Fine Arts
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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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Item Becoming the Poem(University of Waterloo, 2024-05-31) Beerdat, AshleyMy 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.Item In The Mix: An Exhibition of Black Diasporic Studies, Remix Culture, Astrology and Sound(University of Waterloo, 2024-05-27) Charles, Charlie StarAs a Black biracial woman disconnected from my heritage, I research Afrosonic music histories to connect to my Afro Caribbean culture, while gaining a deeper understanding of the historical and social context of music in the broader Black diaspora. My thesis exhibition, In The Mix, encapsulates this research through a site-specific, interactive installation that incorporates sound, music, collage, personal family photographs and archives, disc-jockeying and experimental turntablism. In addition, as a unique expression of my multifaceted identity, I incorporate astrology as a theoretical and formal framework to analyze unseen elements behind musical releases, as well as to create sonic compositions that evoke ideas of time and space. Through my engagement with remix culture, I utilize both audio and visual samples from existing works and create new works. This process of recombination and repurposing of existing work has enabled me to promote a more nuanced and varied understanding of the complexities of Black identity and diaspora. I embrace a more inclusive and diverse range of perspectives in hopes that my work can resonate with a wider audience and contribute to a more comprehensive narrative of the Black experience.Item kupferschmidt / kupferschmid / kupferschmidte(University of Waterloo, 2024-04-29) Smith, Jillkupferschmidt / kupferschmid / kupferschmidte is a sculpture and installation-based thesis exhibition which uses materiality and autobiography to question the role of preservation in my life, as a Jewish woman. In this body of work, I have focused on materials related to my cultural lineage (such as copper, jewellery, and pickles), as well as those associated with preservation (including paraffin wax and glass jars). I use these to develop metaphors that demonstrate the tension I feel between the responsibility to hold on to the past and the natural desire to grow. Likewise, metaphorical containers delineate the work: tethered, suspension, and potential. These containers also serve as signifiers of time, grounding the work in a cyclical relationship through past, present, and future.Item New Day. New Painting.(University of Waterloo, 2023-07-06) Garbett, BrentThe thesis I’m presenting is an investigation of the perceptual experience of my day-to-day life as a student undertaking the graduate program at the University of Waterloo. It consists of observational paintings, which are organized into four groups detailing my home, the campus, my six-week research trip (June – July 2022) to Charleston, South Carolina, and the walk to my car—an experience that was interrupted when a stand of trees that seemed almost familial were unexpectedly cut down.Item In Search of Wholeness(University of Waterloo, 2023-05-29) Laratta, ClaraIn Search of Wholeness is an exhibition of sculpture, alternative photography, and video. The work examines connections to healing and being. “The English ‘health’ derives from Old English ‘hælth’, which is related to ‘whole’ ‘a thing that is complete in itself’ (Oxford Languages). But what constitutes being whole? How does one know if they are whole or complete in themselves? And, if one is not whole or complete, how does one become, or ensure that they are? Is wholeness even possible if everything is in a state of flux: transient, ephemeral, and uncertain? Is completeness something to move towards? My research is a quest to answer these questions. It examines what I think I know, ways of healing and being, and familial connections. The artworks utilize food waste, found materials, construction matter, alternative photography techniques, and video, as material archives documenting aspects of healing. This cyclical story of healing draws on a lifelong journey with chronic illness. It moves between and merges, modalities, and connections to look at personal and collective healing. The works reference fragility and strength, dissonance and connection, loss, and hope – in essence life.Item rinse and repeat(University of Waterloo, 2023-05-26) Wilson, Stephanierinse and repeat is a collaborative thesis exhibition of art created by my plant collaborators and I that uses the visual language of sculpture, photography, performance, audio narratives, and collaboration to question the devaluation of life within imperial-capitalist culture. I work intimately with Fungi and Moss through attempts at listenings to seek to unlearn individualism and apparati of separation. This thesis exhibition consists of both indoor and outdoor components, as collaboration with the Land is