Visual Arts

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https://hdl.handle.net/10315/27620

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Open Access
Documents from Antarctica
(2023-03-28) MacDonald, Kristie Lynn Anne; Balfour, Barbara
This paper investigates the history of human settlement on Antarctica from the perspective of an artist engaged in research-creation. It accompanies a body of artwork entitled "Documents from Antarctica," which uses found photographs and papers as the source material for installation and photo-based images. This paper engages in a reading of the material culture used in my art practice as both documents and objects in the round. The result is a series of written vignettes that trace the development of Antarctic geopolitics, climate change and the Anthropocene, historiography of the South Pole, and art history from the Second World War through to the present. Collections and archival methodologies are investigated as a primary means by which humans understand and define themselves – responding to the conditions of their social and geographic surroundings through making, building, and recording. Unpacking the past and present contexts of material culture used in Documents from Antarctica results in a reflection on Antarctica as a highly mediated space, with an increasing socio-cultural presence in the Anthropocene.
Open Access
these words don't belong to me
(2022-08-08) Canaviri-Laymon, Jasmine Nicolle; Levitt, Nina
This thesis, and its companion exhibition, uses my writing as the primary source in its written and visual iterations with a focus on memory and trauma. I examine the “auto-” as it relates to the self while adopting my lived experience as the main subject matter. The goal of this thesis is to expand the idea of the “auto-” beyond the singular "I" and to include the impact that other people and extenuating, situational circumstances leading to/after trauma impart on the self. Through my firsthand account of trauma, I question what it means to heal using visual arts as well as what it means to exhibit artwork embedded in pain to the public. Taking an autotheoretical approach combined with trauma and narrative studies, this paper intends to shed light on my own experience navigating trauma during a pandemic.
Open Access
Not All Dogs Go To Heaven
(2022-08-08) Harding, Andrew Douglas; Vickerd, Brandon
This paper is in direct support of my thesis exhibition, Not All Dogs Go To Heaven, held at Gales Gallery, York University, April 11-15, 2022. This document and its text reveals the conceptual and material concerns that are relevant to the narrative and mythology that become the focus of the exhibition. Central to this project is an entity of fiction. It is never fully revealed, only referenced. The stray dog stands in as a metaphor. The path that it travels is curiously arranged and its existence is fugitive. The artworks I am creating are located in this speculative zone. Physically, the works take the form of fabricated and assembled sculptures, cast objects, acrylic structures, metal lightboxes, and digital images and illustrations materialized through commercial printing techniques. These works all exist within an imaginative area—the stay dog’s path—and are the accumulated forms of multiple iconographic references and inherit the emotional weight of the contemporary milieu. The work itself is a “check-in” of the current moment, it suspends the time it exists in order to dissect it in a slow and critical manner. Through the use of bold visual forms and imagery, the works are able to highlight the strange times we live in—a sense of contemporary angst that is sticky and bright and plasmic.
Open Access
Without These Things, I Would Be Invisible
(2022-08-08) Kitchen, Jessie Lyn; Levitt, Nina
This paper "Trace and Retrace" accompanies my Masters of Fine Arts thesis exhibition titled "Without These Things, I Would Be Invisible". The exhibition took place in Special Projects Gallery at York University in April 2022. The body of work consists of sculptures, photographs and found objects. The work stems from my own experience of loss from childhood to the present. I am reflecting on how unresolved familial loss and trauma can be passed down through the things shared in a household. "Without These Things, I Would Be Invisible" explores the intersection of grief with sentimental objects as they intertwine with memory, unresolved loss and identity. I work with personal materials that recall memories, conjuring a symbolic status that overrides their intended function. This body of work is my attempt to remember, find new articulations, and honour the complexities of my own experiences of grief and my obsession with objects.
Open Access
Shaper
(2022-08-08) Coulombe, Derek Victor; Balfour, Barbara
This work is a cross-genre memoir that draws upon critical disability theory, literature, images and theoretical discourse in order to examine, express, and critically expand upon my experience of living within the confines of a body and mind conditioned by severe Tourette's Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This work is structured around intermittent descriptions of each of the nineteen tics that form the 'repertoire' of my condition. Interspersed between these nineteen descriptions are brief pieces of writing that span memoir, theoretical writing, and fiction. This work may be of interest to those seeking material on critical disability, illness and life writing, photography, autobiography and memoir, speculative fiction, and visual art.
