Visual Arts

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/27620

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Edges are a Shared Contour: A Formalism for Future Collaborations
(2026-03-10) Harbridge, Maegan Elise; Daigneault, Michel
Edges Are a Shared Contour: A Formalism for Future Collaborations explores abstract painting as a critical field of inquiry and a method for entangled, more-than-human perception. Departing from the modernist framework of aesthetic autonomy and medium specificity, this dissertation proposes an expanded formalism rooted in embodied, processual, and reparative forms of attention. Engaging thinkers such as Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze, and Daniel Neofetou, it considers how painting might operate not only as a visual language but as a practice of knowledge-making that resists closure, extractivism, and representational finality. Drawing from my own research-creation practice, this dissertation grounds its arguments in formal analysis of material processes: layering, erasure, gesture, and provisional mark-making. These techniques are explored as methodological refusals of hierarchy between form and content, surface and depth, viewer and object. Through engagement with the works of Amy Sillman, Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and others, I argue for abstraction as a site of critical friction—a space where affect, history, and subjectivity fold into one another. The project introduces care/full looking as a reparative mode of perception that values slowness, uncertainty, and mutual responsiveness. Abstract painting becomes here not a retreat from meaning but an opening into multiplicity—where attention is shaped by what resists immediate comprehension. In theorizing edges as shared contours, this dissertation reimagines form as a relational threshold—a fractal curve—suggesting that painting can act as a collaborative interface between human and nonhuman, body and environment, past and future. Ultimately, it positions abstraction not as a formal tradition to preserve but as a continually unfolding terrain of speculative and collective inquiry.
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Low and Slow
(2026-03-10) Tetrault, Ella; Couroux, Marc G.
Low and Slow investigates how video and performance can cultivate alternative modes of ocean-based education and advocacy. Working across four interconnected modalities, the dissertation considers how research creation in visual art can shift human–ocean relations by reorienting attention, sensation, and storytelling. The first chapter examines the psychological, cultural, and capitalist implications of remaining on the ocean’s surface. Using the 2019 Wish Whale performance as a point of departure, it analyzes three forms of surface encounter: the ocean’s visible threshold; the living or deceased bodies of marine mammals; and Ron Broglio’s theorization of surface phenomenology as a site of interspecies meeting. Chapter two moves just below the surface through transitional and boundary objects as catalysts for oceanic research. Through interviews with artists and scholars, the chapter develops a set of video vignettes and interviews shaped around a series of to-scale ceramic whale eyes exchanged for collaborative responses. The third chapter dives further, exploring states of being lost and resurfacing—both materially and metaphorically—through six letters addressed to a humpback whale named “Ursula.” Interwoven autobiographical narratives and oceanic disappearance stories draw on Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water to frame a feminist posthuman hydrocommons. The final chapter turns inward, tracing the physiological and sensorial transformations of freediving. Designed as a meditative performance script, the chapter reflects on bodily change, Eva Hayward’s concept of “fingeryeyes,” and the regenerative capacities of starfish in relation to trans embodiment. All practical components are housed within a virtual ocean environment, enabling viewers to navigate texts, videos, performances, and sculptures. This evolving space serves as a platform for future artworks and collaborations oriented toward oceanic care and conservation.
