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Visual Arts

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  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.  
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.