vital to redefining the personhood or beinghood of autonomous beings and the white-cube gallery is an inhospitable environment for my collaborators. Materials range from gathered wooden limbs to Soil, sawdust, plywood, copper gilding, gold gilding, and photography on paper, as well as Moss and Fungi. Each artwork has undergone a transformative process through iterative choices that lean towards interspecies collaboration and away from scientific-mechanistic indoctrination. By working alongside different Fungi and Mosses, I have come to realize that my upbringing in the imperial-capitalist system was unethical, violent, and delusional. The breadth of my research is sustained through thoughtful actions that have real life consequences, as all life is intrinsically linked and ethically bound together. The aim of this thesis is to address alienating ways of living, making, and behaving, and extending collaboration to gallery visitors through walking tours and performance. This accompanying support paper has three sections that articulate artistic methodology and theoretical contexts for the thesis artwork. The first section, “Intangible Transference: A Reevaluation of Beinghood”, is a mixture of descriptions, reflections, and conceptual underpinnings about each artwork. Forming the pieces began with simply connecting to beings in habitats, recording auditory reflections of site-specific areas, constructing, or sculpting habitats, and taking meditative walks through the in-between spaces of the urban and peri-urban landscape. This research is inclusive of experiencing and observing relationships in the more-than-human world, making vessels for collaborators, extensively reading and learning about and from Moss, Fungi, decolonization, and habitats, growing Fungi and Moss in multiple ways, and continually processing and synthesizing the many failures that come with such a non-linear practice. In this work I attempt to develop interrelation between decolonial practices, relational ways of knowing, and climate change. Through this work I seek to revaluate beinghood as an essential facet for moving through the climate crisis. Relational ways of knowing and living are intrinsic to the Indigenous Nations of the Turtle Island and the Sámi people of Sápmi. In weaving together the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Leo Killsback, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Merlin Sheldrake, a comprehensive understanding of relational ways of living works towards an appreciation for the complexities of interspecies life. These connective ways of living are supported by the theoretical writings of Achille Mbembe, Kathryn Yusoff, David Graeber, and Ariella Azoulay by contemplating necropolitics, white geologics, imperial archives, and imperial taxonomy. The second section of the paper, “Methodology on the Haldimand Tract”, is an overview of the methods I applied in making the thesis artworks, and how certain choices became necessary. Lastly, in the section “Contemporary Practices as a form of Oneness,” I discuss establishing listening as a foundational practice to building interspecies bonds through the writings of Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, and Katya García-Antón and Liv Brissach. By examining the artistic works of Paula Kramer and Máret Ánne Sara, I unfold an understanding of what listening is, leading to a synthesis of how deeply embedded ritual is in art, and how art blurs the lines of living with intention.Item Something to soften the blow(University of Waterloo, 2023-04-27) Martin, SarahSomething to soften the blow is a visual arts exhibition featuring photography, textile, and video artworks that explore feminist critiques of representation in film, specifically looking at the slasher genre. What began as a casual consumption of horror films bloomed into a binge-watching experience over the last 3 years during the COVID-19 pandemic, which inspired the themes incorporated into this body of work. In referencing select films from the 1970’s to 2020’s, I consider parallels to contemporary culture and how patriarchy and misogyny feature in representations of real and fictional women. This text is split into twelve subtitled chapters that reflect the approach to my artistic practice, choice of materials, and conceptual underpinnings.Item Care Packages(University of Waterloo, 2023-04-25) De Vuono, Christine CarmenThis 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.Item Heavy as a Cloud(University of Waterloo, 2022-08-18) Williams, Amber LeeHeavy as a Cloud is a collection of phenomena that alludes to the fragility and transience of life; clouds drifting away, waves rolling in, flowers fading in the sun, a lingering fragrance, and crumbling sandcastles. Using photographic and sculptural mediums, this exhibition considers human experiences such grief and memory, mediated through everyday objects and elements of nature, to represent states of impermanence. Exploring how grief can be contained