Access status: Open Access ,
Bound by Margins, Rested in Rivers: How artists write, visualize, perform, practice and theorize community-based artworks
(2026-03-10) Wang, Zi; Largo, Marissa
This paper accompanies my MFA thesis show, Bounded by Margins, Resting in Rivers, exhibited from April 16–25, 2025, at Gales Gallery, York University. It encapsulates an inquiry into how artists write, visualize, perform, practice, and theorize community-based artworks. Since 2022, I, alongside my mother, artist Zhu Dandan, have engaged with Ontario’s diverse neighborhoods, Richmond Hill, Scarborough and Toronto, working with 90 community members, primarily visible minorities, and immigrants, through our shared workshop series, Project Cocoon. Our workshops employ an object-biography approach, harnessing visual, audio, and collaborative art-making to amplify memory-making. The thesis show, featuring mixed-media installations, artist books, prints, and performances, embodies these narratives, while this paper articulates their conceptual and ethical underpinnings. Facilitation, I argue, is not neutral; it navigates power dynamics, institutional constraints, and ethical tensions. Rooted in the diaspora context, my practice prioritizes care, dialogue, and openness to the unknown, fostering a relational aesthetic that resists dominant frameworks. Together, the show and paper explore how community-based art gains legibility and integrity, weaving a living collection of shared resilience that bridges personal and collective experience.
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Plural Loyalties
(2025-11-11) Yu, Yangqingqing; Lau, Yam K.
In the context of the past few decades of globalization, cosmopolitanism is a contested notion. Major cities tend to be where protean and nascent forms of cosmopolitanism are practiced, due to their job opportunities, diverse communities, and a presumed and relatively open attitude towards otherness. Nation-state borders are often the presumed basis of loyalty; upon this setting, Jasmine’s thesis exhibition in conjunction with this supporting paper draws together critical theory, personal stories and found image close-readings; and manifests materially in forms of mixed media installations. Found images share qualities with the immigrant psyche, which is marked by gestures of flattening and decontextualization, both external, through stereotypes and expectations casted upon them, and internal, through divorced identities, citizenships, and relational roles. The immigrant experience, in which one is uprooted from a previous and ghostly lingering life, while the new life abroad is this overwhelming situation: an “it” that one doesn’t know what it is nor how to be in it. Reciprocally, the immigrant figure has the same effect on nation-states; their in-between and partial adaptation/integration is an abject situation that constantly demands ongoing reassessments, confrontations, and conciliations of norms and tolerance. Jasmine examines phantasmagoric images of “the good life”, interrogates the immigrant’s deterritorializing potentials, and teases out their psychic attachments to sites and strategies of being deliberately out of place. The project of the ordinary cosmopolite, or the transnational and conditionally mobile subjectivity, grapples with plurality, which is an inescapable means of survival. The tendency to do so will only grow over time, as the economy and globalization demand it. Wading through and navigating the multitude of affiliations and positionalities within power structures, plural loyalties is choosing to adapt to a complex model of identification, making our cruel and self-detrimental attachments to people, sites, objects, and promises survivable and sensible.
Access status: Open Access ,
"Strange Mouth Feel"
(2025-07-23) Mills, Julie Delaine; Cumming, Robyn
‭“Strange Mouth Feel” explores how imagery historically used to depict otherness‬ ‭can be reclaimed and celebrated through performance and embodiment. I do so to‬ ‭contend with my own identity through a satirical lens. This research-creation project‬ ‭examines the history of abject depictions in medieval European art, focusing on‬ ‭gargoyles and elements of gothic architecture as subjects that represent hybridity and‬ ‭fluidity. The artworks accompanying this paper manifest as interdisciplinary sculptural‬ ‭objects that are activated through live performance. During scripted performances, I‬ ‭employ practical effects makeup and choreographed movement to embody the image of‬ ‭the gargoyle. Humour is embedded within the work as a tool to confront issues that are‬ ‭unpleasant, controversial, or frightening. Throughout the exhibition, sculptural moments‬ ‭that represent drainage systems—such as toilets, gutters and drains—are reimagined‬ ‭as portals. The narratives and characters developed in this research draw on my own‬ ‭experiences, as well as imagery from popular culture and gothic reproduction.‬ ‭World-building methodologies borrowed from science fiction and drag are invoked to‬ ‭represent queer temporalities that have the potential to interrupt and reclaim narratives‬ ‭surrounding horror and the abject in contemporary culture.‬ ‭
Access status: Open Access ,
Sticky feelings, like velcro
(2025-07-23) Abballe, Alessandra; Campbell, Jessica
This paper is written to accompany my MFA thesis exhibition, An object thick with presence (the presence of an absence), which took place April 14 - 17, 2025 at Special Projects Gallery (York University). The work included in this exhibition is informed by my sticky experiences with family photographs—experiences that situate me as what writer and scholar Sara Ahmed calls an “affect-alien,” a feminist killjoy, and unhappy queer. The exhibition consists of reworked images gleaned from my family albums, ceramic objects, and various photo-installation strategies in an effort to work on, with, and against the structure of the family album in order to imbue it with new meaning. The aim of this paper, “Sticky feelings, like velcro,” is to make sense of and contextualize my inclinations in making through an explanation of and grounding in queer and intersectional feminist theory and practices, alongside personal auto theoretical anecdotes. How do images from my personal archives—ones that I hold so much affection for, but do not feel myself reflected in—register? How can I work in tandem with these images to claim space and agency? My thesis exhibition and this accompanying support paper use these questions as a springboard to look up and back, as well as forward and onward.