Open Access
A Place for Fire and The Matter of Deep Time
(2022-08-08) Cristinzo, Lisa MaryAnne; Daigneault, Michel
Fire is the subject, matter is the object. This paper is written to accompany my MFA thesis exhibition, Stone like Fruit, Fruit like Fire. Emerging out of fire, objects made of metal, stone, wood, and paper, in addition to a series of paintings, the central body of work, will be on display April 25-30, 2022 in The Gales Gallery at York University. The idea for this series arrived from an encounter with a wood stove in Ireland. The wood stove and the fire within became an allegory for a climate in crisis and my own life and grief cycles as I struggled with my health, matters of the heart and the making and articulation of this work. I reference the work of philosopher Gaston Bachelard to investigate the "doing" of fire and political theorist Jane Bennett to explain the "thingness" of matter, and how these two entities (fire and matter) shift with our own social, political, spiritual, and ecological ideologies. As a reflection of my practice and like the building of a fire, this essay is written with a stacking and positioning of the biographical and theoretical, where stories and concepts create fictional frictions illuminating paths within the work.
Open Access
When Nobody Was Here
(2022-08-08) Grey, Shawn Louise; Couroux, Marc G.
When Nobody Was Here is a visual arts Thesis project documenting the collaborative making of a 45-foot cloth banner. It is part of an ongoing conversation in my work about the untold stories found within the context of Canada's settler-colonial history. Beginning with historical misrepresentation, the project invites individuals to create fabric assemblages for the banner in response to ideas about generational knowledge. Together, the assembled pieces create an unplanned narrative across the surface of the banner. I use screen captures and video clips in a digital montage to document and reflect the mood of the project. The banner and the video montage work together to encapsulate the past through a process of locating the social, political, and natural interconnections we carry with us in our day-to-day lives. This paper is written to support my thesis project.
Open Access
aqui y alla: una manera de ser (here and there: a way of being)
(2022-08-08) Peraza, Michelle; Jones, Janet A.
This thesis support paper explores a body of work based on drawing and painting representing my LatinX family. In this paper, I intend to probe, contest, address, and resist our colonial history to contribute to resilience, empowerment, and a nuanced LatinX identity in a visual format. In this paper I contextualize my family within a post-colonial Latin American history, investigate the role of painting in perpetuating dominant colonial tropes, as well as engage with theories of the center and marginality. I also discuss the aesthetic strategies of haciendo caras (making faces), performing brownness, and parody, concluding with a discussion on mimicry/ambivalence and a method of healing the colonial wound. The artistic practice I outline in this thesis paper fluctuates between research and creation to engage with decolonial strategies in figurative painting and non-figurative drawing. This practice creates resistance against coloniality through visual creations.
Open Access
Resonant Frequencies Beyond the Visible, Between the Lines: Re-visioning Photographic Subjects in the Encyclopaedia Britannica
(2022-08-08) Oghobase, Onoriode Abraham; Levitt, Nina
This masters thesis gives an insight into my artistic practice – that explores colonial history, the otherness of colonized subjects, environmental exploitation, and personal encounters with place – leading up to and informing my MFA final exhibition. My thesis project attempts to interrogate meanings inherent in colonial representations through an engagement with the materiality of photography, with a focus on the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1968). By photocopying, juxtaposition and layering images contained within its pages, I aim to open up possibilities for the re-conceptualization and re-visioning of African subjects of this compendium of knowledge who would otherwise remain voiceless and perceived from a limited, colonial gaze. The resulting images complicate and stretch the boundaries between art and history and raise important questions, including about the signifiers of feeling and vibration that invest certain images with mystery and power, leading to a dimension outside of sight and touch.
Open Access
Disruptive Body
(2022-08-08) Hois, Catherine Aliki; Daigneault, Michel
This support paper describes the development of my exhibition, Disruptive Body, based on my personal experiences with an eating disorder and my studio research. In my paper, I aim to engage a conversation about the dangers of normalizing body management by creating an immersive, confrontational environment for the viewer. I highlight a reflection as the root of my process, as I began reading through my collection of journal entries that record my experience recovering from an eating disorder. I discuss the inspiration behind Pageant of the Vulnerable, beginning with research into art therapy, eating disorders, and artist Yayoi Kusama. Kusama is an important reference for my large-scale sculptures, because of her approach to expressing her own fears and obsessions by surrounding herself with forms that represent the source of her trauma. I discuss my need to confront my past and present struggles with body dysmorphia, and my decision to create large-scale sculptures that are inspired by different parts of my body. It is important to me that the viewer is immersed into the environment I create, and I explain how I achieve this through researching aspects of the home, memories, and familiar materials. Disruptive Body is an objection to the obligation of unhealthy body standards in society, and an expression of healing my own relationship with my body.