within objects and photographs, but also felt in the world around us, this work investigates some of the ways in which we contain loss. Using ephemeral themes and materials, the work asks the questions: How do you hold something that doesn’t exist? And how will we be remembered after we die? This work resides in a place of desire or longing to hold things that cannot be held, to fix a moment that is gone, to make physical things out of the intangible.Item Borrowers and Bullies(University of Waterloo, 2022-05-17) Irish, JacobBorrowers 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.Item Borrowers and Bullies(University of Waterloo, 2022-05-17) Hall, JulieBorrowers 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.Item Seedlings(University of Waterloo, 2022-05-05) Galarneau, SarahSeedlings is a fictional, constructed ecosystem. It is a garden-like installation consisting of a coming-together of numerous printed, gathered, gifted, and reconstituted components that “cross-pollinate” the gallery space. This biomimetic amalgamation is characterized by themes of collaboration, cyclicality, potentiality, and adaptability in both its process and visual aesthetic. In its form and execution, Seedlings is open to various modes of transformation and myriad future iterations. My methodology is defined by what I have called “recuperate, reconstitute, reconstruct.” What can I collect from what was once destined for the landfill? Will it eventually decompose? Can it combine with other elements to form something new? In blurring the boundary between plant life and the built world, Seedlings engages in breaking down the outdated Western theoretical binary between what is and isn’t considered “nature.” My research, presented in this support document, represents a fusion of two subjects that deeply fascinate me: ecology and visionary fiction. As a strange and fictitious environment, Seedlings reflects my interest in visionary worldbuilding and alternative worlds. This combination of subjects reflects my desire to imagine radically hopeful futures beyond the status quo and the current ecological crisis. A seed is an oft-used metaphor for an idea. “Planting a seed” can be a reference to how new ideas are formed in one’s mind. If a seed is an idea, perhaps a seedling is an idea that is taking physical shape.Item Put a finger down if you've ever been personally victimized by social media algorithms(University of Waterloo, 2022-04-27) Guenette, AshleyPut a finger down if you’ve ever been personally victimized by social media algorithms is a collection of critical reflections on embedded social media microaggressions reflecting acts of racism, body shaming, the glorification of mental health disorders (such as ADHD, depression, anxiety and eating disorders), as well as ‘That Girl’ routines, and the biased algorithms that make them tick. Using strategies such as humour and exaggeration to my advantage, I translated this digital content into hand-based methods (drawing, painting, soft sculpture, and linoleum carving) to reinterpret this seemingly playful content and to offer the viewer time to reflect on the more hateful sides of social media which are normalized by Pop Culture.Item forms of relief(University of Waterloo, 2022-01-19) Pearson, SaraI am calling this paper, and the body of work that it supports: forms of relief. The word relief has a couple of meanings: in the sculptural sense, the Latin root word relievo means to “raise or to lighten”, visually resulting in sculpture that combines two- and three-dimensional forms, where the sculpture remains supported by a background of the same material. Relief as an emotion, means to feel a lightness after a period of anxiety, stress or pain has been experienced and has passed. The artwork in my thesis examines the dual reality of relief and chronic pain through material and conceptual explorations. To live with chronic illness often means to live in friction with the hyper-performance of modern western society; to live in resistance to behaviors of individualism, acceleration and competition. It is my opinion that the labour of illness is connected to every other aspect of an ill life. For me, this raises questions about the role that art can play in cognitive and physical restoration practices. What can communicate ideas of imperfection, simulation, trust, time, and importantly, support? How can I both maintain my physical well-being, and my love of building things and fabrication? The sculptures in this exhibition manifest the ideas, philosophies, physical labour, energy expenditure, conversations, research and heart that has made up the last two and a quarter years of my life as I worked to heal and rehabilitate my body and mind, in tandem with making the art presented here.Item Rat, Plastic, Wood(University of Waterloo, 2021-08-19) Simmons, MariaRat, Plastic, Wood is an exhibition of hybrid sculptures centering the physical manifestation of interspecies intra-action and natural forms of