Fine Arts

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/9878

This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Fine Arts.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

Waterloo faculty, students, and staff can contact us or visit the UWSpace guide to learn more about depositing their research.

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 82

1,2,3,4
(University of Waterloo, 2018-05-22) Martens, Tess
My thesis exhibition, 1,2,3,4, consists of four performances: Announce It!, A Second Hand Emotion, Slow Change and Portrait-Self-Portrait. The performances will take place on scheduled days at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. 1,2,3,4, is also a multidisciplinary project, as each performance produces leftovers that will remain installed in the gallery. In addition, the title, 1,2,3,4, references the counting and chanting used in various sporting practice sessions. The installation evolved through the use of remnants of the props, materials and detritus from each performance. The act of preserving the leftovers of each performance serves as both a reminder of each action, as well as a form of documentation. I invite the audience to become witness to, and in some cases also actively participate in my performances. I ask audience members to be a witness to a juxtaposition of empowerment and vulnerabilities within the framework of how I use my body as a tool to produce works. I think of my performances as empowering, comedic, and, at times even tragic. Although these acts are intensely personal, they are open enough to allow witnesses to bring their own experiences to the performances.
1b, black legs, 52"
(University of Waterloo, 2021-04-30) Mitchell, Karice
1b, black legs, 52” is an effort to reconcile with history. Through the recontextualization of black pornographic images, this exhibition serves as a re-imagining of what black women’s futures could be. By creating images that are hyper visible in presentation, yet ambiguous in their representation, these works seek to foster images of the black female body that demand to be seen and understood removed from the historical construction of blackness that has been upheld and perpetuated through white supremacy. Giving the black female body a new meaning, we can begin to cultivate new possibilities for it to be understood differently, and for it to exist in its multiplicity. This show creates space for black women and their sexuality to be unapologetically represented, while also allowing ourselves the grace to acknowledge the historical legacy of racism in an effort to subvert it––ultimately, striving towards reclaiming our agency.
9 Sum Sorcery
(University of Waterloo, 2017-04-25) Hildreth, Alexis
9 Sum Sorcery is a multimedia exhibition comprised of video and sculpture. Nine screens depict 'The Player' performing with an assortment of augmented found materials within the framework of a board game. The Player continually re-organizes the components of the game-space (a social, political, psychological, and spiritual body) in an attempt to come to terms with their place in it. In addition to appearing in the videos, the game's components are present physically in the gallery, enclosed in a vitrine. Each video offers a first-person perspective of The Player in various states of communion with the game system. This system complicates itself through The Player's desire to simultaneously project narrative onto, and remove narrative from, the components of the game. 9 Sum Sorcery encourages engagement in a spiritual ordeal, where the potential for transformative power can become an ossifying psychosis in the absence of The Player's and the visitors' capacity to de-code and re-code meaning.
Any other name would smell as sweet
(University of Waterloo, 2020-05-05) Matheson, Tyler
Any other name would smell as sweet is an exploration of personal and shared experiences of feeling queer. This exhibition serves as an aesthetic and material investigation of the performativity of othered bodies, identities, and visibility. The process of becoming and adapting to surroundings is conceptually and experientially present in my work. When creating installations, I employ mirrors and queer-coded reflective materials. By choosing materials that have the visual capability to shift and transform their appearance depending on the viewer’s body and position in relation to the work, I create a spatial dynamism where each individual's experience is uniquely their own—where the viewer and the work are reliant on each other. In this codependent performance, the gallery becomes a site where viewers can be projected into queer liminal space—a bridge between worlds.
Based on a True Story
(University of Waterloo, 2009-05-19T15:28:38Z) Everingham, Scott
The paintings in Based on a True Story are at once illogical and concrete – implying both failure and the hope of figurative and architectural construction. Developed as a kind of psychological landscape, they suggest a depiction of contemporary societal / political, and environmental instability. Neither true nor false: the paintings are spaces in which one may become dislocated, anxious, and unsettled. Inclusion of architectural fenestration suggests one’s fractured location and continually shifting ground. Furthermore, literary and cinematic fiction plays an important role to the work in that they both suggest landscapes that may never exist literally. Fiction is also indicative of the close relationship between the utopia and dystopia as environments for escape. This sense of balance or lack thereof, becomes important to the development of the theatrically absurd, so that an audience may be implicated as the tragic and comic active participant. While investigating the work of Peter Doig, Stephen Bush, and Dana Schutz, for example, I suggest that the trail of the painter’s hand becomes a necessary mode of entrance into the work, offering a closer relationship to the act of painting as another form of escape. This gestural mark-making runs counter to current pushes toward technology, and suggests the re-emergence of painting as a primary approach in which to investigate the development of personal space and experience.