Open Access
Otium
(2021-11-15) Ghayedikarimi, Maryam; Couroux, Marc G.
Two parallel investigations entwine to compose a plane of immanence where various concepts are rhizomatically juxtaposed. Theories of consciousness are studied in connection to the forces that surveil the will to life, palpable as well as imperceptible authoritarian powers that enframe and inform human activities. The immaterial affects the material. The fluid forces of digital surveillance today structure a particular set of constraints that densify the bodily and spatial limits of modern individuals. Electronic means of control have structured the parameters of a loose confinement that exceeds a definitive objective phenomenon to infuse everyday activities and become an integral component of our lived experiences. Entangled in this reciprocity between the material and the immaterial, the actual and the virtual, the body and its objective possibilities are subject to study within the accelerated disciplinary models of the digital age. This dissertation maps the new landscape that has emerged, the site where power is articulated on the body in the quest to respond to rhetorical questions of autonomy, selfhood, and democracy. In the search for a substance independent from imposing external enclosures, art and philosophy are studied to propose possible means of escape. Against the incessant structures of control, this project explores the potentials of building a space of delay where one can experience other modes of being, a site to become opaque, incomprehensible, and therefore resist the mechanisms of capture.
Open Access
Devolved Sculpture
(2021-11-15) Scott, Jonathan; Couroux, Marc G.
This research is focused on the fictive processing of information as an essential method in contemporary arts production. Framed within a discourse on the production of subjectivity, it uses diagrammatics as a model to think through, whilst engaging an expanded practice of sculpture. This body of work functions to articulate the space between lived thought and object materialization. The name of that space is Devolved Sculpture.
Open Access
A low hum, a strong gale
(2021-11-15) Bullock, Hannah Alison; Balfour, Barbara
For the past eleven years, I have lived with undiagnosed chronic pain. This paper functions in support of my thesis exhibition: delving into my embodied experience of invisible illness and internalized ableism as it relates to disability justice and crip theory. The body of work aims to reconstruct my practice in order to best accommodate my own access needs. "A low hum, a strong gale" calls into question what it means to create a body of work that outwardly rejects the idea that to make valuable art, I must 'suffer for it.' The process of creating the exhibition included working interdependently with others to help materialize my ideas, and building upon tasks—primarily breathing—that I can perform from bed when I'm unwell. My material explorations aim to make visible the invisible—documenting the physical limitations that are a result of my pain, rather than searching for evidence of its existence.
Open Access
Narratives of the Self: A Walk Through a Labyrinth
(2021-11-15) Inalouei, Niloofar; Armstrong, David Scott
This paper parallels my thesis exhibition entitled Narratives of the Self: A Walk Through a Labyrinth. This expansive installation of wooden sculpture frames embedded with hand-dyed fabric, explores notions of private and public, in relation to my personal experience of growing up in Iran. In this thesis support paper I address how notions of private and public could be perceived as fluid, unfixed and in the state of flux, yet they tend to be perceived as fixed entities. When referring to private, I mean the idea of home as a realm that belongs to the inside world, and public as it belongs to the states patriarchal authority. Drawing from my art practice, the notions of private and public are addressed metaphorically by the use of narrative allusions, expressive materials and processes such as dying, stretching, cutting and knotting.
Open Access
A Wish Stays With You
(2021-11-15) Doucet, Hannah Glinski; Levitt, Nina
My thesis research represents a pulling back of the curtain on the long-standing relationship between the charitable organizations devoted to wishes and the corporate media giant Disney that spins tales of realized dreams. The work weaves together explorations of memory, fairy tales, art, architecture, corporate philanthropy, commerce, advertising, performance, death, illness, disability, and toxic positivity. My thesis satirizes, reflects on, and theorizes around aesthetic seduction at Disney and Give Kids the World Village (GKTWV), linking the worlds of healthcare, Disney, and wish-granting together for their joint pronouncement on the importance and necessity of happiness. Through my critical theorizing of this early-life wish experience, I interrupt the toxic stories I observe within the dual worlds of Disney and wish-granting, inserting nuance and complexity within otherwise purely positive narratives.
Open Access
Books and the Disappearing Body
(2021-11-15) McCray, Kelly Todd; Lau, Yam K.
Through a questioning queer lens, the Books and the Disappearing Body project will explore the impact of the authoritative archive and surveillance on the queer body through performance and elements of VR technology. The thesis support paper will emphasize aspects of physical contact including the fear of touch during the current COVID-19 pandemic and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Throughout the paper I advocate for the preservation of human touch, emphasizing the significance of the body in relation to technology. The fear is that as the global pandemic continues, accelerated technology will replace human touch.
