title: Citizen Spaces: Experiments in Reclaiming the Right to the City

contributor: Carson, Jessica (Jessica Carson) (author)

contributor: Frid-Jimenez, Amber (Amber Frid-Jimenez) (thesis advisor)

format:
64 p.
electronic
electronic

subject:
Political art
Urbanization
Capitalism
Political participation
Public spaces

abstract:
The physical and economic growth of large cities under late capitalism has been driven by the profit motives of the elite class of financiers, developers, and global scale wealth. This urbanization under capitalism can often eclipse broad and systemic efforts to consider the quality of life of all citizens. The rapid physical transformation of cities for profit can lead to increased lack of affordability, displacement of marginalized people, eradication of historically vibrant cultural zones and privatization of public space. The increased consumerism caused by capital-driven urban development can result in pacification of potentially revolutionary communities, cultivating an individualistic rather than collective culture. Citizen participation in action that transforms public space for community benefit can help re-establish these lost social bonds and promote collective empowerment.
The “right to the city,” is a concept introduced by French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre in 1968, in response to the condition of urbanization under capitalism and its compromising effect on citizens’ rights. Drawing on Lefebvre, contemporary anthropologist David Harvey defines the right to the city as “a common rather than an individual right… [that] inevitably depends on the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization” (23). My thesis research aligns with Harvey’s definition of the right to the city and provides examples of grassroots participation and art and design activism that contribute to collective empowerment through the creation or transformation of urban public space.
In addition to the condition of urbanization under capitalism, my thesis responds to contemporary academic research in political science. Participedia is an international academic collaboration researching public participation. This project fosters connections and community between activists, practitioners and scholars around the world and has developed an open source crowdsourcing platform allowing contributors to publish information about cases, methods and organizations in this field of study. I propose to 1) raise awareness in the Participedia community about grassroots participation and art and design activism through documentation on the platform, and 2) experiment with the production of visual media expanding the ways in which projects are represented on Participedia, encouraging citizens to get involved in public participation initiatives and potentially benefiting community groups.
My thesis addresses this research question: How do initiatives of grassroots participation and art and design activism help citizens reclaim their right to the city and promote localized collective empowerment? To explore this inquiry at the community level, I launched experimental projects in four cities. I undertook exploratory research to get a broad sense of currently active grassroots participation and art and design activism initiatives before reaching out to selected community groups to collaborate
with on experimental projects, outlined in detailed case studies. Through this work, I explored the reclamation of privatized space for public use in Madrid, Spain; increased neighbourhood safety in Kingston, Jamaica; protection of urban green space in Montreal, and the trend of temporary interventions, or “placemaking,” in Vancouver. As a final experiment, I initiated a public space activation called the Vancouver Bubble, exercising my own right to the city, transforming an underused site into a “citizen space” by creating opportunities for participation, dialogue and youth engagement within a temporary intervention of design activism.
An outcome of my practice-based research includes the ongoing development of a methodology for collaborative media-based storytelling, through which I engaged with community groups to craft and share stories from their individual unique perspectives. I used 360° film technology to document and reflect on the site-specific nature of the initiatives explored. Production of visual media may also benefit community groups by encouraging more everyday citizens to get involved via channels such as Participedia.xyz.
Finally, I propose four axes of participation to address the commonalities and distinctions between the sites of grassroots participation and art and design activism I explored in my thesis: 1) threatened versus safe tenancy, referring to site-specificity, 2) top-down versus grassroots initiatives, referring to the perspective of the organizers, 3) intervention versus site transformation, referring to action and duration, and 4) oppressed versus empowered communities, referring to outcomes and impact. The axes help to outline the characteristics of these site-specific urban contexts and provide a framework for understanding initiatives affecting the use of urban public space in ways that can contribute to the empowerment of citizens by promoting the right to the city. I also illustrate how understanding the way these aspects operate within their varied contexts lays the groundwork for future work in creating citizen spaces that reclaim the right to the city.

abstract: The right to the city

abstract: Grassroots participation

abstract: Art activism

abstract: Design activism


title: Exploring Change: The Object-Identity-Consumption Dynamic

type: thesis Text

contributor: Fraser, Hélène (Hélène Day Fraser) (author)

contributor: Emily Carr University of Art and Design Graduate Studies (Degree granting institution)

format:
61 p.
electronic

rights: This thesis is available to view and copy for research and educational purposes only, provided that it is not altered in any way and is properly acknowledged, including citing the author(s), title and full bibliographic details.

subject: Sustainability--Consumption--Industrial design--Consumer goods--Product life cycle--Design--Psychological aspects--Environmental aspects

abstract: In modern society there exists a perception of an ongoing need for self-elaboration, revision of identity, and projection of self. Because objects are part of the way that many proclaim identity, this expectation for change has created a pattern of ongoing consumption. Traditional modes of design and production support this through creation of newer and better objects. Current marketing trends demand a rapid turnover of product, or planned obsolescence. The detrimental effects of this system on the environment are becoming an increasing concern. In light of the problems created by modern society’s inclination to the ephemeral, temporary, and the dynamic, this thesis explores another understanding of change. It looks to the concepts of Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, who both considered the process of becoming, and explored the connection between change and the continuity of things. Exploring Change examines the possibility of allowing the design lens to shift its focus and regard objects to be in an ongoing state of development. Investigations into the act of making, the multiple events attached to articles of cloth, and the physical evidence of time and wearing, provide insight. The intent is to depart from a linear process. A cyclical understanding of the lifecycle of an object is moved into one that is a designed spiral. Designed obsolescence is replaced by designing for perpetuity. Within this paradigm the work also considers the role of the individual in differentiating and personalizing designed multiples and the relationship between mass production and the personal act of making. The need for change does not have to force us to succumb to a practice of consuming unsustainably. Alternatives resolving the issue are discussed.

abstract: Abject object

abstract: Visual metaphor

abstract: Installations

abstract: Difference

abstract: Identity

abstract: Change


title: Expectations in Material Culture & Re-thinking our Separation of Space

type: Text thesis

contributor: Day Fraser, Hélène (Hélène Day Fraser) (thesis advisor)

format:
79 p.
electronic
electronic

subject:
Nature
Home
Perception
Aesthetics
Material culture
Sustainability
Value

abstract: There is a pressing need to shift present expectations of urban lifestyle in contemporary western society — to reconsider how we can sustain ourselves and our planet. Shifting understanding of our relationship to our built environment may play a role in adjusting expectations of the future. In doing so, we can start to look towards alternate ideas and new possibilities for the material culture found within the home. This thesis seeks to expose how we see and organize our homes through aesthetics, language and meaning. It considers how this affects our perception of our built and natural environments — our separation of space — in a social sense. A generative process-led design practice is used to find means, through artifact, to have others (first the designer, and in turn, users/consumers) think critically about current understandings of urban lifestyle, and aspirations connected to desired standards of living. A series of small projects that explore themes of care, control and expectations are used as a catalyst for discussion. The intent is not to find solutions for sustainable design but rather to communicate and promote consideration about sustainability, the home environment, and material culture.

abstract: Language

abstract: Environment

abstract: Objects

abstract: Care

abstract: Control

abstract: Expectations


title: Abstract Connections

contributor: Narusevicius, Vytas (Vytas Narusevisius) (author)

format:
51 p.
electronic
electronic

subject:
Painting
Painting, Abstract
Philosophy
Art and philosophy

abstract:
This thesis links disparate sources to build a new way of looking at abstract painting. It draws on anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy, and art history to open up a different discourse about abstraction. Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art is used as a model for investigating the various social exchanges that take place in the entire spectrum of interactions that abstract painting involves. These social transactions include both traditional linguistic ones, as well as non-linguistic exchanges. Cognitive science is looked at to investigate the experience of sensation at a more granular level than that of language. Philosophy, particularly of Gilles Deleuze, is discussed in order to tie sensation with the opening of a fissure to connect to new ways of thinking and debating. Art History is
investigated to situate my own practice with other painters, both historical and contemporary. This openness of sources in my writing is reflective of the openness of the types of resources that I use in my painting practice, where I mix ornamentation, topology,
and gesture. In both the written thesis and my art practice the goal is to regard abstraction as a means to facilitate alternative knowledge production. In this sense, abstraction is investigated as a search for discursiveness through a material practice.


title: Thirty-One Thousand, Seven Hundred and Seventeen: Give or Take

contributor: Eythorsdottir, Katrin Svana (Katrin Svana Eythorsdottir) (author)

format:
48 p.
electronic

subject: Qualitative research--Self-perception in art--Walking--Photography--Personality change

abstract: This essay explores the changes that I experienced as an artist over a period of time – the time when I moved from Iceland to Vancouver to join a Master of Applied Arts program at Emily Carr Institute to the middle of my last semester at the school. I use reflexive writing, specifically autoethnography, to ask the following questions: who am I as a photographer? And what does it mean to be an artist? It is through the process of writing that I experienced a significant shift in my practice. This paper is organized into seven sections, each a representation of those shifts as they relate to insights into myself and my research.