Becoming the Poem
(University of Waterloo, 2024-05-31) Beerdat, Ashley
My MFA thesis recognizes the interconnectedness of all living beings. The paintings I created immerse the viewer in landscape scenes spanning anywhere between eight feet in height to eighteen feet in width. Inspired by natural formations, an important aspect of my studio practice is engaging with my sensory apparatus (sight, sound, and touch) through which I attempt to materialize how I perceive other life forms and environments. In short, my painting methodology is heavily process-based where intuition and the senses direct the trajectory of the work. The pictorial language of my paintings is largely based on organic and biomorphic imagery which appears to grow, slink, and unfurl through the space of the paintings. These travelling forms on the canvas parallel the sensory processes of the human body. Conceptually I also explore my relationship to nature, the past and future through material means and methods such as rotating the canvas while painting, thinning and thickening the paint, pooling colours, and layering brushstrokes (Fig. 1). Through this, I seek to embed myself in the material processes, forming highly saturated, dense landscapes that speak to the vastness and evolution of nature as well as our own human embeddedness in it. I chose landscape as the main theme of my work because it represents an accumulation of deep time, present in rock formations, gigantic trees and ancient spaces that were formed over millions of years. More importantly, the resilience of nature resides in the fact that its creation is ongoing just like my painting practice which also evolves as each painting informs the next. Through its conceptual and formal elements this thesis exhibition considers nature’s resilience, that is the ability to rise above ecological disasters, such as extinction, wildfires, flood and draught — nature’s ability to survive.
Behavioural Enrichment : An Exhibition of Painting
(University of Waterloo, 2010-05-18T14:35:59Z) Partridge, Shannon
Behavioural Enrichment is a series of paintings of fictional zoo exhibits; the body of work as a whole creates a silent zoo. The paintings merge imagery and draw comparisons between the stage-like sets of mid-century interior design photographs and Western zoos exhibits. The paintings present curious new worlds that comment upon the artificiality that is in both zoos and the ideal home. The contained curious new worlds that comment upon the artificiality that is in both zoos and the painted environments are complete with props of still-lifes, behavioural enrichment devices from zoos, and animal actors. These strange worlds of artifice are constructed with images within images: odd compositions and disintegrating spaces that balance between an illusion of depth and an abstract flatness. The work provides a space for the imagination to contemplate many possible metaphors.
BORDERLINES
(University of Waterloo, 2007-05-17T20:30:35Z) Skensved, Emmy
This thesis paper is the supporting document for an exhibition that was held at the University of Waterloo art Gallery. The show consisted of a series of large scale acrylic paintings on canvas. Through my paintings I deal with the current role that pattern, ornament and decoration play in our society today. My work is also concerned with the concept of the painting as a decorative object in and of itself. Our understanding of the terms ornament, embellishment and decoration have changed considerably throughout history, being defined and re-defined time and time again. Moreover, we have yet to come to a definitive explanation for the existence of ornament and decoration. The persistence of ornamental motifs throughout time, as well as their continued presence in contemporary visual culture, evidences the fact that this subject requires further investigation. As such, I have chosen to explore this through my paintings. I alter the palette, composition and medium of my source imagery in order to re-present these familiar motifs in a manner that encourages the viewer to regard them anew. In doing this, I explore ornament’s potential as a relevant visual language within contemporary western culture.
Borrowers and Bullies
(University of Waterloo, 2022-05-17) Hall, Julie
Borrowers and Bullies is an exhibition of sculpture, installation, and video. I was highly impacted throughout the making of this work by the Covid-19 pandemic, which began immediately preceding my acceptance into the UW MFA program and has endured to the present at the time of writing. By walking the same paths daily, in my home and in the park behind my home, I more clearly saw my own habits in settler-colonial greenspaces and the built environment. Central to this work is my understanding of a habit as not just a set of repeated behaviours but as a central, life-configuring scaffold for building and maintaining relationships to one another, the built environment, and the land. During the summer of 2021, my collaborative partner and I harvested materials, documentation, and experiences from settler-colonial greenspaces in Southern Ontario and The Maritimes, while asking myself: How does my social muscle memory inform how I understand my home, my neighbourhood, my nation? And do these habits inform my ethics? I see my collaborative art practice as an opportunity to manifest anti-colonial and anti-capitalist ethics by tugging at relationships between subjectivity and materiality. Borrowers and Bullies is an exhibition with its eyes turned to the colonial-capitalist enclosure of time and land, and how that enclosure configures the knowable, the thinkable, and the imaginable. This exhibition, Borrowers and Bullies, is a document of work that took place in very interior spaces. What is in the gallery is residue from the work embedded in my body and my collaborator’s; I proceed from this thesis work transformed.