contamination-as-collaboration. In the gallery space a central structure of wood and plastic becomes the locus of boundaryless activity where soil, yeast, plants, fermentation, hardtack and garbage all share space and interact. While making your way, you may collide with fruit flies while inhaling the aromatics of fermenting pine, noodles, dirt, and rotting banana. You may hear the low rumble of a dehumidifier, ultrasonic rat communication, and possibly the wet sizzle of dry soil sucking up water. Taking direction from the artmaking process I have chosen to approach the writing of my support paper in a hybrid manner, combining the conventional essay with moments of irregularity—dialogue, manifesto, material and dialogical lists, recipes— forms of writing that resist conformity. In this way, the paper not only supports the work, but occupies the same conceptual and aesthetic space. I will be drawing from feminist theorist Karen Barad in exploring the concept of lichenization, using the theory of intra-action to decentralize the human and refocus our understanding of relationship-based living. Concepts of contamination-as-collaboration will be based on ideas developed by philosopher Alexis Shotwell and anthropologist Anna Tsing. These concepts will provide a framework for understanding my approach to developing artwork. I will present these ideas and explain the importance of hybrid artistic methodologies that guide my artistic outcomes. The three sections: Rat, Plastic, and Wood which form the exhibition title structure the paper: Rat introduces the exhibition and sets a conceptual framework for the artwork, Plastic speaks to the theoretical dimensions of the work, in particular, the Capitalocene and the need for transformative metabolization, and Wood concludes by discussing my materials, methodologies and processes. That said, although these divisions exist, be prepared for cross-contamination.Item Pacing the House(University of Waterloo, 2021-08-04) Perreault, CarrieSurveying my through a feminist approach to autotheory, Pacing the House is an exhibition that uses material inquiry to reframe personal trauma into a site of investigation. By creating systems of organization—categorizing, formatting, grouping—I work against dissociation to create meaningful connections in the physical world and use this process-based method as a form of knowledge gathering. By temporarily suspending external and dominant narratives that have upheld the stories I have repeatedly told myself, I recover and articulate my personal experiences through the creation of objects, installations and drawings that reflect these conceptual intensions. In my research, I seek ways to dismantle gendered and psychological abuse and to formulate those results in an experiential language while referencing residential architecture and childhood memories.Item In Places Rarely Seen(University of Waterloo, 2021-05-25) Blackburn, JordanIn Places Rarely Seen is an interdisciplinary exhibition bringing together print installation, video, photography, sound and text. This thesis exhibition considers my own shifting perception of what Nature is and how I relate to it. This shift is informed by my lived experiences as someone from a French settler background, exploring what it means to create ecologically focused art, temporal investigations, Indigenous ways of knowing Nature and land, as well as the similarities and differences between art and science. There are four sections: Poetry and Narrative; (Authentic) Experience; Temporality; and The Environmental Crisis. A self-authored poem bookends each section—as a trio the poems contextualize my experience of, with, and in Nature.Item 1b, black legs, 52"(University of Waterloo, 2021-04-30) Mitchell, Karice1b, 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.Item The Chicken Is Just Dead First(University of Waterloo, 2021-04-30) Rowe, RacquelMy 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.Item shrimpychip YouTube(University of Waterloo, 2020-05-22) Wijshijer, B.shrimpychip YouTube is a series of YouTube videos that explore the ways in which digital intimacy and capitalism intersect. The performances, designed for YouTube, strategically exploit emotional responses to the body, the home, and notions of privacy in order to highlight the counterintuitive relationships embodied in digital capitalism. The structural aesthetics of social platforms are deliberately employed in my videos to stress the strangeness of these new economic, cultural, social and personal relationships. In documenting myself using the algorithmic structures embedded in these systems, the work functions as a digital archive of actions and perceptions, providing a firsthand account of the body and thoughts as they are mediated by technology. By tirelessly following trends to the point of ridiculousness, the online persona of shrimpychip empathizes with the internet culture while simultaneously highlighting our vulnerability within these systems.