abstract: Autoethnography

abstract: Reflexive writing

abstract: Fragmented writing


title: Mis(s)representations: Reimagining Women with Collage and Paint

contributor: Cutler, Randy Lee (Randy Lee Cutler) (thesis advisor)

format:
40 p.
electronic

subject:
Wit and humor in art
Feminism
Painting
Figurative art
Collage

abstract:
Collage at times refuses to be contained; it spills over the paper substrate and ruptures the idea of kept order. This thesis examines collage as a material strategy to address gendered mis(s)representations of women that I am confronted with in my everyday. Acknowledging collages political agency alongside methodological research on feminism, intertextual strategies and modes of transgression provides new understandings as well as alternative forms to visually express being in one's body and in the world. Writers Georges Bataille and Kathy Acker demonstrate how transgressive tendencies evoke an outsider’s political agency using abject signification to question systems of order and hegemonic power. My process-based art practice looks at works
of art and ideas that promote or demonstrate an affective undoing. Employing humour invites the absurd, the dark and the grotesque to disrupt idealized notions of the feminine. The heart of my investigation looks to push the boundaries of otherness and bad taste in hopes of answering my central research question: Can one affect the conventional order of things through transgressive renderings of the female form?

abstract: Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts

abstract: Affect

abstract: Subversive

abstract: Transgression

abstract: Absurd

abstract: Female body


title: Painting Idyllic Places: Distortions, Disruptions and Deviations

contributor: Alborg, Michele (Michele Alborg) (author)

format:
30 p.
electronic

rights: This thesis is available to view and and copy for research and educational purposes only, provided that it is not altered in any way and is properly acknowledged, including citing the author(s), title and full bibliographic details.

subject: Painting--Deconstructivism (Architecture)--Modernism (Aesthetics)

abstract: This thesis paper articulates the ideas, creative approach, and methodology with regard to the visual component of my thesis project. As a painter, I explore the concept of the ‘public realm’ by appropriating and disrupting environmental designers’ two dimensional perspective sketches. These stylized sketches, typically used for marketing purposes within the design profession, are distorted and warped into unsettling places. Idyllic visions of parks, waterfront plazas, playgrounds, and other nostalgic public places are transformed into doomsday scenarios through the injection of fragmented media images and individual memory of catastrophic events. By making the familiar feel unfamiliar, I hope to generate a series of enigmatic and uneasy associations for the viewer. The designer's intention to convert virgin space into a democratic, civic place becomes compromised and circumspect during these moments of danger. These places deny the viewer the comfort of representing any specific location, and yet seem uncannily familiar. Built form transgresses from a designer's optimistic sketch for the future into glimpses of destruction and uncertainty. The structure of the thesis begins with an introduction to the main themes of my research. Firstly, I explore a variety of approaches to the visualization of idealized public places. By discussion of the forms and intentions of Deconstructivist architecture and the notion of the architectural uncanny, I provide a theoretical backdrop toward the investigation of contemporary approaches to placemaking. I describe my background in environmental design and the impact of my Modernist training on my painting practice. Secondly, I describe how the preceding ideas are addressed in my painting practice. By situating my work with regard to contemporary painters such as Peter Doig, Daniel Richter, Neo Rauch, and Matthias Weischer, I investigate common themes or points of departure with respect to the representation of place and space, mark making, colour and composition in their work. Lastly, I focus on six paintings from my thesis project work. I describe the creative process for generating images, discuss source material, painting techniques, the use of the figure, specific influences and the intentions of each piece.

abstract: Space

abstract: Landscape

abstract: Environmental design


title: Neither Here Nor There: An Investigation Into The Role Of The Photographer’s Subjective View in Landscape Photography.

contributor: Stenhouse, Adam (Adam Stenhouse) (author)

format:
46 p.
electronic

rights: This thesis is available to view and copy for research and educational purposes only, provided that it is not altered in any way and is properly acknowledged, including citing the author(s), title and full bibliographic details

subject: Landscape photography--Criticism--Landscape in art--Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)

abstract: This thesis will examine the role of a landscape photographer’s subjective view in the construction of a photographic image by considering the significance of their photographic intent, visual relationship to the physical world and personal relationship to place.  I will deconstruct my series Neither Here Nor There, examining the significance of investing my own history of experience and memory into the photograph in order to explore my relationship to the landscapes I have lived in.  The paper will examine the roles of the photographer and the viewer when reading a photograph, using Susan Sontag’s ideas of authority within the photograph from On Photography, Roland Barthes’ concept of the ‘punctum’ from Camera Lucida, and Robert Adams’ essay Truth and Landscape, to investigate how a photographer forms intent within his photographs. Drawing on Kaja Silverman’s World Spectators, the paper will go on to explore an individual’s visual relationship with the physical world whilst maintaining the core idea of exploring the photographer’s intentionality within a photograph by using the practice of Thomas Joshua Cooper as an example of a photographer who claims authority over his images.  The thesis then analyses how concepts of place influence this conversation by using Yi Fu Tuan’s Space and Place to investigate an individual’s relationship with the physical world. Taking Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar and Rinko Kawauchi’s photographic series The Eyes, The Ears as examples, the paper looks at the representation of an individual’s relationship to the physical world through their internal solipsistic view.  The essay concludes with an explanation of how my photographic series Neither Here Nor There, tackles the issue of the representation of the photographer’s intent and subjectivevision, by offering an autobiographical reaction to my own sense of place.


title: Constructing a Place of Belonging

format:
57 p.
electronic

subject: Identity (Psychology)--Culture--Painting--Race

subject: Art, Modern

subject: Immigrant experience

subject: Cultural fusion and the arts

subject: Displacement (Psychology)

abstract: This thesis examines the ways displacement is reflected in artistic practices dealing with land, landscape and geography. Land is addressed here as context for histories of displaced persons and it is assumed that connection with the environment affects the human sense of belonging. The theories presented in this essay contextualize practices that turn to subjects of land and displacement approaching them in the light of embodied1 cognition. By investigating emergent and alternative patterns of agency that these theories offer, I trace a current epistemological shift described by a curator and theorist Irit Rogoff which resituates a theory of cognition within lived experience. This shift is important for considering the phenomenon of re-building a "sense of place"2 after the rupture of displacement - as a process of identity and knowledge formation. My research views painting as a practice of agency in examining the experience of concrete subjects rather than seeking formal, transcendental conditions of subjectivity. Employing a theory of embodied cognition I approach the matter of land as place and abstracted landscape painting as an artistic practice and an attempt to actively re-build my own sense of belonging. Through a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in the "representational events"3 of similar practices it is my intention to create a context for my own practice of painting. Work of Ana Mendieta, Julie Mehretu, Huma Bhabha, Joshua Neustein, and Anselm Kiefer is referenced in this paper for evidence of how living away from one's home country or questioning its history is reflected in artists‘ work. I test the potential of embodiment theory and terminology application within the realm of these practices. As an immigrant I had to forge a new identity in adopted environment. In this thesis I intend to elevate the subject of displacement and migration from the matter of universal empathy to the level of identity and knowledge formation. I examine stages in my own new identity development from the rupture of displacement to the awareness of being defined by several cultures. I register how different cultural ways of seeing overlap and influence each other in my work.

abstract: Masters of Applied Art in the Low Residency Program.


title: Agents Costura (We Are a Sewing Agent)

type: Collection Text thesis

contributor: (Simpson) Carneiro, Lisa (Lisa (Simpson) Carneiro) (Author)

subject: Art and music--Avant-garde (Music)--Performance art--Sewing machines--Interactive art--Brazil

abstract: Agente Costura is a Portuguese term loosely translated into We are a sewing Agent. It stands for my experiments with the sewing machine as a compositional percussion instrument, making music out of making clothes, challenging myself in collaborative performances with new ways of transformation. The interdisciplinary quality of the work means that it can be adapted and presented in different settings, from art galleries, to fashion weeks, to music festivals, aiming to engage with various audiences. The work investigates participatory currents in art history, paying special attention to two distinct moments in performance history. Researching my own cultural background, I make reference to Brazilian artists of the 20th century working with participatory performances such as Hélio Oiticica, and Ricardo Basbaum. These artists have created a specific aesthetic that draw on cultural issues in Brazil, which are mirrored in my own work. The work of New York based artists influenced by the teachings of John Cage, such as Fluxus and Allan Kaprow, interest me due to improvisational aspects, as well as the creation of happenings, and the interdisciplinary quality of these works, as I explore music, dance and performance art. Furthermore, my work discusses the contemporary term upcycling, as defined by Michael Braumgart and William Mcdonough, relating back to historical texts on the Dress Reform of the late 19th/early 20th century, both questioning the fashion industry as perpetrator of unnecessary consumption. These themes are stitched together in a rhizomatic structure, through the theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, feeding into the fabric of contemporary art, and creating a patchwork of experiences and ideas.


title: Monstrous and Explosive Junctions: Working with Hybrid Forms

contributor: Campbell, Myron (Myron Campbell) (author)

format:
47 p.
electronic

subject: Animation--Monsters and mythical creature--Interactive art--Monsters in art--Installations (Art)

abstract:
This thesis paper addresses a personal journey into a longtime fascination with mythological hybrid characters. The studio component of my thesis work, the thesis project, entitled In the Caves of Mt. Ida, BC, is an interactive animation installation that depicts moments from a hybrid's life in its natural habitat. The viewer, while engaged with the animation, must remain quiet and stationary so as not to disturb the hybrid. If it is disrupted or annoyed it may respond unexpectedly, perhaps violently.
This paper also describes an interest in interactive narrative and non-linear storytelling. It uses both David Clark's 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein and my own work as primary examples, for dismantling the expectations of conventional storytelling, while also introducing ideas of anti-narrative and anti-interaction.  My method has been informed by Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical interpretations of umwelt, as a means to illuminate visualizations of a hybrid and its actions and reasons for being. The concept of umwelt also helps to establish the notion of the monster: if the hybrid is deprived of its basic needs, or carriers of significance (as described by Agamben), then the monstrous side has the potential to reveal itself. I use the concept of umwelt as a lens through which to view Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and Alan Moore’s graphic novel Swamp Thing, to examine the complex personality of a so-called hybrid monster and its capacity for good and evil. In addition, this paper also examines an attraction to horror and the abject, by way of using Jan Švankmajer's film, Little Otik, as a primary case study.

