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Item Open Access 30 going on 13 (strike out) like like or just a “like”?(2023-08-04) Dodgson, Rachael Maria; Armstrong, David ScottThis paper, written to my BFF, supports my thesis exhibition, 30 going on 13 (Strikeout) like like or just a ''like”? at York University’s Gales Gallery. Using screenprinting, fluorescent acrylic sheets, found objects, projection, and dollar store scented trash bags my thesis is a bold and immersive assemblage of surface and abstract imagery. Guided by a playful exploration of material, my work is influenced by my own anxious and disembodied search for identity and connection in my online and “away from keyboard” (AFK) life as an urban millennial. What does it mean to transmute feelings evoked digitally into material we can physically be with and touch? Embodying a Postdigital aesthetic, one fusing digital and analog means of making and utilizing the immersive characteristics of installation art, my thesis uses materiality, abstraction, and text to center and de-center the viewer calling on them to participate in an assemblage of simultaneously comforting and awkwardly disorienting material fragments.Item Open Access A Constellation of Sorts: Pause, Glean, Repeat, Drift, Wait(2016-09-20) Testa, Andrew Mark; Balfour, BarbaraMy art practice is concerned with the nature of imagesimages which at once inscribe a historical continuity between the past and present, as well as index an inevitable sense of loss and drift. My MFA thesis exhibition, A Constellation of Sorts, is an assemblage of found and family photographs within my personal collection, to be shared and hidden, discontinuous yet whole. Through collecting, story telling, making and folding, my exhibition and thesis support paper reframe and represent fragments of images and thoughts into assembled entities. When one pauses and allows their eyes and mind to wander, these prints and texts may lead to nuanced observation, questioning how we know what we think we know about an image.Item Open Access A low hum, a strong gale(2021-11-15) Bullock, Hannah Alison; Balfour, BarbaraFor 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.Item Open Access A Place for Fire and The Matter of Deep Time(2022-08-08) Cristinzo, Lisa MaryAnne; Daigneault, MichelFire 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.Item Open Access A Simultaneous World(2019-07-02) Briede, Ilze; Armstrong, David ScottWhat if we could experience and see more than meets the eye? What if we could envision a multitude of existing realities being unveiled to us simultaneously? What if we could float in and out through different temporal representations inside the expanded field of our consciousness and retain everything together into one single continuum? What would this multiplicity look like to us? My artistic practice, a hybrid of video, image and object making, investigates the phenomenon of perception and the constraints and boundaries between the senses and knowing. This supporting paper maps out the creative influences and experiments behind the four installation pieces presented in my thesis exhibition Simultaneous World show at the Gales gallery, York University.Item Open Access A Troubling, Soft Underfoot(2021-03-08) Chang, Shea Lynn; Jones, Janet A.A Troubling, Soft Underfoot delves into the spatiality of complex otherness, and investigates pluralistic, non-delineated and deviant embodiments of place, race, gender, and sexuality through cross-bred processes of drawing, painting and sculpture. Through thin washes of pigment extended onto aluminum, a disquieting exchange is generated amidst thresholds in contemporary drawing, painting and sculpture; the resulting work takes shape between the spaces of control and accident, opacity and transparency, porosity and rigidity, alignment and disruption, seen and unseen. The multiple and mutable optical and physical formations in this work propose a reconsideration of the thresholds between all things, organisms, animals and humans, to uncover the invisible symbiotic entanglements in which we all exist.Item Open Access A Wish Stays With You(2021-11-15) Doucet, Hannah Glinski; Levitt, NinaMy 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.Item Open Access After Muybridge: Becoming Unknown(2018-11-21) Frise, Heather Ruth; Armstrong, David ScottThis thesis paper is in support of the exhibition, After Muybridge: Becoming Unknown, and examines the material and conceptual approaches to my work with drawing, animation and installation. The paper begins by looking at figures (both human and animal) as a central image, and a means through which I explore the relationship between corporeality and subjectivity. It looks specifically at experiences of motherhood, both cultural and autobiographical, and how they might be transcribed/transfigured through the language of drawing and animation. Eadweard Muybridges photographic studies provide a