Access status: Open Access ,
How the Light Gets in: The Atom and the Organism, Artistic Reflections on the Complementarity of Being
(2025-07-23) Keen, Andria Dianne; Pechawis, Archer
EXHIBITION ABSTRACT Humanity has long sought to understand itself by looking outward at the universe, inward at existence’s building blocks, and beyond comprehension toward consciousness. Existentialist philosophy deeply resonates with me, as it emphasizes finding meaning within individual experiences in an indifferent world. This perspective offers solace, placing the responsibility to create meaning on me. How the Light Gets In invites introspection on our embodied existence and connections to the world. Through interactive, immersive installations that challenge typical rules and expectations of the white cube gallery, the work encourages investigation, reflection, and play while pausing to consider broader dimensions of being. By navigating scale—from the vastness of space to the minuteness of particles—the pieces provoke shifts in perception, eliciting responses ranging from awe to intimacy. This body of work aims to inspire a deeper understanding of our relational existence, fostering a space for meaning-making in the everyday.
Access status: Open Access ,
Garden of Hope
(2025-07-23) Kanic, Vladimir; Largo, Marissa
Garden of Hope is a network of entangled beings, materials and processes, all engaged in interspecies collaborations that create intertwined frameworks for ecological repair through multidimensional research-creation praxis. This thesis explores breathing as both a conceptual and material method for artmaking, rooted in my lived war experiences and informed by ecofeminism, posthumanism and material sciences, intending to cultivate and disseminate radical hope to spectators and communities. My collaboration with living algae creates biomedia artworks and transdisciplinary textiles that actively capture carbon and propose new ecologies of care while offering speculative blueprints for the future. The thesis exhibition operates across media and reframes the exhibition site as a living ecosystem where human and non-human agencies co-create through the exchange of breath. Drawing on ancestral Croatian textile traditions and oral histories, Garden of Hope questions planetary survival, intergenerational memory, and the role of art in creating socioecological resilience amidst our fragmented zeitgeist.
Access status: Open Access ,
A Truck Goes Through The Tulip Field: Art As A Medium For Women's Freedom And Resilience
(2025-07-23) Shahverdi-Azarbaijani, Paria; Vickerd, Brandon J.
A Truck Goes Through the Tulip Field: Exploring Women’s Freedom and Liberation through Immersive Painting-Installation explores the intersection of women’s freedom, resilience, and resistance through an immersive, mixed-media installation. Drawing from personal experiences of violence and displacement, the work employs abstract and figurative representation to challenge societal norms and amplify the voices of marginalized women. The installation features a dynamic painting arrangement that engages physically and symbolically with the gallery space. Three paintings will hang loosely on the walls, creating a sense of fluidity and movement, while three others will drape like a curtain from the corners of the room, evoking a tension between confinement and release. In the centre of the gallery, four paintings will be suspended from the ceiling and anchored to the floor in a rhombus shape, a representation of the delicate balance between oppression and freedom. With its equal sides and tilted form, the rhombus suggests both tension and stability, reflecting the precarious conditions many women face in their pursuit of autonomy. Each painting employs a multi-point perspective, offering a visual and symbolic lens into the layered, fragmented experiences of diasporic women. This approach resists singular narratives, emphasizing complexity and inviting multiple interpretations.