abstract: Myth

abstract: Umwelt


title: Emerging Rhythms

subject: Rhythm--Sound in art--Proportion (Art)--Maps in art--Walking--Painting--Drawing

abstract: Considering art as both a metaphor for place and a place in itself, this thesis project investigates the organic and fabricated rhythms in everyday life and art making. The project’s concern is the effect of repeating seemingly simple gestures associated with the minutiae of everyday life. The rhythmic act of walking through place is a foundation and preliminary activity for the resulting paintings, drawings, and sound work. Echoing the action of walking, the rhythmic and temporal quality of music provides additional focus and inspiration. The works in the project present place from an aerial view, and considering the writings of philosopher Michel de Certeau, explore the complexities and tensions of representing absence, and creating intimacy in spite of an alienating view. The writings of sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre provide a context for analyzing rhythms and noticing difference. Repetition in sound is considered as a parallel to repetition in the visual. The music cognition researcher Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis outlines the phenomenon of semantic satiation, which is used as analogy to analyze the rhythmic nature of the work in the project. The work of artists Mark Bradford, Richard Long, and Roman Opałka are drawn on through their use of repetition, focus, and interactions with place. Artist Avis Newman’s writings influence discussions of the nature of the unbound, unframed form of the work in the thesis project. The unbound form of the work connects it back to notions of the everyday and its incessant nature. An interest in the everyday informs the thrust of the work, indicating the aim of the practice: to create work that eschews spectacle, elevates simplicity, and recognizes the significance of the ordinary.


title: Visual Storytelling: A Design Method to Capture and Validate Experience in the Early Stages of the Design Process

format:
63 p.
electronic

subject: Design--Storytelling--Children's Hospital (Vancouver, B.C.)--Radio frequency identification systems

subject: Information visualization

abstract: The early stages of the design process are often ambiguous and complex. In this phase designers discover, learn and gather much information about the audience, culture and the context they are designing for. Through the synthesis of data their goal is to learn as much as possible about all stakeholder perspectives, activities and constraints involved in the design situation in order to identify and prioritize design problems. This paper examines the value of visual storytelling methods in the early stages of the design process to enhance the identification of design opportunities, validate assumptions and improve design decision-making when designing for an optimal user experience. To help evaluate the potential benefits of visual storytelling methods a case study has been conducted with fourth year Interaction Design students at Emily Carr University involved in designing a patient tracking system using radio frequency identification technology for the BC Children's Hospital Emergency Department. This research explores storytelling as a visualization tool for translating, interpreting, verifying and communicating data collected from diverse user communities to build a better understanding of the context and circumstances surrounding complex design challenges involving multiple stakeholders.

abstract: Health practice

abstract: RFID

abstract: Research

abstract: Health knowledge

abstract: Health attitudes


title: Something Something Something: Toward a Minor Practice

subject:
Conceptual art
Minimal art
Wit and humor in art
Irony in art

abstract: The social and political relevance of contemporary art is bound up in paradox. As the perceived failures of the avant-garde demonstrate, even the most radical projects of the 20th century eventually succumb to some form of institutional enfranchisement. As an artist working within an art museum, this irony is particularly acute. Given the problematic political biases of the institutions of art, how can artists elude this performative capture to exercise their agency? In response to this, artists have probed the boundaries of art practice seeking a way out. Acts of complete withdrawal, while dramatic, are not productive. Critique plays an important political function of art, yet negation on its own is not enough. There is, I think, another way: not a way out but a way in. Situated in and between modes of affirmation and dissent, my sculptures, texts and photographs work in dialogue with art world conventions to create witty and poetic meditations on art and knowledge. Through the use of humour and ambiguity, I operate strategically within dominant narratives to keep performative capture at bay. Using a methodology adapted from Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the minor, I aim to create a space of productive estrangement to call forth new subjectivities.


title: Contexts That Gather: Authorship and Collaboration; Bodily Gesture and Boundaries

format:
44 p.
electronic

subject:
New media art
Installations (Art)
Storytelling
Interactive art
Internationale situationniste
Avant-garde (Aesthetics)

abstract: In this thesis, I discuss two media installations and the process and reasoning behind their creation. These include The Monster and The Explorer a three channel video installation that addresses marginal voices and pathology and my final thesis project, Bed, Door, The Order of Things an interactive nine channel video matrix dealing with intimacy and boundaries. Growing out of a desire to collaborate and choreograph a composition of elements these two works explore relationships and storytelling. Specifically, I investigate authorship as an emergent interaction and collaboration as they relate to desire in the negotiation of intimacy, bodily gesture and boundaries. I act as artist/ instigator to examine the creative process as both set and provisional using rules and improvisation toward the recording of performances for the camera. The media installation and interactive components within the resulting exhibitions work to extend the collaborative experience into the space of the gallery. I consider these two projects through their art historical antecedents from artists coming out of Black Mountain College and the traditions of the Situationist International to the conceptual avant-garde. I am especially invested in theoretical concepts that draw from philosophy to investigate what is essential to my work.

abstract: In support of the fulfillment of Low residency Master of Applied Arts degree in Media and Visual Arts.

abstract: Bodily gesture


title: Coyote Walks: A Relational and Narrative Framework for an Emergent Practice

subject: Storytelling--Walking--Narrative art--Aboriginal culture--Installations (Art)

abstract: This practice based research is grounded in multi-day walking and camping activities guided by procedures which alter the ways I perceive and participate with my more-than-human surroundings. From these walks emerge animations, installations, oral presentations, as well as virtual and material objects which draw relations between humans, animals, plants, landscapes, and other entities: A creek visited during a walk spawns a carved series of stones, and a story about the birth of a child. The research practice can be understood as a relational network that is dispersed across time, place and medium. The network can also be read as a narrative, where an understanding of the practice becomes more complex as each object is discovered and incorporated into the larger story. The work attempts to understand the world through sensorial experience, indigenous ways of knowing, and Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. From these embodied perspectives, relationality and respectfulness emerge as dominant themes in the creation of the work. This narrative-relational structure acts as a reflexive framework that guide the form and content of art objects, and gives meaning to the work in a gallery space. The utility of the framework is expanded, tested and reinforced by drawing on fellow artists including Duane Linklater’s Decommission and Valère Costes’ Tortue.


title: Historias de maíz

type: thesis Collection Text

subject: Photography--Sculpture--Guatemala--Memory

abstract: My thesis research is an investigation of Guatemala’s history, where I am from. I do this in resistance to silence, venerating and collaborating with my ancestors. The silence I speak of is a Guatemalan characteristic that entails never speaking about trauma. The trauma of violence, war and the wounds left by the colonization of indigenous peoples by the Spanish. This silence exists in my home were the recent war is seldom talked about, it exists in school classrooms where we are not taught history, and it exists in the public as forms of self hate and neglect of the other. But this silence is broken by the iq’ (wind) on the day of the dead. During the celebrations for the day of the dead in Guatemala, communities gather each year on November the 1st to construct giant kites that with their flight take messages to the dead. But within these messages there exists resistance. I am using the idea of the kite to venerate and communicate with the people of the CIRMA archive (center for mesoamerican research), that is an archive of guatemalan history through the lense of a camera. The photographs of the archive are witnesses of history, they break the silence and deny the lies. I have separated this archive in two group, the perpetrators that stand as witnesses, and the photographs that symbolize collective memories and ancestors whom I wish to venerate in the creation of a memory sculptures that function as kites that cannot fly. The heaviness of their material, that of the cement and steel ground the kites to the earth as symbols of what repression and silence can create. I hope that by the creation of these sculptures I am able to resurrect these spirits and celebrate them in hopes that their memory can be not only acknowledged, but released.


title: An Itinerary For Painting Through Space

subject: Painting--Modernism--Architecture--Aesthetics


title: مسافر : Mosafer (the Traveller)

contributor: Mehran Modarres-Sadeghi Modarres-Sadeghi, Mehran (Author)

subject: Sculpture--Artists' books--Drawing--Group identity--Persian language--Emigration and immigration--Iran

abstract: This thesis poses questions about the preservation of culture and language amongst generations of Iranian immigrants living in North America. It investigates the socio-cultural implications of hybridity as they relate to interethnic exchange and the globalizing process of travel and translation. Working with notions of “third space” or “the space in-between” (Clifford,1992; Bhabha, 1994) and Farzad Sharifian’s research on the globalization of English (2012), this work explores how the use of the hybrid language Persian-English affects an Iranian sense of identity in a globalized world. Susan Stewart’s discussion on the agency of objects to generate narratives which are central to a cultural experience (1993) is discussed as it applies to the use of objects in the artworks being examined in this paper. An analysis of several contemporary autoethnographic works from recent art history, such as Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988), Zineb Sedira’s Mother Tongue (2002), and Ala Ebtekar’s Elemental (2004), is used to form a basis for a discussion of hybrid identity and how inherited language can complicate cultural exchange. The artistic projects that come out of this research are Ma Miaeem va Miravim (We Come and Go), 2016, and Soghat (Souvenir), 2017. Ma Miaeem va Miravim (We Come and Go) is an artist book based on the first-grade English book, We Come and Go (1954), which employs a hybrid translation of Persian-English—in which Persian words are written using the Roman alphabet. Soghat (Souvenir) is a series of sculptures made from everyday objects and string, which investigates how culture travels through objects. These artworks are discussed to explore ways in which meaning can be lost, gained, or altered, through the substitution of signifiers and the co-mingling of cultures.


