The walls of Oshawa, Ont.'s Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery are lined with close to 200 pieces of artwork created by students from across the Durham Catholic District School Board as part of this year’s Into the Horizon exhibit.

More than 180 custom entries from students, ranging from Kindergarten through Grade 12, are on display for all to see (free of charge) in Durham Region’s premier gallery through March 16.

While the gallery was open to submissions of any kind, Sebastien Lelasseux, the visual arts teacher at Notre Dame Catholic Secondary School in Ajax, saw the opportunity as a way to foster creativity in his classroom.

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“In this Grade 12 art course, students pick a theme at the beginning of the semester and once they have picked that theme, they have to stay with it for the whole semester. Through multiple projects they can work with different mediums, but it forces the students to work with something they truly believe in,” he said.

The exhibit displays extensive paintings, sculptures, photography, charcoal and even digital artwork.

For Nickolas  Prokopowich, a Grade 12 student at Notre Dame, his piece titled Thirteenth Hour reflects the chosen theme of perseverance. It depicts a ruin-marked cityscape and contains a working clock in the piece itself, all elements he thought out carefully and deliberately.

“The idea is that even though the road ahead may be tough, unknown and kind of scary, that you can know you’re not going to give up and that you will get through it,” he said.

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“The working clock ties it together and it shows that when you are deciding whether to persevere or not, time is running out. I know that I'm graduating soon, and the thought of it being anxious is seen in the cityscape as the real world that you have to go into.”

Even as his artwork will garner attention from visitors to the Robert McLaughlin Gallery,  Prokopowich says the experience served as an outlet for him, an experience he may not have otherwise found if not for the collaboration.

“Honestly, I took visual arts in Grade 12 just as a filler course but throughout this last semester doing art allowed me to get more confidence with it. This exhibit just shows how things can change and how you really can improve with effort,” he said.

Echoing this sentiment, Leila Timmins, the gallery's interim CEO and senior curator, celebrates the transformative power of art through the exhibition.

“We are thrilled to host this year’s Durham Catholic District School Board art exhibition, showcasing the talent of so many young artists in the region. The students are incredibly talented and there is so much creativity on display. Huge congratulations to all the students, their amazing art teachers and I hope to see many of them pursue a career in the arts,” she said.

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Lelasseux hopes so too. 

“ This is great for the elementary students too as it allows them to showcase their work in a gallery and hopefully some of those artists that are in this show come to Notre Dame next year or in the future,” he said. “The next step is the Art Gallery of Ontario, perhaps.”