Access status: Open Access ,
Exllu(gesis)
(2025-04-10) Ancheta, John Robert; Couroux, Marc G.
Exllu (2024) is a text-and-image-based digital artwork that presents as a literary publication of paranoid fiction. Set within the ubiquitous surround of U-City, Exllu plots a game-like condition that perpetually breaks down and reconstitutes itself through the quotidian effects of its intimate and remote contests, inciting far-flung and jarring ideas concerning what this strangely familiar scenario affords and obscures, promises and threatens. In Exllu's exegetical companion text, "Exllu(gesis)" (2024), I relaunch and perform the artwork's pretence of paranoid fiction while expounding on its underlying theme of gamespace and dissimulative treatment. I evince Exllu as a systems thinking and, equally, an analogical encounter with the ubiquitous, control-oriented technologies of the contemporary milieu, and a generative endeavour of unsettling dominant scopes of world-making.
Access status: Open Access ,
Subtle Matter and Delicate Bodies
(2025-04-10) Norton, Jennifer; Couroux, Marc
Stemming from an artistic mode of enquiry centred on the enmeshment of physical and virtual realms, four works are produced within seemingly paradoxical contexts of non-locality and site-specificity, distance and proximity, biology and data, and information as it pertains to technology and affect. The mediums of these works range from augmented reality, geo-locative technologies, sonic and spatial interactivity, dance choreography, 3D animation, public projection, and multimedia installation. Produced and exhibited in Kingston, Toronto, and Athens, I explore and define intersecting points of affect and materialism and the transmission of information. A new methodology is shaped through these stages of research creation, underscored by emergence, superimposition, offsets, and projection. Drawing upon concepts developed and articulated by Karen Barad, Teresa Brennan, Ursula Franklin, and David Bohm, specifically their understanding of interconnectivity on a material level, Subtle Matter & Delicate Bodies makes a case for a more empathetic, equitable ethos to be implemented in urban development and city planning, and social infrastructures, within the consideration of a more-than-human existence. Underscoring downstream consequences from a historical context, the works aim to tenderly touch upon lack, absence, reverence, and resilience. Through creation, an artistic methodology has formed that interweaves science and technology with poetic and responsive expression. This dissertation will also look upon the preceding research, studio experimentation, and exhibitions that have led to the four works of Subtle Matters & Delicate Bodies, and the approaches I have taken towards rendering invisible phenomena legible, felt, and considered.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Shape of Sound
(2024-11-07) Dunning, Ann Elise Taylor; Balfour, Barbara
My studio work imagines the experiences of non-human animals and finds ways for humans to approximate them or imagine forms of entwinement between species. Sound-sculpture has been at the centre of my practice-based research at York University over the past five years. I have used this medium to consider what an expanded range of human senses might be if we move beyond the five that Western culture typically acknowledges. Sound can bend and bounce, it can penetrate and vibrate through bodies, it can move objects – and yet hearing and touching are often thought of as separate. Imagining the sensory experiences of the non-human world is one way of thinking-with other species. The culmination of my research is The Shape of Sound, an exhibition and written dissertation. It is the in-between spaces – and the potential for shifts in behaviour because of proximity to another – that inspire me to imagine alternate ways of thinking about the world. The richness of liminal spaces has influenced my studio projects and I have consciously approached my written research with these proximal influences in mind. I have used the craft of twining – the hands-on process of twisting and wrapping together two or more strands to make a cord – as a structure for this paper. While the chapters have themes, they are entangled with one another. They shift, transform, and reemerge. Collaborative methodologies are part of my studio practice and have the potential to be transformative relationships. They are dialogues that can shift ways of thinking and generate outcomes beyond what would be created by an individual. To extend this approach to my writing and broaden the discussion of the male-dominated field of sound art, I have conducted conversational interviews with women artists who maintain multi-disciplinary practices that use both sound and object. Excerpts from the interviews are woven throughout the text, adding a polyphonic voice to the dissertation. Ecopoetics is another strand of The Shape of Sound text. Poems are included as a counterpoint to prose. Ecopoetry contends with the human-nature entanglement while acknowledging the current climate crisis; qualities that are reflected in my studio practice.