title: An Emergent Practice of Applied Doubt and Wonder: Dismantling Imagined Boundaries and Awkward Repositioning for Wayfinding in the Anthropocene

contributor: Jennifer Ireland Ireland, Jennifer (Author)

subject: Nature -- Effect of human beings on--Installations (Art)--Performance art--Cross- and interdisciplinary fields

abstract: This research based practice investigates a contemporary relationship to environment in the age of the Anthropocene. Conceptually led, this interdisciplinary practice ranges from drawing, photography, video, sculpture, to site-sensitive installation and performance while employing strategies of philosophical inquiry, characterized by applied doubt and wonder. Mindful of situation and context, this practice’s environmental ethic is drawn in specific materials and methods, which are often light, provisional and sustainable. Research within this practice spans the humanities, natural sciences, science fiction, history, philosophy, and arts. With a mindful attention to an awkward and multi-directional problem solving methodology, this practice works to research ways for re-imagining and weaving bonds with flora, rock, soil, water and sky. The thesis project titled sympoiesis, sought to reposition and propose alternate ways of perceiving and knowing the natural world. Inspired by the contemporary environmental writing of Jamie Lorimer and Donna Haraway, and responding to their calls of ‘awkward environmental humanities’ and ‘tentacular thinking’, sympoiesis reconsiders the social behaviours of plants and our likeness and relationship with them. Each artwork is a proposition that operates simultaneously as suggestions and possibilities for wayfinding in the Anthropocene.


title: Significant Surfaces

subject: Bricolage (works)--Photography--Assemblage (Art)--Sculpture--Collage

abstract: This paper explores the conventions and limitations of the photographic medium, both material and representational. Suggesting that photography is situated at an important point within its evolution, the paper searches for new directions within a photo-based practice, which continues to challenge and push the limits of the medium. Examining the way in which photography mediates and shapes experience, this thesis engages with popular photography, as a language with its own syntactical and semantic rules. Through explorations of the syntax of photography, parallels are drawn between the structure of language and the structure of photography. Metonymic structures within photographic language are discussed, with examples of the artist's work that aim to reveal and disrupt the metonymic nature of images. The role of collecting in the practice is defined as a first step in a process of coming to understand the world and its representations. Asserting the power of collage to disrupt and challenge representations, through a process of play and embracing ambiguity and uncertainty, the thesis culminates with a discussion of the development of genre mixing within the practice as a necessary evolution.


title: Like Something Different: A Farfetched Inquiry Into Art and Agency

subject: Criticism Drawing Mimesis Appropriation

abstract: This thesis research is comprised of artworks that are concerned with the processes by which art objects are delimited in terms of both their creation and their reception. My conception of objects is informed by Karen Barad’s agential realism, which understands reality to be constructed not of ‘things’, but as a result of the way that various forms of agency enact ‘cuts’ upon entangled phenomena. Objects in my practice are therefore defined by surfaces which are reconfigurable; in my work I seek to render them in as much complexity as possible, in a manner inspired by Walter Benjamin’s ruinous 'Arcades Project'. My conception of agency is mimetic and linked to the gaze, and draws on Rennie Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. Iterating on and in some ways critiquing appropriation art and institutional critique, my work draws on ideas of the copy, the commodity, and the gaze to enact or depict the complex surfaces that define art. Two works are described in terms of the surfaces that define their possibility, definition, source, and audience. While 'Manua' is an attempt to capture the source of aesthetic choice, taste, and agency, 'Bob Rennie Painting' addresses audience and reception as surfaces or defining limits of the work. 'Bob Rennie Painting' evokes a strange, hybrid art world, one which blurs the line between mutually exclusive audiences. Both of these works seek to render contradiction, or to glimpse the possibility of something simultaneously being what it is not.


title: Being and Constructedness: A Personal Journey Into Identity Formation

format:
68 p.
electronic

subject: Photography--Postmodernism--Portraiture--Asperger's syndrome--Neuroscience--Identity

abstract: This thesis explores the relationship between surface and depth in photography and their influence on identity formation from the perspective of an Asperger’s personality. I saw in my prior work a sense of duality, a conceptual in-between space and the need to construct photographs as a metaphor for my confused sense of self. The present work is an exploration of how my perspective on identity expresses itself in my photographic work, which I have contextualized in relation to the apparent dialectic of internal/individual (being) versus external/social (constructedness). I have further contextualized my work relative to four artists I have identified as representing the use of portrait photography as a means of exploring what lies beneath the surface: Guillaume‐Benjamin‐Amand Duchenne de Boulogne’s direct, literal approach, Florence Henri’s connection between literal and metaphorical, Nancy Burson’s consideration of the relationship between “believing” and “seeing”, and Elisabeth King’s exploration of the relationship between mind and body through “attention’s loop”. My projects, “emotional me”, “mirror/mask”, “collaborative self‐portrait”, and “the emotions project” individually and collectively play on key elements of each of these four approaches to identity. There is a way to balance between internal needs and external pressures when forming a sense of self. For me that balance is found not in words but in a non‐linguistic, non‐linear form of photographic narrative. I have come to believe that photography – which I see as a medium that both transmits and reflects, that retains some of the pre‐modern assumption of transparency – is the medium that will allow me to explore the incomprehensible.


title: Nothing is Nothing

contributor: Carpenter, Cheryl (Cheryl Carpenter) (author)

format:
43 p.
electronic

subject: Prints -- Technique--Nothing (Philosophy) in art--Internationale situationniste--Punk culture--DIY

abstract: This paper provides critical background and insight into the practical and theoretical context of my artistic practice, by focusing on the concept of nothing. In contemporary contexts nothing is seen as a void of being, doing or even existing – but paradoxically nothing also contains the values and choices defned as negative by dominant ideological forces. Embracing the power and subversive potential of this paradox, however, transforms nothing into a progressive political position. My research spans several relevant histories and modes of practice, including the theoretical work of Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Raoul Vanigem and the Situationist International, as well as DIY, conceptual art, punk and zine culture. This investigation is connected to a creative methodology featuring a focus on text, listing, the absurd, and the momentary. It seeks to develop an understanding of the subversive potential of the everyday in an artistic practice which challenges dominant modes of production for gallery exhibition. To achieve this, this paper explores the possibilities of subjective meaning in the concept of nothing.

abstract: Art

abstract: Philosophy

abstract: Printmaking


title: The Phenomenology of Technology: A Search Into the Experience of Technology and Machines

subject:
Art and technology
Robotics
Installations (Art)
Technology

abstract: This paper discusses strategies for breaking conventional semiotic systems of signs and symbols towards machines and technologies, and considers alternative modes for interactive technologies and common technological objects. My research explores the use of semiotic analysis conventionally applied to machines, and questions whether this system of signs adequately describes the engagements and interactions between biological and mechanical beings. This body of work brings focus to these relationships by highlighting my works that use digital and interactive technologies to explore modes of relational feedback. The primary focus is to create an interaction with the materiality of an ever increasing digitalizing, mechanizing and animating (Here I am using the definition of animating to imply a giving life to, to enliven, and to impart motion or activity onto) of our modern landscape. This research is driven by the premise that recognizing and exposing the modes and areas of interactivity breaks existing conditioned semiotics towards objects by allowing the agency of objects, their ability to effect change in the world based on input, to be made visible. My inquiry into the relationships between humans and objects focuses on interactive artworks as modes for recognizing a social exchange, one that is less about the qualities of the object or subject, and instead how both contribute to an event or exchange between each other. With virtually all the technologies we will encounter on any given day being designed to interact with a human at some level, this is a point of discussion I feel we should have with our creations, both technological and artistic.


title: The Leather Diaries and the Rise and Fall of Rocket Queen

contributor: Emily Carr University of Art and Design Graduate studies (Degree granting institution)

format:
47 p.
electronic
electronic

subject:
Heavy metal
Fetishism

abstract: In the midst of doing my Master’s degree, I created an alternate persona for myself. She belongs to a tribe of edgy women, and explores various aspects of self in relation to past and present narratives of fandom. Fandom is a subculture of fans that share a common interest, in this case heavy metal. Since 2014, I’ve framed my alternate identity in the art world. For this paper and my art and graduate work she is Rocket Queen [ET]. Her desire to relive becoming Youth Gone Wild is a desperate attempt to escape the inevitable: mortality. Rocket Queen and Rocket Queen [ET] - my persona name - is a fantasy character acting in a type of large social drama or my own rock drama where we can witness the rise and fall of rebellious women. Rocket Queen [ET] takes her adventures through a series of art making in the form of rock posters stapled up around the city of Calgary, Alberta as interventions, installations using concert lights and leather reconfigured to appear in the tradition of objects/wall paintings. My aim is to understand and disrupt gender expectations and to signify homologous and heterogeneous characteristics, while aestheticizing and fetishizing the coded material of heavy metal culture. Leather remains a powerful masculine signifier in heavy metal and is prominent in my artwork. It carries with it a history of objectification and sex along with other meanings and histories. In my thesis project I explore the predominately male subculture as “other” and from the perspective of a female, a fan, someone engaging the genre not in London but in the Canadian prairies, and as an artist. My media comprise paintings, mock paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, theatrical lights, paper posters, civic interventions and gallery installations. I am identifying with this subculture and its feelings of empowerment and freedom, while simultaneously being isolated from its core as a player.