starting point for exploring the animated figure. His representations of Victorian women as domestic labourers are deconstructed through my artwork, and this thesis paper details the processes carried out in the studio over the course of two years. The artworks described here consist of both drawing-based works, created through a process of cutting, collaging and employing traditional and non-traditional drawing and painting materials, and, a video projection of animated drawings. My thesis exhibition brings these sympathetic media togetherreimagining the female body and identity, and, creating more porous boundaries between human and animal bodies, domestic and wild spaces, animate and inanimate figures.Item Open Access Al Lado, Afuera. // Beside, Outside.: The Performance of Solidarity between Archive and Repertoire in Guatemala and Canada(2018-11-21) Heyn-Jones, Zoe Amelia; Marchessault, Janine MicheleMy research-creation dissertation investigates the question 'how are human rights enacted/performed? by examining solidarity activism in Guatemala and the hemispheric networks that enable it. The essay film al lado, afuera. // beside, outside. (2018, 21:12 min.), a synthesis of interviews with contemporary activists looks at human rights accompanimentthe process of situating oneself as an unarmed volunteer, assuming a physical presence alongside social activists who are victims of political threats, in order to dissuade violence, bear witness, and activate international solidarity networks. The performatic repertoire of accompaniment activism is explored upon the backdrop of the LAWG (Latin American Working Group)s collection of solidarity documents (1965-1997) and a large wall drawing that maps my research on networks of solidarity activism, thereby contextualizing this little-known embodied activist practice and exploring entanglements between the material archive and the ephemeral repertoire. Solidarity movement ephemera and a series of posters, created from graphic and textual elements of selected LAWG documents, highlight the material and historical foundation of todays accompaniment activism in Guatemala. By continuing to scan these documents in the gallery space as a durational performance throughout the exhibition, I highlight the labour performed in solidarity activism, and the change-of-state from paper materials to digital files, thereby mirroring of the trajectory from pre-Internet campaigns of letter-writing, information bulletins, flyers and posters, etcetera to todays digital forms of solidarity mobilization, and the various temporalities of solidarity. In transforming the collection from a material to a digital archive, I am creating an open source online repository of these crucial materials, as well as a gallery installation that highlights the aesthetics and materiality of pre-Internet solidarity activism, posing the question how does the materiality of solidarity evidenced in the LAWG collection work in tandem with embodied performances of solidarity activism?Item Open Access An Animal Among Animals(2018-08-27) Maston, Sara Kay; Daigneault, MichelThe discourse of Animal Studies has been gaining momentum as a scholarly discipline, advanced in remarkably diverse ways by theorists such as Jakob Von Uexkll, Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway, Michel Serres, and Giorgio Agamben. Drawing on these theorists, my research on animality seeks to name what the animal represents, as well as situate the human as an animal, and address questions of ecology and non-anthropocentric relational subjectivity. I will also look at several artists who have advanced the cultural identity of animals through their work including LinLee-Chen, Jochen Lempert, and Pudlo Pudlat. This paper proposes to reject the notion of humans as separate from nature and emphasizes the exploration of unrecognized forms of knowledge acquired from the parallel lifeworlds of animals. I will also describe my method of practice-based research through visual art as a means to approach the abstract and often inaccessible knowledge of an animals experience without favoring the anthropomorphic constraints of language. My visual research employs storytelling and metaphors through painting, drawing on personal narratives or dreams as a medium to engage the multiplicity of worlds and reveal meaning without imparting propositional claims. I will walk the reader through the accompanying thesis exhibition, describing a series of paintings that focus on rendering animal experiences that are oftentimes disregarded or invisible to our human affordances. A large-scale installation will facilitate a space that situates the viewer in relation to nonhuman animals inhabiting parallel environments. Paintings focused on rendering the physicality and vantage points of nonhuman animals, along with non-pictorial elements, are used to disengage anthropomorphic assumptions and situate human animality in a symbiogenetic