Students who walked through the Imaginus poster sale two weeks ago, among rows of posters and replicas of classic art, may have noticed something slightly different this year.
A wobbling, makeshift board, plastered with prints of student art, distracted students who noticed they weren’t seeing standard-issue Imaginus image replicas. Some students even tried buying these prints, but later found out that this student art wasn’t an Imaginus product.
The poster board itself was a piece of student art. It was created by Tara Downs, a third-year Queen’s art history student, who adorned it with prints of works by herself and her peers.
Signs on the board bore messages such as “Let us imagine for you,” “Reproduction only. Ask for a unique copy,” and “Uniform your dorm,” messages Downs said were intended as a parody of Imaginus’ labels.
Since Imaginus is a business aiming to sell as many posters as possible, they only display the already iconic prints which they expect to be most popular, Downs said.
“I don’t think it would be possible for [Imaginus] to sell student or contemporary art,” Downs said.
“They’re into selling cultural icons—and if [the posters] are not cultural icons, they’re not going to sell it. And while there were people who tried to buy our artwork, [they] were a minority.”
Downs said her board was meant to comment on the uniformity advanced by Imaginus’ repeated display of familiar art pieces, and to draw attention to images selected by criteria other than popular appeal.
“My first inspiration was [when] I found the dichotomy between high and low art and just a really informal art exhibition fascinating,” she said.
Downs’ board also displayed prints of images that remain available as originals, whereas the originals of many Imaginus prints are not accessible to student buyers.
Downs said her board was meant not to contribute to the poster sale but to represent an element of spontaneity infiltrating and setting itself off against the automatic arrangement of the poster sale.
She said her board, like the images it displayed and other pieces of marginalized art, was an art piece which could regularly only be displayed in local galleries and exhibitions.
Downs said it belonged to the realm of art that viewer can still interact with and have an active role in—unlike the art pieces whose reproductions could pass through Imaginus’ commercial selection process.
Imaginus’ representatives did find Downs’ board—and when they did, they removed it from their exhibition.
Downs said the staff told her they found the project amusing and even offered her a free poster. She said recognition from Imaginus wasn’t the goal of her project, though.
Instead, Downs said a major aim of her project was to draw attention to the distinction between reproduced and original art, and to prompt students to reconsider their preference for the accessibility of reproductions over the authentic quality of original images.
She stressed she wasn’t trying to join the business venture and sell the images she displayed.
“I didn’t want to see Imaginus selling Queen’s posters—that wasn’t the point of the project,” she said. “One of the stickers [I gave out] encouraged people who read it to go out into Kingston and go to local art galleries.
“People just spend too much money on these paper reproductions but never visit an art gallery to discover contemporary art.”
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