abstract: Rocket Queen

abstract: Leather

abstract: In support of the fulfillment of Low residency Master of Applied Arts degree.


title: Deconstructing Narratives in The Song of the Whale

subject:
Armageddon
Perspective (Linguistics)
Pictogram
Scrolls
Drawing
Sound

abstract: My project, The Song of the Whale, is a product of an interdependent narrative structure, and has been led by my conjectural knowledge and artistic research. My research has led me to my current investigation and exploration of particular events and techniques in relation to methods and methodologies, which could represent historical progress with regard to an impending future catastrophe - Armageddon, which is from a verse in the New Testament, “And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon” (King James Version, Rev. 16.16). The dichotomy between fear - of war or disasters, and goodness in relation to being brought up in the Christian faith, performs the formation of my framing metaphor and my figuration which is my positionality, through embodied knowledge, which is always moving with my ideas into different positions. My artistic process often begins with narrative. Mieke Bal’s Narratology has provided significant insight because her theory of narrative, involving fabula, story, and narrative text, is effectual in breaking down the essential features of narratives in my work. Allegory threads these three layers of narrative together. In this process of decomposing and interpreting my narrative, I explore Manfred Jahn’s theory of focalization - the relationship between the vision, the agent that sees, and that which is seen (Bal 146). In further exploring this connection, I found it useful to consider both my situated and embodied knowledge in relation to Jahn’s Model of Vision. In this context, I began to speculate about narrative perspective in my writings, and I experimented with second person narration and stumbled upon an unpredicted momentum, which made me step into and play again in the relationship among my elements and audience. I developed more of a sense of concern with, and curiosity about, how the audience becomes a participant in connection with my artwork.


title: The Spider, the Monster, the Mother, and the Homemaking Queen

subject:
Feminism
Autobiography
Comic books, strips, etc.
Queer theory
Identity

abstract: This thesis essay is an account of an auto-ethnographic research about how personal identity is formed, performed and represented. Its structure is experimental and it uses various and overlapping discursive strategies to engage the reader. It is informed by affect, queer and feminist theory, especially the writings of Judith Jack Halberstam on failure. It also draws from conceptions of identity encountered in postcolonial theory, critical pedagogy, girl studies and fat studies. I look into my working method through an examination of material and immaterial works. Playful artistic gestures, improvisation and messy installations are envisioned as acts of casual rebellion, or transgressive ways of making that deliberately register my work outside of the mainstream. I introduce several recent projects and contextualize them by means of storytelling. I also address my interest in attraction and repulsion, personal history and hierarchies of value.


title: Interlocutrix

subject: Art & society--Archives--Community arts projects--Artists and community--Interactive art--Campbell River (B.C.)

abstract: The research I performed during the MAA program was focused on establishing a theoretical framework for creative and collaborative participation, using dialogue and encounter in place-specific contexts. I discuss the development of this methodology through a narrative progression of four artworks. Performed over the course of the program, my practice-based research brought forward themes and questions related to institutional, public and social spaces as sites for dialogue and participation. For the graduate project, Archive Encounters, I worked with five community members inside the archive and collections of a regional social history museum. These individuals were associated with the Campbell River Arts Council in various ways, involved in public art, writing, education and community organization in the local area. In the archives, I played the role of interlocutrix to open up a space of dialogue with my participatory audience, responsive to each individual’s living archive of memory. The interlocutrix is the feminine form of interlocutor, a theatrical term for one who initiates dialogue with an audience. Inside the collections room, the audience/participants were given access to the artifacts in storage and a projecting digital camera. Each person used the tool to capture and project a series of images onto the artifacts. Encountering personal and collective narratives in the process, we played with the surfaces of memory and form, exploring shifting and contingent meaning. The projections were documented, resulting in a collection of digital images that formed a secondary body of work. To support dialogical and participatory aesthetics with an audience, I look to the critical theories of Paulo Freire (dialogue) Grant Kester (dialogical aesthetics), and Pablo Helguera (participation). Doreen Massey, Michel DeCerteau and Henri Lefevbre informed the development of a critical framework when working with the elements of space and place in an artwork. The writing of Liza Graziose Corrin informed a dialogical methodology for my artistic research performed inside the contemporaneous museum.


title: Performing things

subject: Phenomenology--Metaphor--Performance art--Installations (Art)--Arts audiences

abstract: I make performances using space, time, the body — and sometimes things — as materials. These performances attempt, through a personal and embodied investigation of these materials, to explore an intimacy with the viewer that engages with questions of individual and collective identity. My current work includes performative acts or gestures that evolve through a phenomenological process of inquiry. The work aims to challenge the ways we relate to each other physically, emotionally and conceptually inside the spaces we occupy in order to create moments of tangible engagement with each other. Through my art work, I am interested in finding a means to open up family histories, everyday experience and cultural and socio-political perspectives between the viewer and the artwork, in order to explore how this exchange can shift our interaction with the world, offering new ways of seeing and identification. As a form of research, the artwork investigates how the act of interpretation can draw the viewer into a performed reception, attempting to make essential the complex social relationships that exist in a shared space through activating what the viewer’s ‘part’ or ‘role’ is in relation to a work. To this end, my working processes include promoting an intimacy through reversing spatial relationships, using performance and the body to encourage an embodied response and drawing upon narrative conventions, such as metaphor, to further an interpretation that supports an intersubjective engagement in order to deepen the opportunity for the viewer to perform their own meaning in their reception of a work. Influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s theories of bodily perception, Claire Bishop’s writing on the physical relationship between art and viewer and Amelia Jones’ ideas on representation of the performed body and its role in meaning production, my research attempts to understand how we can create definite connections with the viewer through our shared attention to a work. As such, artists Tino Sehgal and Sophie Calle have been influences inside my practice.


title: WATERMARKS: Resonant Absences in Painting and Memory

type: Collection thesis

subject: Autobiography--Memory--Storytelling

abstract: This paper is about memory and about narrative, both of which are concerned with what is missing. It explores the ways that the events in our individual lives, our collective lives, become history and narrative. The paper considers writer Thomas King’s work on narrative, and Walter Benjamin’s work on memory as theatre. Many of the stories included here are personal. They might have been heard at kitchen tables, or on the phone from family and friends. Some stories are ones which I can’t recall not knowing. The paper poses questions such as how these things become important to our present. Whether and why it is important to remember, and what constitutes authenticity in memory. The narrative structure of the paper reflects these concerns, by highlighting spaces and absences. To an extent the structure manifested itself organically, as a result of attempts to provide an honest articulation of the questions and ideas which have impacted on my material practice. This has proven to be a delicate task, as it attempts to speak to a material practice that is ongoing, constantly changing. There are overlaps in the form and content of each but there is also a space in between. My modus operandi resists full disclosure. I have this image of myself, like I am in the backyard, in the dirt, excavating some things burying others. From a certain vantage point all you see is the upturned soil following me, dirt under my nails.


title: The Self, the Grid and the Rhetoric

subject:
Art & text
Installations (Art)
Walking
Interactive art

abstract: This thesis outlines the various approaches, processes, and works that I used throughout an ongoing negotiation between my professional routine as an employee with the Government of British Columbia and my work as an artist. The process of negotiation is actualized within what scholar Michel de Certeau has termed ‘grids of control’ and makes use of tactics (as opposed to strategies) that are negotiated through a practiced based on walking, interactive installations, and text that aim to collate, destabilize and amplify everyday repetition and patterns. Within an artistic discourse where the context ―social, political or otherwise― is of primary concern, my practice neighbours that of artists including as Francis Alÿs, Barbara Kruger, Cathy Busby, and Jenny Holzer, who each deploy a variety of methods and tactics that disrupt social spaces and text- based rhetoric. Detailed in a series of chapters, the works Thread (2013), Walking & Writing (2014), Doppelgänger (2013-14), Stalemate (2014), and You Just Never Quite Know (2015) are outlined as important exploratory steps towards the use of various tactics to create an idealized opposition, and a way to subvert control from the ‘disciplinary powers’ embedded in the patterns of everyday routine, and Speech from the Throne (2014) and (2015) as the cumulative works of this process and my graduate research.