Open Access
What Once Was, Is All That Should Have Been
(2021-11-15) Visco, Gerardo; Lau, Yam K.
My research paper and studio work will look at the recontextualization of three basic building materials: concrete, steel, and Wood. My research aims to provide these materials with a renewed agency that imbues them with power through visual and tactile language. My studio work will look at how these materials function via an aesthetic that will evoke a visceral experience delivered through medium and subject engagement. The physical work will seek to break the barrier between the observer/viewer and the work itself by providing a participatory experience with the pieces I have made. My paper will look at the Arte Povera movement as theorized by Italian art critic and curator Germano Celant. Adopting some of the methodologies of Arte' Povera to the theoretical writings on New Materialism, the resulting studio work will establish a visual context that supports the reiteration of the materials used. The central focal point, The Nest, will mark both the beginning and the end of my research and the resulting work. This sculptural element will encompass a place of birth along with a repository of the past, present, and future. The embodiment of my practice and research will work within five principles: proximity, similarity, continuity, connectedness, and closure. The works I will introduce within this paper will unpack these principles by assemblages made with new and repurposed materials and objects. The phenomenological experience with the piece has also impacted this paper as the materials have been imbued with a renewed power and agency of their owna power that New Materialism informs. My paper will investigate the ontological definition of certain materials and how these materials have been impacted through the works created. I will be discussing a new approach, one combined with the "vitalism"1 of Jane Bennett, the writings of Diane Coole, and "imbuing the 'things' with power" of materials. As stated by Christiane Meyer-Stoll in Che Fare?: "They invite viewer participation, urging visitors to place themselves, as in the mirror paintings, in a situation where they become part of the work. In this respect, they offer an open-ended situation that provides a communitive structure."2 The title of this paper, What Once Was, Is All That Should Have Been, engages one with the history of materials that have entrenched themselves in our everyday lives, such as concrete and steel. A renewed agency allows concrete and steel to break with their history by forming a more empathetic practical ethos rather than one that aligns itself with their brutalist past. With its iconic history as a symbol for an environment that has fallen victim to deforestation that seeks to harvest it for building and clears forests to allow for further development, Wood, acts as the catalyst.
Open Access
That Thing: Confronting Difficult Trauma
(2021-11-15) Wunderink, Rachelle Gerine; Lau, Yam K.
Society censors, rather than confronts, stories of rape and harassment. Rachelle Wunderinks thesis work unveils the consequences of sexual assault trauma by forcing viewers to engage with the emotional affect. She does this in three key ways throughout her body of work: Blankouts, an immersive wheat-pasted installation, which looks at the covert ways in which society suppresses womens stories of assault through the use of coded language and censorship. Secondly, Trauma Embodied, looks at how the artist self- censors her own stories through a multi-layered editing process of eight different videos. Lastly, in Wunderinks thesis exhibition, That Thing: Confronting Difficult Trauma, the artist activates the gallery space creating various modes of interaction with the work engaging her audience to consider the ways in which the work imprints on their own experiences.
Open Access
"Strange, she thought, pausing on the landing..."
(2021-11-15) Gallucci, Katelyn Marie; Knight, Katherine
"Strange, she thought, pausing on the landing..." is a collection of interdisciplinary artworks I produced from September 2019 to April 2021, incorporating drawing, photography and installation. In my research, I used my knowledge of image making to restructure and empower how I navigate the physical world. The result is a new archive of images that describe the world as I experience it. This supporting paper articulates my approach to studio production.
Open Access
Memory of Place: Restaging Lived Experience Through Photographic Images
(2021-07-06) Yerkovich, Mikhail Eli; Armstrong, David Scott
My current thesis work consists of building and photographically documenting sets of SROs (single room occupancy housing) in order to understand the spaces used as housing for people that were formerly homeless, and who live with mental health and substance use issues. The work explores the idea of late photography, ie. photographs that are taken after an initial event, and the relation between documentary style truth telling and photographic recreation. Through the use of built sets, I recreate scenes based on memories I have of these spacesthe goal being to investigate whether these images of recreated spaces can stand in for the actual event. Within my research and investigation, I explore how these staged rooms photographs evoke ennui: feelings of absence/presences, boredom, and the uncanny. My thesis concludes by addressing the difficulty of separating these binary states true/false, absence/presence, and stimulation/boredom suggested by these photographs, and discovering through the recognition of their inherent overlap.