing batik as a technical means of subverting the way in which land is understood and documented.
Batik can be characterized as a surface design method where hot, liquid wax is applied onto a fabric as a resist to silk dyes. Batik, in this case, produces little to no defined lines, leaving room for uncontrolled material expressions that mirror the movement of water. As a result, our multi-layered composition illustrates the maps of Toronto’s existing, lost, and imagined waterways.
By paying homage to the once vibrant freshwater network that flowed and carved through the city, Tribute seeks to critically examine the artificiality of our city’s landscape while proposing speculative geographic futures in honour of Toronto’s waterways.
Omar is a textile artist and designer currently in his final year in the Material Art and Design program at OCAD U. His practice focuses on cultivating the relationship between traditional textile crafts and contemporary design methodologies, seeking out new and hybridised approaches to textile design. Working through a variety of mediums such as; silkscreen, natural dyeing, weaving, and felting, Omar's work explores themes of material agency through a “making-as-negotiating" approach to his process.
Website: www.omartzayed.format.com
Lin completed her environmental design program at OCAD U and is presently pursuing a degree in landscape architecture at the University of Toronto. She is interested in the hidden environment that is beyond what is usually visible, and is interested in finding ecological relevance in urban environments.
Website: www.issuu.com/linjdai/docs/binder1
Learn more about our Career Launchers at: https://careerlaunchers.format.com