Access status: Open Access ,
We change everything we touch and everything we touch changes
(2024-07-22) McGeough, Ella Dawn; Singer, Yvonne
We Change Everything We Touch and Everything We Touch Changes draws upon the vast, expressive potential of beds in their many forms, human and otherwise (i.e., coral-beds, death-beds, flower-beds, fossil-beds, river-beds, sedimentary-rock-beds, sleeping-beds, and so on). Qualities of horizontality and support draw this research together, but also a certain nondistinction between surface and depth, exterior and interior, which reminds us that when we are in-the-bed we lie on-the-bed. Applying the logic of assemblage, the formal structure of this work grasps several genres and a broad selection of subject matter via storied descriptions and visual material to form a recursive sense of textuality. Throughout, extimate aesthetics offers a conceptual foundation to register the indivisibility of exterior-objective forces within interior-subjective experience.
Access status: Open Access ,
Grieving (and) Weaving (and) Spreading (and) Becoming
(2024-07-18) Spiljak, Veronica Jacqueline; Vickerd, Brandon
Our interactions with personal ephemera - a home, a recovered letter, an expired bank card, an arranged breakfast table, a church stained glass window, an enclosed corner, your mother’s rosary, a childhood bedroom - give way to the psychological investigations of the self. In this thesis paper, Grieving (and) Weaving (and) Spreading (and) Becoming, I will explore my practice of subverting and incorporating found images, video, Slavic motifs, text and text(iles) in a disembodied search for identity, reconnection and softness. My arts-informed research project uses weaving methodologies, our personal archives among the discourse of grief, trauma, the domestic space, ritual, religion and gendered domestic labour. Through works of embroidery, image-making, performance, installation this paper aims to include a “distraction-as-ceremony” based methodology, similar to weaving methodologies, as a form of reconnection to our roots and our identities. In this paper, I will be using my Polish heritage as reference. In what ways can recreating, assembling, manipulating ephemera, space, language and the archive be used as a tool for a softer, slower, more patient future?
Access status: Open Access ,
Parameters of Spooning: In the Site of Possibility
(2024-07-18) Rattray, Heather Anne; Vickerd, Brandon
Parameters of Spooning: In the Site of Possibility explores the intersections of craft, identity, and self-discovery through the creation of spoons. Stemming from an abundance of curiosity, my research took the form of learning new skills as a way to access the self. The process of learning, both of materiality and of self, centred around the question: what does it mean to queer an object? The work I produced during my MFA explores these skills and applies them to the form of the spoon, continually pushing this form further and further into ‘uselessness.’ These spoons—in ceramic, wood, metal, bronze, and woven natural materials—investigate failure as a queer possibility for transformation and growth. Through the queering of the spoon, I reimagine their purpose and transcend traditional notions of functionality, failure, and a possibility for trans and queer futurity. This paper is written to accompany my MFA thesis exhibition, which will be on display from April 15th to April 19th 2024, in the Special Projects Gallery at York University.