Borrowers and Bullies
(University of Waterloo, 2022-05-17) Irish, Jacob
Borrowers and Bullies is an exhibition of sculpture, installation, and video. I was highly impacted throughout the making of this work by the Covid-19 pandemic, which began immediately preceding my acceptance into the UW MFA program and has endured to the present at the time of writing. By walking the same paths daily, in my home and in the park behind my home, I more clearly saw my own habits in settler-colonial greenspaces and the built environment. Central to this work is my understanding of a habit as not just a set of repeated behaviours but as a central, life-configuring scaffold for building and maintaining relationships to one another, the built environment, and the land. During the summer of 2021, my collaborative partner and I harvested materials, documentation, and experiences from settler-colonial greenspaces in Southern Ontario and The Maritimes, while asking myself: How does my social muscle memory inform how I understand my home, my neighbourhood, my nation? And do these habits inform my ethics? I see my collaborative art practice as an opportunity to manifest anti-colonial and anti-capitalist ethics by tugging at relationships between subjectivity and materiality. Borrowers and Bullies is an exhibition with its eyes turned to the colonial-capitalist enclosure of time and land, and how that enclosure configures the knowable, the thinkable, and the imaginable. This exhibition, Borrowers and Bullies, is a document of work that took place in very interior spaces. What is in the gallery is residue from the work embedded in my body and my collaborator’s; I proceed from this thesis work transformed.
Care Packages
(University of Waterloo, 2023-04-25) De Vuono, Christine Carmen
This thesis illuminates the importance of care between individuals and within society. The exhibition, entitled Care Packages, uses installation and sculpture to encourage collective care and support. Through monumental forms of sculpture, I expose the intense stress paid caregivers are subjected to and point to the labour needed to help people during vulnerable transition. Domestic and cultural signifiers embedded in the materials, combined with poetry of inclusion, define and suffuse the space, further augmenting my message.
The Chicken Is Just Dead First
(University of Waterloo, 2021-04-30) Rowe, Racquel
My thesis exhibition encapsulates my lived experience as a Black woman from Barbados who moved to Guelph, Ontario at eighteen. My studio and artistic research is focused on the ways that food, ritual, hair, and colonialism intersect with the Black female body. By employing the medium of performance art and research into the history of colonization, I use my body to challenge preconceived characterizations (loud, angry, aggressive) often used to define Black women. This research culminated in my MFA thesis that takes the form of performance for the camera and installation. The outcomes of my performances for the camera are as important as my deep-rooted memories they uncover, often prompting further exploration into images I create and their meanings such as for example the seemingly mundane action of washing rice. Keeping traditions (food, ritual, hair) alive through acts of image making is important to me because the videos I create echoe the oral nature of the way things have been passed down to me. The exhibition consists of three large-scale projections with my solo performances for the camera on each, featuring my body against bright, colourful backdrops. Two wall-mounted monitors display video artwork with my family, filmed in domestic environments such as my mother’s kitchen, living room, and granny’s kitchen. Lastly, several small CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) televisions are placed on the floor of the gallery displaying scenes from the East Coast of Barbados.
Collective Case Studies
(University of Waterloo, 2009-02-20T16:27:17Z) Beniston, Susan
This paper is intended to serve as a supporting document for the exhibition Collective Case Studies that was held in The Gallery, at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. In Collective Case Studies, the head sculptures act as blank slates for my expression of personality archetypes. They embody a longstanding interest in the psyche, character and identity that continues to influence my art-making practice. These sculptures introduce a particular personality trait or present a case study to make human idiosyncrasies manifest in visual terms, both individually and relationally. Collectively, the works are inspired by psycho-social aspects of personality, including archetypes and stereotypes, in the past and present time. The leading sources for my work are psychological, cross-cultural and empirical.
Condemned to a Perpetual Jacuzzi… With Millions of Your Best Friends
(University of Waterloo, 2020-05-21) Witt, Kayla
Condemned to a Perpetual Jacuzzi… With Millions of Your Best friends is a multi-media exhibition that investigates the personal, the socio-political and the cultural notions of home. The mind’s vision of home is most often held as an idealized place – the location where meanings and attachments are personal and symbolically intense. Forms of utopian thinking are embedded as the very cornerstone of what the home represents, especially in contemporary media iterations of the home. My work grapples with the lived experience and materiality of the home by redrafting the imagery presented in Interior Design and Architectural publications. Through collage, painting, video and performance to camera I subvert the structured and predictable media’s language of desire by creating unusual viewing. At first glance, my work appears “homey”, as the magazine source material is evident, but as details register and accumulate, it becomes apparent that there is a tension between comfort and discomfort in the images. There is disruption and unpredictability in these inaccessible, aspirational spaces. You wouldn’t actually want to live there even though it feels like you might.