title: The Mill Project

format:
34 p.
electronic

subject: Installations (Art)--Bricolage--Skateboarding--Subculture--Urban archaeology

subject: Collage

subject: Art, Modern

abstract: I am exploring bricolage as the primary artistic gesture in the work that supports this thesis, focusing on the history of a single site in West Vancouver, where lies a remarkable subcultural artifact: the Inglewood ‘Mill’ Skatepark - the first skateboard park constructed in Canada in 1977, and subsequently buried in 1984. The skateboard subculture is layered with three other histories: the Shields Shingle Mill (1916-1926), West Vancouver Secondary School (1927-present), and my own lived experience as a suburban skateboarder. The approach of the project has been that of a pseudo-archaeological ‘excavation’, digging through the layers of the site's historiography, engaging with questions around authorship and authenticity, historical accuracy and objectivity. Through the detournement of archival images (photomontage), an assemblage of site-related constructions, and a series of interventions, surveys, and excavations of the site, histories are subverted and conflated.  its material and intellectual capacity - to recompose dominant histories, ideologies, and mythologies. Bricolage is discussed in relation to appropriation, myth, and subcultures (specifically in the way bricolage is manifested in skateboard culture). My investigation is supported, primarily, by the following writers and their theories: on the topic of bricolage, Claude Levi-Strauss and Dick Hebdige; on the topic of subcultures, Dick Hebdige and Iain Borden; on the topic of myth, Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss; and on the topic of appropriation, a whole host of writers and their discussions around postmodernism in the late seventies and eighties. Further examinations of these topics are found in the collage works of Martha Rosler, the pseudo-archaeological site interventions of Mark Dion, the ad-hoc constructions of collaborators Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser, and in the bricolage-installation, Vancouver School, by the collective Futura Bold.


title: Aurora

subject: Decoration and ornament--Sculpture--Canada--Installation (Art)

abstract: This paper is in support of my artist-based thesis research entitled Aurora. My practice is interdisciplinary with a focus on installation and sculpture, consistently engaged in questions surrounding culturally inherited power structures and resulting modes of representation. This thesis research critically investigates what is understood as “traditional” in North American domestic ornamentation through considerations of complicated and intertwined histories, commerce, personal memory and taste. This paper provides an art historical and contemporary art context for this line of artistic investigation. Focusing on contemporary artists, this paper seeks to highlight the current discourse around culturally inherited materials, in particular of those from hybridized cultural identities. Drawing from theorists engaged in Marxism, post- structuralism, post-modernism; a nuanced understanding of ornament as a commodity and social signifier is highlighted. An account for the breadth of my material research is outlined in this document, focusing on three major works that were exhibited in defense of this thesis, Aurora, Secret Garden and Like Countless Men on Horseback. A focus is emphasized around sets of gestural responses to materials; these are drawing, casting, tracing, folding, cutting, and staging. These gestures invite viewers to think through their own understanding of domestic ornamentation and inherited social structures, as they focus on perceptions of appropriation, nostalgia, monumentality and memory. This paper concludes with implications of this research. That networks of associations to the self, class and history resound through the maintenance of domestic ornamentation. These networks are not static and fluctuate through trend, social norms and ideas surrounding domesticity. Thus it is paramount that in the creation of works invested in this dialogue that ambiguity is facilitated to gain entry into layered, and possibly contradictory associations to the ornamentation of the home. The accumulation of my cultural identity, lived experience, influences and biases will continue to be investigated and articulated through my practice vis-à-vis symbolic socially constructed materials and beliefs.


title: Looking at Word Finding, a Practice-Based Research Project About Participatory and Dialogical Art Processes

contributor: Klassen, Lois Elaine (Lois Klassen) (author)

format:
36 p.
electronic

subject: Artists and community--Communication in art--Interactive art--Video Art

abstract: The art-based thesis project, Word Finding, is currently being produced through dialogue and conversation. Beginning with a community process and finally being realized in an art context, Word Finding asks larger questions about authorship and public discourse. This work and others described here challenge the reliance on fixed authorship in the way Foucault imagined a future marked by distributed authorship. In Word Finding authorship is continually distributed amongst the work’s participants and audience. This project builds on my earlier art practice where I investigated the way words spoken within a social context produced instability of meaning –how they were interpreted, retold and translated between people. To contextualize this project and my practice in general, I present case studies that provide a variety of models for dialogical art strategies. Linda Duvall and Kutluğ Ataman have produced artworks in which the respatialization of unscripted talking in aesthetic contexts enables a level of audience engagement. Methodologies surrounding dialogical and participatory art forms are discussed here with respect to key texts by Mikhail Bakhtin, Grant Kester, Claire Bishop and others. As an art project, Word Finding investigates the integration of communitybased dialogue and aesthetic use of dialogue within art contexts.

abstract: Participatory art

abstract: Community

abstract: Artists


title: Exploring the Hoard: Constructing New Maps of Understanding

contributor: Motut-Firth, Monique (Monique Motut-Firth) (Author)

subject:
Consumption (Economics)
Collage
Criticism and interpretation
Constructivism (Art)

abstract:
How do images and diagrams inform cultural identity and the navigation of social space? This is a core question motivating my art practice.
To produce my artwork, I glean images and texts from magazine collections, which I deconstruct and reconfigure into new iconographies. My goal in this process is to simultaneously destabilize knowledge systems that pretend to obscure uncertainty, even while hinting at possible new understandings. Building on the history of collage as a critical strategy, I explore the role of technical images in identity formation, knowledge production, and expressions of power and authority. In this way, my work maps contextual frameworks that span disparate image cultures and identity systems.
The ‘hoard’, as a type of collection, is an important space for my practice; I see the hoard as an archive and active site of social and political possibilities — a physical manifestation of the excess of capitalist culture (In this text, I will refer to the hoard as a metaphor for the overwhelming volume of cultural imagery at large as well as, a specific collection of print imagery that I see as physical symptom of the pressure of image culture). I mine these archives for veins of source materials, looking for patterns that emerge through formal aesthetic similarities. Colour and line speak from within images to reveal possible hybrid visualizations and derive new trajectories of meaning. In this work, I am exorcising my suspicion of a tendency to slip into a passive viewing position; in this way, my work is calling to (and being beckoned by) Vilém Flusser’s cautionary writings on the inherent perils of technical images in mass media.
My works traverse image and objecthood. I transform print materials into photographs, then into pixels, and finally to printed-paper structures. In this way I usher meanings from objecthood to image and back again, questioning visual language along the way. With each work, I engage in a struggle to decipher and map historical traces of print images. At the same time, I am actively trying to confuse, question, and re-code visual tropes, questioning the impact of images on identity construction and broader ontologies. I bury my tracks knee-deep in scrap.


title: Untitled (Complicate, Devotion, Dualism, Evidence, Fraternize, Gap, Interpretation, Naiveté, Riddle, Unsettle) 2018

subject:
Multiples
Riddles
Installations (art)
Ceramics
Ontology
Textiles
Collections and collecting

abstract: The following essay includes information that surrounds my investigations into the human desire to invest in objects. This writing accompanies questions concerning systems built for, by, and with things, as well as the possibilities of breaching those boundaries. Explorations around what becomes available in this stuff when significance becomes both flexible and untethered are considered from separate, sometimes overlapping vantages within my practice. Using complicate, devotion, dualism, evidence, fraternize, gap, interpretation, naiveté, riddle, and unsettle as anchor points, I contemplate the real and sensual, the emotional and physical, experiences that objects provoke in all types of possible relationships.


title: Speaking Spaces: Phenomenology, Meditation and Pleinairism

format:
38 p.
electronic

subject: Phenomenology and art--Meditation--Outdoor painting--Plein air painting

abstract: This paper is about the practice of painting outdoors in the manner of pleinairism. This activity began for me as an effort to overcome a sense of personal alienation by engaging in an applied empathy with space. In turn, the thesis also touches on the general social condition of Postmodern alienation as a context for plein air painting. And it briefly outlines the history of pleinairism, as a methodology that aspired to render the world as it appeared to the contemporaneous eye. My current approach to plein air painting is described as an embodied conversation with space through the index of paint and suggests that in the state of attention, the space and the painter become intertwined in a reciprocal exchange, or a Chiasm as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By painting this way, it is suggested that space and the painter express one another and in so doing, produce an animate document of a painted conversation. This material practice is inspired by phenomenology, meditation and the sensorial experience of working outdoors. This paper seeks to redefine plein air landscape painting for the 21st century as a model for awareness of ourselves and our relationship to space. It describes a methodology of applied empathy, and forgetting the self and predetermined ideas, in order to become receptive to the agency of space.

abstract: Phenomenology

abstract: Location


title: Sham–Real Shadows: On Navigating the Anthropocene

subject:
Sculpture
Shadow
Light art
Wallpaper design

abstract: I make intimate scale objects that encourage audience interaction through their mobile devices, or small to larger scale works utilizing phenomenological engagement with projections, or mirrors. My research  is focused on the Anthropocene, our current human-influenced global geological epoch born of the Industrial Revolution. It is my hope that my passion for the ideas contained in this subject will have some resonance in the work, while the things I make and the experiences they permit can be understood as meditations, and salves for bleak subject matter. The works discussed herein do not lecture toward my personal thinking around the Anthropocene (we get the planet we make), rather they dire  themselves toward suggestions of how nature is presented, understood and utilized in a human-dominated world, and what that does to how we under and our relationship vis-à-vis nature. I believe that these are symptom and source for the problems we currently face and will carry with us into the future. The works discussed in detail are Familiar Strangers, Sham–Real Shadows, and The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple. These works utilize human-made materials sourced from nature such as paper, MDF, light, and plastics, as well as contemporary technology such as lasers (an Anthropocene futuristic form of primitive fire). Frequent research sources, such as naturali  wallpaper, are chosen for their presentation of a commodified and rationalized Nature; a shadow of a shadow used as simulacrum to decorate interiors in a human world. The areas of inquiry focus on two streams with the attempt to answer the question, “are there ways to explore the ideological underpinnings and ramifications of the Anthropocene?” These two primary avenues of exploration are: 1) Nature–human dichotomies and ways of designing nature, presenting and thus knowing Nature as simulacrum represented in repetitive patterns and then used to decorate human space; and 2) Hyperobjects as Burkeian, and Kantian sublime presented as patterning of indeterminate space as meditations on, and signi ers of bleakness and hope, light and darkness destabilization and interconnectedness, time and the unknown knowing. These two outcomes are explored in detail with in this document, and have formed the basis of my current practice.