Access status: Open Access ,
Annihilation Symphony
(2024-07-18) Craig, Torin; Couroux, Marc
This paper supports my thesis exhibition, Annihilation Symphony, displayed at York University’s Gales Gallery. Annihilation Symphony is a multi-sensorial installation, using guitar amplification equipment, CRT televisions, video, and stringed sculpture to probe the potential of an artwork to affect the viewer’s body/mind. It creates an interactive work which will use volume, space, imagery, and participation to stimulate atypical states of consciousness in the spectator. Feedback, as both sonic/visual phenomena and as a concept in nostalgia and cybernetics, is the center of the project, which features feedback from high-volume guitar amplifiers and closed-circuit video. Each formal component of the installation is explored through its respective grounding in my research in topics ranging from drone metal, 20th century video art, and consumption in capitalist society. The project also examines post-war cybernetics’ ascendence to cultural hegemony, the control of how the past is presented, and the potential still held in history’s lost dreams.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Practice of Perfection: Dance Gestures and Printed Traces
(2024-07-18) Newton, Samantha Fenwick Wyss; Armstrong, David
"The Practice of Perfection: Dance Gestures and Printed Traces" explores the intimate parallels between printmaking and ballet, highlighting the shared dedication and physical demands of both practices. Beginning with an examination of the historical evolution of printmaking techniques, particularly drypoint, the narrative delves into the meticulous process of plate preparation, marking, and printing. Through meticulous attention to detail and repetitive physical practice, practitioners of both printmaking and ballet navigate the delicate balance between pressure and resistance. The paper further elucidates how touch and pressure are fundamental to the creation of prints, mirroring the physical demands and hidden labours inherent in ballet. Finally, it underscores the importance of embodied gestures and kinesthetic understanding in both disciplines, emphasizing how the pursuit of perfection leaves an indelible mark on both the artwork and the artist's body.
Access status: Open Access ,
hide
(2024-07-18) DesRoches, Chanel; Daigneault, Michel
hide places the viewer in a state of distraction, removed from reality and situated in a newly created in-between space. Surrounded by constant interruption and infinite misguiding, the tangling of painterly gestures and sporadic mark-making brings forward feelings of being overwhelmed. Seemingly confident, the scale and visual forms simultaneously intimidate and draws the viewer closer. I employ abstraction as an avoidance strategy to deflect from my great fear of drawing attention to myself by making quick and irrational compositional and material decisions out of wavering anxiety. Finding humor in what feels like a ridiculous fear, I lean into the embodiment of an idealized, fearless self. Integrating loud colour palettes, awkward-yet-intentional linework, and moody titles like Bite me, I look to derail any signs of weakness. My issues with attention are only engulfed in flames and activated in public spaces.
Access status: Open Access ,
As It Seams
(2024-07-18) Reid, Shannyn Rose; Vickerd, Brandon
Using personal stories, found shopping lists, and symbols of home, this paper examines the aesthetics of the everyday through textile recreations. The works produced for this thesis are informed by my cultural heritage as a settler on the island of Newfoundland, my desire to create a more inviting contemporary art space, and my love for the mundane. Using my collection of found shopping lists, to-do lists, and reminders, I am attempting to create an atmosphere that encourages slowing down, noticing, and enjoying the typically overlooked.
Access status: Open Access ,
Motherhood Moments: Creating New Aesthetic Space
(2024-07-18) Grad, Rachael; Couroux, Marc
Motherhood is mayhem. Since becoming a mother, I carve out space and time for short creation bursts. I observe my children’s lack of inhibitions and carefree use of materials and incorporate their habits into my work. Art routines are a way to create in my messy maternal life. This thesis examines: How is the practice of an artist-mother visible, and how is it currently categorized in the visual arts? Concurrently, by what specific modalities do parents carve out space and time for work, art, family, and health, and what tactics might be envisioned? This paper defines motherwork, a mother’s studio practice, mother artist examples, the use of toys and gestures in my Mommy Mayhem and Motherhood Hit Me Like a Train art series. I explore my creativity, concluding with future plans involving artmaking and workshops for parents. Artistic play is critical for an artist mother.

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