Cul-de-sac Island
(University of Waterloo, 2019-05-13) Stewart, Jordyn
Cul-de-sac Island is a multimedia installation that combines personal research, lens-based strategies and performative re-enactments to camera that engage in a self-reflective investigation of identity, place and territory. Juxtaposing elements of the natural and the unnatural, my work questions personal and collective assumptions about the landscape, while exploring the correlation between nature and nationhood. By re-positioning myself within familiar sites from my childhood, my work interrogates the suburban spaces that have influenced my understanding of nature and the ways in which these constructed environments instill a human privilege over the landscape.
Customer Service
(University of Waterloo, 2019-04-29) Allaby, Patrick
Customer Service is a half-hour storytelling performance that uses PowerPoint and drawing to discuss my experience working at a call centre in Moncton, New Brunswick. The performance uses this autofictional narrative to discuss labour in late capitalism and the toll it can take on mental health. The piece serves as a platform to combine a variety of my interests, from storytelling and drawing to pop-music, animation, and experimental theatre. Ultimately all of these elements fold back into Customer Service and contribute to the work’s exploration of the tension between my personal need to escape capitalism and inability to do so.
dollhouse: An Exhibition of Installation
(University of Waterloo, 2016-05-17) van Milligen, Carol-Anna
"dollhouse" is a dreamy, peachy, pretty little private space saturated with sickly sweetness. The installation consists of three rooms built inside the shell of a 1971 Airstream trailer, filled with objects, forms, and colors associated with conventional femininity. As a whole, "dollhouse" simultaneously asserts the value of this so-called “feminine” affinity for embellishment and color, and questions the ideals, assumptions, and expectations through which women and girls are jointly framed and perceived by society. In order to illuminate some of the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the work, this paper explores dollhouse through five interrelated sections: ambivalence, hyperfemininity, artifice, beauty, and sexuality.
Drawing Lines
(University of Waterloo, 2008-05-22T20:04:01Z) Raciborski, Monika Julia
My work uses process as a course of action that marks the death of moments through a continuous stream of consciousness. I metaphorically link disparate pieces of information to the human condition in order to present multiple readings through juxtaposition. I assemble both abstract and figurative subject matter in a collage-like manner through methods of cropping and fragmentation to symbolize the disjuncture I feel is indicative of how we experience the world through short-lived thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Dup-boug-a-dad
(University of Waterloo, 2016-05-16) Thomas, Aislinn
Dup-boug-a-dad is a video installation that is curious about different ways of being in the world. Its form and content address the body and some of the many ways of being bodied. In parts intervention, documentary, document, performance and music video, it features David Gunn, a friend of mine who has a physical and intellectual disability. David loves cheerleading. Living in rural Nova Scotia, as he does, his main access to the sport is through YouTube. The footage in Dup-boug-a-dad was taken when David visited Kitchener-Waterloo and practiced with the University of Waterloo cheerleading teams in 2015. David loves to sing. Being deaf, as he is, he sings in his own language. The song in Dup-boug-a-dad is, at least in part, about lifting a cheerleader up with one arm. He sang it while “hearing” his voice for the first time that we know of. This was made possible by his standing on a vibrotactile platform that vibrated in response to the sounds he made, translating his voice into a felt, tactile sensation. Two of these platforms and a vibrotactile bench are present in the gallery space. My artistic practice is quite varied in nature, so although I am exhibiting just one work in my MFA thesis show I wanted to write supporting documentation that spoke to the life and sustainability of a wide-ranging practice as a whole. As a result, the first section of this support document, How to Be In the World? touches on many of the concerns that currently inform my approach to art and life by grappling with title’s question. It’s written in a declarative (though not definitive) voice, and operates as a manifesto of sorts. I see it as both a record of my present stance and an aspirational text. While the concerns in How to Be In the World? have undoubtedly shaped my thesis exhibition in both obvious and subtle ways, the second section of this support document speaks more directly to, and about, this work. Dup-boug-a-dad: Process & Description and Installation describe the piece itself, its making, and the specifics of its life in the gallery.
Eternal Recurrence: String Theory
(University of Waterloo, 2007-05-15T20:36:00Z) Rizzo, Richard Joseph
The work in this exhibition is the result of philosophical contemplation and the concepts that followed from these moments. The moment that we find ourselves conscious, the moment in which we inhale or exhale is the focus of this work. Through the materiality and physicality of paint, I explore this moment. Paint thus acts as a metaphor for my body, having set parameters that dictate its cause and effect. The very nature of painting; its essence, is the moment of state change from a fluid material to a solid state. I use the method of process and tools that I invent to help express these concerns of eternal recurrence. I make paintings that make space visible and invisible.

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