title: Imagining and Material Immediacy

subject: Sculpture--Handicraft--Social change--Art and society--Design

abstract: Through sculptural explorations using everyday objects and materials, my work investigates the potential for social transformation through material explorations in art. Drawing on strategies found in both art and design, I explore connections between material culture and the social ideals of a larger collective. Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch refers to the goal of utopia as "being-here". I aim to address being-here through a sculptural exploration of the objects and things that are ready-at-hand in my immediate surroundings. Using combinations of handmade and readymade objects, I'm interested in relationships between the individual hand and larger industrial systems. By exploring relationships between individuals and collectives through sculptural objects and installation, my work aims to reframe utopianism in a contemporary context, acknowledging a world in which materials might also act as agents. Through this work I intend to make a critical intervention using a material practice to address issues of sustainability, and a broader range of problems including social and economic alienation. Materials are full of quiet, unknown potential, both hopeful and unsettling. Political theorist Jane Bennett describes the material stuff of life as "vibrant matter". I'm interested in this notion of the vitality of materials, and through my art practice I explore the possibility that matter may have unseen agencies and a greater impact than we readily acknowledge. How might objects be considered as subjects, and what larger ramifications might this shift in perspective have? By participating in material enquiries, I examine the relationship between utopian imagining and the immediacy of materials, aiming to question late capitalist models of consumption and excess. Drawing on various strategies including idea-led, material-led, and use- what-you've-got approaches to making, my work poses questions about the possibility of creating "embodied utopias", in which idealism merges with the lived experience of the body. My thesis research explores being- here with materials, by which I mean: exploring my desire for an ideal state of being, in dialogue with a shifting, continually transforming relationship with materials.


title: Pause and Reflect: The Art Object as Immersive Experience

subject: Painting--Sculpture--Visual perception--Art objects

abstract: My research has consisted of a series of artworks that are aimed at identifying effective methods of generating an immersive experience that gives pause for reflection. Art for me is a transformative process that increases awareness of self. Art transcends many boundaries making it a unique form of communication with an audience where words can often fall short. Building on my history of work with the medium of stone, my artistic investigations have led me to examine how process, scale, material, craft and form can be effectively employed to create an immersive experience with the art object. My artistic creations have taken the form of sculpture and painting. Relevant to my practice are the artists Mark Rothko, Isamu Noguchi and Rachel Whiteread and theorists Clement Greenberg and Martin Heidegger. My research explores the effects of an immediate experience with the art object as a technique to absorb the viewer. Precision of craft is employed as a method to elevate the significance of materials and form. Materials are understood in terms of their density, weight and psychological impact. Perspective distortions and defying the expectations of the viewer can serve to destabilize and lead them to re‐establish their ground. Different processes are explored as a way to give living qualities to a static object.


title: Biting and Chewing as Sculptural Gestures

contributor: Huijnen, Patricia (Patricia Huijnen) (author)

format:
52 p.
electronic

subject: Conceptual art--Mouth--Research--Sculpture

abstract: This thesis essay contextualizes a specific aspect of my art practice -  the use of the mouth as sculptural tool. It examines the destructive and formative element of the bite exploring this gesture from a physiological, sense-related and art historical perspective. What drives my practice-based research (Borgdorff, Sullivan) is the question of how embodied sensations can be transferred from the mouth to an object. Descriptions of bodily sensations related to the ingestion of food and its rejection (De Beauvoir) and theories of embodied perception (Merleau-Ponty, Grosz) inform my investigation of the biting process. Affect as a liminal space of acting and being acted upon (Seigworth, Gregg) and the relation between sensorial perception and emotions (Highmore) are considered in relation to the mouth. The process of biting and chewing is compared to traditional sculpting techniques backdrop. Related to explorations of soft materials and chance (Duchamp, Oppenheim, Benglis), as well as feminist art practices involving the body, I focus on the works Petit Dessert I (1970-71) and Photosculptures (1971) by Alina Szapocznikow, The Destruction of the Father (1974) by Louise Bourgeois, and Gnaw (1992) by Janine Antoni to situate my practice within a specific artistic context. The essay also considers the physical contextualization of the chewed objects within the sculptures through the concept of ‘spitting’. The sculptures represent the liminal position of biting, between destruction and formation, through physical instability and suggestion.


title: Sculpting Organic Order: The Nature of Ornament

contributor: Jonsson, Stephanie (Stephanie Jonsson) (author)

subject: Decorative arts--Modernism (Art)--Ceramics--Decoration and ornament

abstract: This paper presents academic and practice based research. Exploring the concepts of ornament, pattern, and decoration, it aims to define these terms as they are applied in the research and studio. The role of ornament in Modernism, examples of ornament in nature, and nature inspired ornamental forms throughout history are examined. It considers the marginalized position of craft in relation to fine art, and illustrates the shifting nature of this relationship in the work of artists who use craft mediums. The association of decoration and craft with the feminine and “women’s work” is also explored. The methodology for the artwork involves research that is influenced by a formative undergraduate degree, a reflexive studio practice, conventional scholarly research, observation of natural forms, and adaptation of patterns in nature to consumer objects. The methodology describes the use of both craft materials, such as ceramics and textiles, and fine art materials as an ornate responses to Minimalism. The paper presents a selection of artworks that use this methodology as examples of these responses.

abstract: Craft

abstract: Sculpture

abstract: Textiles


title: Surveillance and Performance in Norman Eberstein

contributor: Emily Carr University of Art and Design Graduate Studies (Degree granting institution)

format:
53 p.
electronic

subject: DIY--Performance art--Gender--Electronic surveillance

subject: Criticism

abstract: The central investigation of my practice lies in reconsidering surveillance through  performance art by subverting its role in the everyday and questioning its reliance on technology. This paper introduces my visual art process and describes how the project Norman Eberstein is manifested in a gallery. This body of work suggests that the concept of surveillance is open for  interrogation: Can altruism be reconciled with surveillance?  Does technology create safe spaces? Is surveillance necessary?  These queries reflect critiques on surveillance written by Matt Hern, John E. McGrath, Michel Foucault, Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong. Referring to their texts, I trace the proliferation of surveillance and the excessive production of technological devices in public and private spaces. My practice is multi-faceted, simultaneously manifesting elements of performance, drag, craft, drawing, writing and video. Within these medias I have developed an experimental methodology, in which the performance of surveillance is core. Norman Eberstein is an ongoing series of performances and body of work in which I use a persona to re-identify myself in the guise of surveillant. The performance is the process that creates the work itself. This is enacted through the role of a security guard in training, the persona Norman Eberstein, who finds himself subsumed in certain settings that he is compelled to guard and document. In discussing works by Marcel Duchamp, Jill Magid, Bernadette Corporation, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood, I will demonstrate how key concepts and methods in these works speak to my practice. Though my work is informed by the history of performance art, it is rooted in an experimental process in which performance is a method, and its fruits are valid not only as documentation, but as art. I’m interested in performativity as a process that feeds a range of experiences in galleries and public spaces. To frame this idea, I will specifically refer to the catalogue and essays from the exhibition Not to Play with Dead Things. Like many of the artists in the exhibition, my work is as invested in the attendant objects and relics as it is in the performance itself.

abstract: Craft

abstract: Gender


title: Shovelling Piles

subject:
Walking
Labor
Capitalism
Neighborhoods
Video art
Performative (Philosophy)


title: The Writing of Light: Photography's Apparatus and the Unrepresentable

format:
106 p.
electronic

subject: Conceptual art--Photography--Camera obscura--Postmodernism

abstract: This thesis situates aspects of my recent practice by examining photography's apparatus in relation to the idea of the unrepresentable. In art, awakening the present to the past or memorializing the dead evokes a dense web of cultural practices, aesthetic conventions and social agreements. Photography is unique among them. The act of photography is one of apprehension, for it grasps what is given spatially and temporally then isolates both space and time from a continuum. This rupture caused in spacetime is one of photography's most evocative and least understood effects. Spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the here-now and the has-been are, in a photograph, presented simultaneously. I explore this rupture in relation to the dialectic between presence and absence, and to certain subjects that exceed photography. My own works propose to give form to delicate and nuanced questions concerning invisible subjects or subjects that exceed representation. I explore how the photograph is implicated in its (self) presentation. How can the photographic reflect its own condition while simultaneously representing subjects other than itself? I situate my work alongside early and contemporary photographic works, “zero-degree” painting and examples from conceptual photography and consider these questions as a weaving together of the relations in my artwork: what is the photographic? What exceeds the photographic as the unrepresentable?


