Art History and Visual Culture
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Browsing Art History and Visual Culture by Author "Parsons, Sarah"
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Item Open Access Arnaud Maggs, Once a Designer(2024-11-07) Cibola, Anne; Parsons, SarahArnaud Maggs had a decades-long career during which he produced important work in both commercial and fine art. In his early years he worked as a graphic designer and illustrator. In the late 1960s he pursued commercial photography. Maggs then transitioned to fine art in the early 1970s, producing work frequently positioned within the context of conceptual art. Maggs and others often portrayed his shift to fine art as a dramatic and transformative reinvention, resulting in limited acknowledgment of his early commercial work and only cursory investigation of its impact on his subsequent artistic production. This dissertation maintains that Maggs’s visual and conceptual languages reveal a synthesis of strategies from each stage of his career, and argues for a more comprehensive understanding of Canada's visual culture by bridging the gap between fine and applied art histories. Biography helps to reveal a range of influences and experiences that may otherwise remain concealed but contribute to shaping an artist’s work. In so doing, biographical detail — especially detail that traces professional experiences and work history — helps to unsettle perceptions of artistic genius by offering a more nuanced understanding of how an artist’s work develops through interconnected influences, life experiences, and work history. Through a close examination of Maggs's biography and emphasis on his commercial experience, this dissertation highlights the interconnections in Maggs’s creative practices and challenges traditional biases in art history. In order to expand biographical and contextual details, I conducted a series of interviews with people who knew and worked with Maggs. This oral history unsettles the mythology around his career narrative. What emerges instead is a picture of an artist whose formal and conceptual languages evolved over decades of work. Structured in two parts, “Once a Designer, Always an Artist: Redefining the Mythology of Maggs” and “Once a Designer, Always a Designer: Commercial Practice and Conceptual Praxis,” this dissertation contextualizes Maggs’s work within larger trends and foregrounds the profound influence his early careers had on his artistic production in order to illuminate his motivations and offer a counternarrative to published accounts of his career trajectory.Item Open Access Moving Through Images: Spectatorship and Meaning-Production in Interdisciplinary Art Environments(2020-08-11) Wilmink, Melanie Thekala; Parsons, SarahThis dissertation establishes a framework for understanding embodied experience within immersive art environments by examining artworks that deploy interdisciplinary conventions to turn attention towards spectatorship itself. To accomplish this, I apply cross-disciplinary theory from John Dewey, Henri Bergson, Brian ODoherty, Gilles Deleuze, Laura U. Marks, Peggy Phelan, and others, to close-readings of select case studies. My methodology articulates how memory, duration, material forms, and the relational dynamics between the spectator and artwork all structure the aesthetic encounter. It is my aim to bring together the rich, but isolated, knowledge sets of the art gallery, cinema, and stage to develop a more nuanced understanding of how attentive spectatorial engagement with artwork is produced. In Chapter One, Robert Lepage and Ex Machinas installation The Library at Night (2016) demonstrates the philosophical framework for how a spectator moves between the virtual and physical within aesthetic encounters. Chapter Two extends these ideas through the spatial conditions of the art gallery in dominique t skoltzs y2o dualits_ (2015) exhibitions. Chapter Three addresses the architecture of the cinema, through Janet Cardiff and George Bures Millers The Paradise Institute (2001), which calls attention to the temporal and social conditions of cinema as an interloper in the gallery. Finally, Chapter Four examines the Situation Rooms (2013/2016) as theatre group Rimini Protokoll disrupts the division between the audience and stage by placing the viewer in the middle of the action as a live participant. Each of these case studies examines how artistic intervention either deploys or disrupts the architecture of the exhibition space in order to produce spectatorship that oscillates between the viewers immediate aesthetic encounter and the structures that construct their experience the work.