relationship with other animals.Item Open Access Apropos Obsolescence(2019-07-02) Wolstenholme, Colleen Dawn; Singer, YvonneApropos Obsolescence is the title of this PhD in visual art dissertation and exhibition. It is an exploration of how a human mind interfaces with and mediates both proximal space and the larger environment of planet Earth. How is the outside brought inside? What is mediation and how does it operate upon our consciousness? Within the exhibition explored in this text are several works that investigate mediation. The main work, Hexagraphy, is a rudimentary backlit screen; a sculpture that refers to a field of neurons using light. Neurons in the brains hippocampus region are active during movement as a component of our agency in connecting to the navigational aspect of consciousness. These neurons operating in grids are calculating our direction and placement in space as we move around. To engage with this information, I improvised a decentered geometry for some of the work in the exhibition. In other works, I included signs of the enormous physical forces that are in play on the planet, the non-local phased objects we are immersed within that are not easily represented due to their enormity, but that technoscience exposes. Two questions became evident to me through looking at both science and new materialist philosophy. The first is that following the digital turn, an extension of our senses aided by computation, it is clear that humanity exists contingently on planet Earth. Humanity was not the beginning and is not the end of evolution. Thus, upending any notion that any thing was created for us. Secondly, is technology as an end in itself helpful for humanity? Through its decentering of humanity and imposing an acknowledgement of contingency upon us, the entire realm of objects is paradoxically elevated. This decentering could be the only thing that saves our species from extinction. It may be the objects that save us. Hyperobjects like hurricanes and El Nino, or climate change in general are caused by a combination of cyclical forces. These large objects decenter humanity, and in my artwork, I want to emphasize the fact that I am a fragile human and not a machine.Item 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.Item Open Access Art Through Sensation: Unfolding Image and Text Together, Through Bacon, Bergson and Jung(2023-12-08) Delisle, Philip George; Lau, Yam K.This book proposes an experiment: to unfold image and text together. Working in reverse, it begins with the painting processes of Francis Bacon (as analyzed by Gilles Deleuze), the metaphysics of philosopher Henri Bergson and the psychology of Carl Jung. The book attempts to build an in-between; to start with givens and fill in the space that blends them together into a smooth transition (intensity). Bringing ideas from philosophy, psychology and art together, and utilizing strategies that have practical application in creative arts as part of its methodology, the paper reframes creative (or analogical) thought process as being a key component in intelligence. We suggest new avenues that need to be further explored in order to bring image-sensation into more meaningful contact with the discursive systems of knowledge.Item Open Access As We Write, So We Build(2015-08-28) Carlesimo, Teresa Margaret; Vickerd, BrandonThis thesis support document accompanies my Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition as we write, so we build. My work explores themes of place, placelessness and memory in relation to the built environment. Using typical construction materials I create sculpture-based installations to investigate our relationship to our everyday surroundings. I draw from my personal experiences and observations of my surroundings to construct architectural fragments that provide an immersive, embodied experience for the viewer. The research images that are included in my Thesis Exhibition contextualize my practice by relating it to my investigation of the built form of the city, while this support document provides further context through reference to my artistic process and influences.Item Open Access Assembly Required: Rewilding Space and Education Through Continuous Adaptive Practices(2021-03-08) Young, Jessie Ann; Vickerd, BrandonAssembly Required is an interactive artwork that urges people to look a little closer at the spaces we live in and who we share them with. This paper outlines the research and development that brought this artwork to life. Using relational aesthetics - a branch of artistic practice that creates relationships between participants in experiencing artwork - to promote ecological awareness through an engaging project. Assembly Required mimics natural repetitive structures of the beehive and coral reefs and breaks them down into units to be endlessly produced and reformed into new structures. Participants are invited to collaborate by making these structures