Audain Faculty of Art

We invite you to explore the full potential of complex contemporary art practices in an interdisciplinary environment, leading to a top tier Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

Imagine the creation of new objects, images, and sculpture via a diverse set of materials and ideas, backed by real-world conceptual, technical, and historical knowledge.

Our student environment is stimulating and supportive, and grounded by conceptual artistic expression honed by intelligent and rigorous critique.

Our Bachelor of Fine Arts program develops working artists who are productive and resourceful. Our graduates become nationally and globally recognized artists, leaders and scholars in research and material practices.

The Visual Art Forums are presented by the Audain Faculty of Visual Art and Material Practice at Emily Carr University. Visit our Vimeo to explore these conversations.

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Choose from three Fine Arts Majors and two undergraduate degree Minors:

Illustration Major

Viewing all forms of illustration, from editorial to narrative, as opportunities for cultural inquiry, our Illustration Major firmly situates illustration practice in contemporary art culture. Students are encouraged to question rather than follow, and to seek out new possibilities in the professional field.

Photography Major

Our Photography Major is a multidisciplinary program, supportive of a broader understanding of the art form. Students first acquire a mastery of traditional photographic art practices with subsequent exploration in a wide range of digital and analogue processes.

Visual Arts Major

• Promoting the connection between material practice, exhibition, and critical reflection through experimentation, our Visual Arts Major encourages experimentation and engagement with traditional as well as emerging technologies. Disciplines within in the Visual Arts Major include:

  • The Ceramics curriculum introduces a range of concepts, materials, techniques, and equipment within the context of contemporary art practices. Traditional techniques are merged with emergent applications, including digital and 3D printing.
  • Drawing instruction and practice cover a range of approaches. Traditional observational methods are complimented by experimental assignments, drawing for narrative, memory, abstraction, and conceptual methods for drawing from ideas.
  • Painting explores colour, image, structure, surface, and support, combined with a rigorous dialogue about painting today.
  • Print Media focuses on concepts and processes, as well as on the roles that printed image and text play in society. Studies in intaglio, screen print, lithography, woodcut, and book media examine historical and contemporary print directions.
  • Sculpture and Expanded Practices emphasizes interdisciplinarity and the development of ideas and concepts. The discipline reflects the diversity of contemporary and traditional practices including video, installation, electronic media and kinetics, cast production, constructed objects and others.

New Media + Sound Art Major

Focusing on the relationships between arts, new technologies, and critical studies, the New Media + Sound Art Major generates new knowledges, sensations and artistic expressions. NMSA emphasizes experience - feeling, seeing, and hearing - inviting students to create worlds of difference.

Art + Text Minor

Explore how text operates within contemporary visual art with the Art + Text Minor. As artworks using text often challenge the conventions of the visual and conceptual in image-making, whether in the form of printed text or recorded speech, students explore how these experiments with language test the limits and modes of communication.

Curatorial Practice Minor

The Curatorial Practice Minor offers a unique perspective on the contemporary art world. Explore grant-writing, exhibition plans, curatorial proposals, the development of criteria for self-curating or curating in relation to one’s peers, through the completion of curatorial projects.