Visual Arts

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

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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Open Access
Don't Let’s Go: Preemptive Grief, a World, and Others
(2023-04) Foss, Fehn Mathilda; Largo, Marissa
This paper is written to accompany my MFA thesis exhibition, the work of holding and exiting, which took place April 10 - May 6, 2023 at shell projects, 13 Mansfield Avenue, Toronto, Canada. The exhibition consisted of lumen prints (a sort of photogram gone wrong), sculptures made from found and discarded materials, and elusive feelings that floated through the space. This paper, “Don’t Let’s Go: Preemptive Grief, A World, and Others” is in a symbiotic relationship with the work of holding and exiting. The paper supplements, is informed by, and informs the work. Grieving the climate crisis can feel diffuse, confusing, and hopeless. The works explored this nebulous grieving through affective means. Artworks that are both abject and beautiful were assembled together in shell projects in a way that asked the viewer to be in intimate relation. The works and the paper search for a more-than-human collectivity. Many of the moments, theorists, and beings that have brought these works into fruition find themselves here in the space of this paper: a reflection, an experimentation, a hand reaching out to the audience; this paper cannot quite go it alone, enmeshed and yet different from the work in the gallery.
Open Access
Repositioning the Gaze: An Aesthetic of Care
(2023-08-04) Kokolakis, Corynn Phrona; Daigneault, Michel
This paper explores, from the subjective positions of mother and figurative painter, the connections and incongruences between the practice of painting and the care practice of mothering. It considers the temporal de-calibration that occurs when engaged in the processes of both practices to shift the focus away from a timely, finished product. Through embodied and autotheoretical lenses, it argues for a reconfiguration of the gaze to look outward from mothering in order to emphasize practices of attunement. It contemplates how artwork might make publicly visible the maintenance and emotional labour of being alongside an other, and posits that painting can be positioned as a form of documentation for the mostly invisible parts of mothering. It considers how engaging with paintings created from the perspective of those who practice care might trouble the boundaries between art and life, public and private, practice and product, and artist and mother.
Open Access
The Poetics of Proximity
(2023-08-04) Russell, James; Armstrong, David Scott
The thematic analysis of my studio work since 2020 work revealed many contradictions. The Poetics of Proximity is an investigation of these contradictions, the connective energy that holds objects, people, and ideas together. My studio work explored how forms gather, interact, and coalesce into meaning, particularly within a grid format. New energetic forms emerged where connections multiply, and where elemental units coalesce. In the mysterious gatherings and connections between individual elements I found emerging patterns, the scaffolding of meaning and belief. My thematic analysis revealed an impulse to organize, connect, construct and repair, to recognize the need for human spirituality as a condition for a better future, an attempt to compensate for my complicity in modern capitalism. My final series, Men in Cities represents bodies in a state of ecstatic exorcism, holding contradiction, deeply engaged in the material transition of the body and mind, energetically vibrating with faith, with new forms always taking shape.
Open Access
Natural Fictions
(2023-08-04) Vita, Elisa; Daigneault, Michel
What if myths grew from the earth, unfurling their petals like fists? What if they lived in the undergrowth, in tree hollows, in between the feathers of ravens' wings? My MFA thesis exhibition, Natural Fictions (April 17-21, 2023), was produced with these questions in mind. In this support paper, I explore the ways in which painting can be a pathway to enchantment. In particular, I focus on the enchanted gaze, and how this gaze both complicates and enriches our interactions with the more-than-human world.
Open Access
30 going on 13 (strike out) like like or just a “like”?
(2023-08-04) Dodgson, Rachael Maria; Armstrong, David Scott
This 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.
Open Access
Grit
(2023-08-04) Bowie, D'Andrea; Vickerd, Brandon
The purpose of this paper is to support an exhibition of sculpture created throughout the past two years in the Department of Visual Arts and Art History at York University towards a Masters in Fine Art. Grit, takes multiple meanings and is used throughout this paper explore material connection and resolve. At the onset of an MFA, I sought to investigate contemporary propositions that recontextualize the tradition of sculpture; specifically, as a maker through a feminist and materialistic lens that highlights reciprocity between maker and material. The paper submitted has been organized within a braid, the main strand informed by a set of identified themes developed within a design vocabulary that offers a framework from which to investigate the work created and their material relations, a central theme to my thesis. Woven throughout an auto-fictional account is a technical investigation into three elements from an often-used glaze recipe. Materially, grit is the substance worked with in the studio; clay, glass, and various dusts extracted from the earth, utilized in specific ways combined with heat provide opportunities for alchemical transformations. As I tumble between the demands of motherhood, academia and art making, writing becomes the grit, a useful polish to bring forth relations and demonstrate how the act of making is entwined with daily life.
Open Access
Propagation Station
(2023-08-04) Yetter, Joanna; Balfour, Barbara
Through narrative inquiry of care within a micro community of myself, baby blankets, text and aloe vera plants, my MFA thesis and support paper present a journey to better understand or come to know the complexities of care and place. My approach to narrative inquiry as a methodology for research in which I slowly and intimately interact with my micro community and present these relationships through text-based works and visual depictions of our material surfaces as both texture and tension. Surface, as an archive of touching, makes evident a troubling of exchange in acts of care. This paper questions what kind of temporality exists in the crevices of the surface and explores ways in which to participate in genuine temporal practices. My research will culminate in an exhibition in my home, which is presented as the work. I invite visitors to my intimate place, negotiating an opening up of the private to the public, hoping for a politely curious encounter.
Open Access
Is that a Promise or a Threat?
(2023-08-04) Sosnowski, Kasia Anne; Balfour, Barbara
The art I produced during my MFA is informed by my personal experiences with trauma, grief, gaslighting, and the subsequent inability to interpret my resonant feelings. The title of my thesis exhibition and accompanying support paper – is that a promise or a threat? – is the foundational question and entryway into deciphering the intense, overwhelming, and contradictory states of affect that I was and, to a lesser degree, still am experiencing. In response to these circumstances, my research focuses on ideas of care, fragility, transformation, dis- and re-orientation, and how clay, as a material, is a catalyst and grounding agent for embodied understanding. The content I explore is mirrored in the precarity and material flux of ceramic sculpture, fragile and vulnerable, yet crystalline. The ceramic sculptures and drawings installed in the gallery space are meant to emulate a perpetual oscillation between risk and safety, threat and promise, anxiety and satisfaction – thus mirroring the constant negotiation and exploration of my own affective experience.
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.