through workshops and a portable kit I created at the height of Covid-19, providing a hands-on educational experience.Item Open Access Beside Oneself: Towards a Participatory Feminist Art Practice(2015-01-26) Schogt, Elida; Tenhaaf, PetronellaComprised of a research paper and the presentation of a performance, my dissertation in studio-based visual art is part of a larger discussion about the role of art and the viewer-participant within social and political systems. Working with queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of beside and what she calls its useful resistance to narratives, as well as feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz’s return to bodily specificity in her reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s BwO (Body without Organs), I move from my former reliance on psychoanalytic tropes and representational forms towards a spatialized, embodied, and participatory art practice. In what curator and critic Lucy Lippard characterizes as the feminist values of collaboration, dialogue and constant questioning of aesthetic and social assumptions, I situate my practice alongside Lygia Clark’s experientially interactive installations, Sophie Calle’s intersubjective video-art and Doris Salcedo’s participatory research-based sculpture; as well as performance artist Andrea Fraser’s institutional critique and multi-disciplinary artist Emily Roysdon’s choreographed movement. The dissertation artwork is a performance of choreographed movement by a group of girls and diverse adults, who create a composite character, the realization of a two-year period of research and planning. The performance begins the moment the viewer-participant enters Toronto’s Old City Hall, which currently functions as a provincial courthouse. Guided upstairs into a grand, open hallway and then up again through a long corridor, movement and tableaux punctuate the spaces, culminating in the dissertation defense. In both the writing and the artwork, I harness affect theory to examine ways the dissociated self, fractured through childhood sexual abuse, can be reconfigured through participatory practices into a cohesive whole that challenges established power structures.Item Open Access Body, Mat, Mark-Making(2015-08-28) Harber, Scott; Lau, Yam K.I explore painting and drawing through a binding of its performative activity with the practice of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. Constraints are put in place to impose constant and abrupt switching between mark-making and grappling activity. The repetition involved in this structure fuses these two distinct activities into one. The experience of mushin (no-mind), a state one enters when deeply immersed in martial art activity, overlaps into the process of mark-making. This experience of mark-making subsequently influences the activity on the mat. Affect, as a pre-cognitive entity, participates alongside conscious activity in this feedback loop of influences. From this view, I revisit the idea of constraint and mushin. The resulting works depict fragmented bodies-in-process, produced under a state of mushin that involves the constrained combination of unconscious and conscious, mental and bodily influences.Item 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.Item Open Access Buffalo Death Mask(2014-07-09) Hoolboom, Mike; Schwartz, JudithThe thesis essay has arrived in six parts. It opens with a discussion of my method, and closes with a detailed look at Buffalo Death Mask, the short digital movie I made in 2013 about AIDS. In between are a pair of what moviemakers like to call establishing shots. There are a couple of chapters on emotional establishing shots narrating fear and death. And there is a chapter that tries to approach the simple and complicated question of what artists might be doing when making experimentalist movies. Why all this need to trouble the form?Item Open Access Chasing the Image(2017-07-27) Allen Laurin, Timothy Allen; Daigneault, MichelMy exhibition and paper addresses the physicality of the image, specifically that of the printed image and its material substrate, whether that image is photographically produced, or one created from printmaking processes. Several years ago I inherited a family archive of photographic negative, prints and slides that date from 1940 onward. These photographs form the genesis of my work. I often begin by sanding away areas of original contact prints to reconfigure the narrative structure of the image. I also use these images to produce large serigraphs on Mylar. Frequently I embellish these works with silver leaf - referencing the silver oxide that forms the foundation for light-sensitive exposures. Along with the sanded photographs and serigraphic prints, I have created an artist book consisting of two decks of trading cards. These cards contain imagery taken from the photo-collection as well as sentence fragments that I develop while sanding the prints.