title: Under and Beyond (the Skin): Artistic Process, Trauma and Embodiment in Image-Making

contributor: Friedrich, Kristina (Kristina Friedrich) (author)

subject: Biology--Human body--Medicine in art--Metaphor--Drawing--Adaptation (Biology)

subject: Human mechanics

subject: Human figure in art

abstract: This paper examines bodily presence and absence, points of connectivity, and negotiates the terrain of the body through two distinct projects. Engaging in a drawing-centered practice I consider embodiment through two projects (Under the Skin and Beyond the Skin), forming a dyad through which to negotiate and illuminate various bodily expressions and representations. Throughout a lived existence, the body undergoes various transformations and adaptations; its ongoing mutation requires a continuous realignment and re-examination. A phenomenological approach acknowledges that an embodied experience is one which is physically aware and shapes our understanding of the world. Trauma, in varying degrees, forces the body to transform and adapt, potentially resulting in a different embodied perspective. Under the Skin takes up a study of embodiment through trauma and the body in pain. Beyond the Skin engages the prosthesis from an artistic perspective, exploring the capacity for altering the figuration of the body, which in turn informs my artistic praxis. Engaging works by artists Rebecca Horn and Matthew Barney, my intention is to develop a context for my own practice and an expansive understanding of prosthetic terminology and the presence of a prosthetic metaphor in artistic practices. As a creative endeavour the refiguration of prosthetic terminology has the potential to enhance the cultural experience of loss, trauma and adversity, allowing an exploration of the body as adaptable and expandable.

abstract: Prosthetics


title: Sea Inside

format:
109 p.
electronic

subject: Interdisciplinary--Marine ecology--Ocean--Nature--Design--Holism

abstract: The emerging practice of transformation services employs design skills in non-traditional territories and brings together a diversity of intelligences, communication types and frameworks from which to define  a problem and develop real-world solutions. Sea Inside is a contribution to the growing discourse around the transformations taking place at the intersection of design, culture and marine ecology. The thesis paper describes the importance of exercising a holistic approach to solving complex problems such as the current crisis threatening our planet’s ocean (and by extension, ourselves). This technique has emerged and developed from my practice of designing a small-scale temporary environment – in the form of a pilot exhibition, interactive features and creative workshops – that attempt to focus participant’s actions and dialogues on the relationship we have with the sea around, and inside us. The project intends to transform people’s perspectives, maintain current positive association and/or provide critical reflection and reflexive opportunities to engage with the subject matter of the ocean. It is hoped that this evolution of the intersections between multiple creative disciplines will support the continued transformation of the participants and encourage actions towards designing and implementing more sustainable ways of living with the ocean in the future.


title: Dialogue Through Design: Visual Communication Across The Cultural Divide

format:
75 p.
electronic

subject: Communication--Design--Intercultural--Sustainability

abstract:
This thesis describes how a designer pursued dialogue and collaboration in the design process when a shared verbal language or assumed technologies were not present. From June 2008 to February 2009, a two-phase project explored the role of communication design in a rural community in Africa. It considered how principles of governance could be applied to create a more transparent dialogue during the design process and investigated the impact of a designer's presence and absence in this context.
During the project, a field bag was designed to act as a writing surface for ten women in Rwanda to use while participating in creative activities during the rituals of daily life. The activities were developed to help a designer have a visual conversation when working with individuals who do not share the same language, in order to discover the needs, assets, beliefs and desires of an individual or group before offering a design solution. By introducing a design methodology into a development context, adaptive tools were created to increase the opportunity for appropriate and effective outcomes. By focusing greater attention on the unspoken needs of the underserved, the often overlooked potential of their ideas can be revealed and accessed for future innovations. From here, design positions itself as a discipline that embraces ambiguity in the midst of complexity when seeking to address significant problems in a sustainable fashion.


title: Sustainable Furniture For Small Dwellings in Mexico

contributor: Mejia Guerra, Ana Luz (Ana Luz Mejia Guerra) (author)

subject: Culture--Sustainable design--Furniture design--Small houses--Mexico--Family life

abstract: This thesis project  addresses a furniture  design problem  related to limited space in small housing units in Mexico. The study analyzes the sociocultural furniture needs for the living spaces of Mexicans with small dwellings and offers a sustainable design solution  in the furniture sector. The main hypothesis for this project  is this: The use of the dining room for family gatherings is  essential to sustaining Mexican culture, and the functionality of the dining room for this purpose is threatened by new housing that provides a very small area for these activities. This research included surveys and interviews  of Mexicans living in small homes. A careful analysis was conducted of the various activities normally performed  in their dining rooms. Throughout the process, the hypothesis was validated by a number of findings. These results indicate that (a) the number of furniture users varies on average from four people on weekdays to eight people on weekends; (b) most inhabitants have a strong preference for long-lasting furniture that reflects the cultural values of urban Mexican cities; and (c) there might be a design solution that supports and sustains Mexican culture. There is a lack of available furniture in the Mexican market that meets these needs while fitting into small dwellings. The seating system presented here is a design solution to the problem of flexibility in using the dining room in small Mexican homes. The seating system addresses both  environmental  and cultural sustainability. This new design also embraces the Mexican preference for long-lasting furniture that can be handed down to future generations.

abstract: Design

abstract: Traditions

abstract: Family


title: Citizen Centred Services: New Forms in Public Space Recycling

format:
73 p.
electronic

subject:
Recycling (Waste, etc.)
Sustainability
Behaviour modification
Public administration
Industrial design

abstract: When designing for citizens, municipalities often focus on the back end infrastructure of services while ignoring the user experience. This can lead to a lack of engagement by citizens and improperly used services. Contemporary issues facing cities today such as waste reduction, and other challenges associated with living in a dense urban core, reinforce the need for a drastic change in the way that people live, work and co-organize as supported by their local government. A two year design research partnership with a local governing body explored the role of participatory design in the creation of a service touch-point aimed at decreasing contamination in the streams of waste that are recycled in public city spaces. It considers how principles of behavior change can be utilized in this inquiry for designing services that are used by the general public in an urban context. During the course of the project, participatory methodologies are used to facilitate conversations between municipal waste coordinators and designers. Through user observations, ethnographic research, co-creation and user testing this thesis argues for the need for participatory design to create effective services for cities. Through explorations of form, iconography, and systems this inquiry has culminated in the design of a streetscape recycling station and a human centered framework for municipalities called ‘citizen centered services’.

abstract: Service design

abstract: Government services

abstract: Design research


title: Exploring Brand Identity: Storytelling Through the Use of Emotional Branding for The Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation

contributor: Corbacioglu, Defne (Defne Corbacioglu) (author)

format:
49 p.
electronic

subject: National Research Council Canada--Commercial art--Graphic arts--Fuel cell industry -- British Columbia -- Vancouver--Fuel cells -- Public opinion--Branding (Marketing)

abstract: This thesis project investigates branding strategies, such as “emotional branding” to tell the story of National Research Council's Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation. There are three aspects to the visual component: signage design, a process book and an animation. Each of these elements acts as the narrator of the story. The book includes a documentation of visual process and synthesizes this information into a section of brand guidelines. It showcases the brand identity and the evolution of visual process in the medium of print, while the animation illustrates the brand through motion graphics and provides an example of how the visual elements that form the identity work coherently as an animation piece. The signage design is the three-dimensional aspect of the project. It presents the branding applied in a tactile way and also reflects a relationship with the space in which it is showcased. With these visual and sensory tools, the Gateway will showcase the rich graphic language of the new brand identity. The written component of the thesis explores the ideas of Marc Gobé in relation to emotional branding and Peter Turchi and Tim Ingold in reference to storytelling. Linda Leung and Donald Norman's works and Ellen Lupton's theories on graphic design are also examined to further investigate theories of storytelling in branding and motion graphics.

abstract: Graphic design

abstract: Technology

abstract: Storytelling

abstract: Branding

abstract: Communication

abstract: Design

abstract: Hydrogen

abstract: Marketing


title: Design for Repurposing: A Sustainable Design Strategy for Product Life and Beyond

contributor: Aguirre, Darinka (Darinka Aguirre) (author)

subject: Sustainability--Product life cycle--Industrial Design--Commercial products

abstract: As a society we are running out of resources and the number of products discarded everyday is no longer sustainable. How can design facilitate a solution to this problem? Design for Repurposing, presents a new strategy for incorporating the concept of repurposing in product design, which aims to extend the longevity of products by intentionally designing features or details that facilitate repurposing. Repurposing is the transformation of products or their components to suit a second purpose after their first has expired. For example, an old truck’s wheel rim is transformed into a grill by welding iron legs onto it. I explored the concept of designing for repurposing by interviewing, photographing and observing how people in developing countries, such as Mexico, transform existing products into different objects for other uses. I translated these observations into a detailed artifact analysis with reflections on what makes certain objects attractive or suitable to those who repurpose them. Design for repurposing converts consumers into engaged users who invest time to transform and customize products, thus easing the amount of waste in landfills and saving energy, money and the environment. The new purposes assigned to products can be classified into three categories: planned, coached and open-ended. These categories share a common goal: to extend the longevity of an object’s use. Repurposing also happens at different scales, such as batch production, and individual level (Do it Yourself: DIY). My thesis contains descriptive information and two checklists for designers, manufacturers and engineers seeking another strategy for sustainable design.