Digital Commons Network^™

Retrieving Images From Tarnished Daguerreotypes Using X-Ray Fluorescence Imaging With An X-Ray Micro Beam With Tunable Energy, Tsun-Kong Sham, Y. Zou Finfrock, Qunfeng Xiao, Renfei Feng, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

We report recent observations using a synchrotron X-ray micro-beam to retrieve images from tarnished 19th century daguerreotypes. We confirm that high quality image can always be retrieved from tarnished plates using Hg Lα XRF as long as the bulk of the image particles and their distribution remains intact. We also report results from using tunable tender X-rays (2 - 7 keV) to conduct imaging in high vacuum at energy above the Ag L-edge and the Hg M-edge, extracting images using Ag Lα and Hg Mα, respectively among others (e.g., S to track corrosion). Images obtained with the surface sensitive total …

Trevor Paglen's Border Abstractions In The Age Of Machine Vision, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

Over the past two decades, machine vision and artificial intelligence (AI) have become integrated into many aspects of daily life, and with machines generating images for other machines, humans are no longer at the centre of the image world. To explore the implications of the age of machine vision, this article focuses on a selection of work by American artist Trevor Paglen made between 2008 and 2018. It examines the significance of the US-Mexico border region as a site of his investigations and the role of abstraction in repositioning machine vision within the human-centred visual language of art. The article …

Photography And 21st-Century Migration, Sarah Bassnett, Blessy Augustine

Visual Arts Publications

No abstract provided.

Family, Diaspora, And The Politics Of Care In Griselda San Martin’S The Wall , 2015-16, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

This article examines a series of photographs by Griselda San Martin, a Spanish journalist and documentary photographer based in New York City and Mexico City. The series focuses on the experiences of people at Friendship Park, a bi-national park located in the border region of San Diego, United States, and Tijuana, Mexico. Working in Tijuana, San Martin engaged with families as they attempted to connect with loved ones across the border in San Diego. Many of the people she met at Friendship Park had become separated from family members after living as undocumented migrants in the US and then being …

Rescue Politics: Richard Mosse’S Thermal Imaging And The Containment Of Migration, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

This article focuses on a body of work by Mosse that includes the multichannel video installation Incoming, shown as a 52:12 minute three-channel video installation with 7.3 surround sound, and the photographic series Heat Maps (2015–2017) (Fig. 1). While Incoming concentrates on migration routes, Heat Maps portrays the architecture of refugee camps.4 I consider how the artist’s use of thermal imaging and his immersive mode of documentary complicates tropes used to represent migration. I reflect on the way Mosse’s artwork intersects with a long-standing interest by practitioners and theorists of film and photography in the idea of the camera as …

The Retablos Of Teabo And Mani: The Evolution Of Renaissance Altars In Colonial Yucatán, C. Cody Barteet

Visual Arts Publications

From the turn to seventeenth through the early eighteenth century, three retablos (altarpieces) were created in Yucatán that relied on a similar Renaissance design. The retablos located in the ex-convents of Mani and Teabo all adopt the Spanish sixteenth-century Renaissance style of the Plateresque. Further, the retablos are connected by the inclusion of caryatid framing devices that establishes a strong affinity among the works. Two of the retablos are located in Mani: the Retablo of San Antonio de Padua and the Retablo of Nuestra Señora de Soledad (or sometimes called the Dolores Retablo). At Teabo is the Retablo de Santa …

Undocumented Migration And Political Community In Susan Meiselas's Crossings Photographs, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

In 1989, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948) photographed irregular border crossings in southern California. At the time, it was relatively easy for undocumented migrants from Central America and Mexico to cross between ports of entry, even as there was growing pressure on American officials to address border security.1 One photograph in Meiselas’s Crossings series depicts a border patrol officer apprehending a migrant off the interstate near Oceanside (fig. 1). Two torsos fill the center of the image. The officer grasps the man’s clothing, propelling him toward the nearby vehicle. With heads cut off by the frame and backs turned, …

Experiential Learning: Museum Of Ontario Archaeology And The Vindolanda Field School, Victoria Burnett

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Presentations

Focusing first on the Museum of Ontario Archaeology, the slides are meant to illustrate the program PastPerfect that I had learned how to use during my time there, as well as a snippet of the Maple Harvest blog post I had written, wherein I would explain the value I had found in writing it and the comments that the Curator made in returning it to me before publishing it. After that is a slide where I would explain the Google Arts and Culture page, what the plans were for me to contribute to it a bit as well as the …

Report On The Museum Of Ontario Archaeology Cel And The Vindolanda Field School, Victoria Burnett

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

In this report, Burnett discusses her experiences as an intern with the Museum of the Ontario Archaeology, and the opportunities she received taking part in the Vindolanda Field School. Having worked in the heritage field in various capacities for six years, Burnett found it to be immensely valuable to build upon her skills of research, critical thinking, and collaboration. Specifically, in the case of archaeology and museum-based conservation, Burnett focused her analysis on the differences between the practices in Ontario and in England as she experienced them at a variety of institutions and sites. Aside from this, the informational and …

Experiential Learning: Sasah Final Report, Elora Sinnott

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

Elora Sinnott revisits both her experiential-learning opportunities, one as a research assistant at Western and the other with Art 4 All Kids in London, ON. In describing her opportunities and the results, Elora focuses on the skills she developed, the impact the opportunities had on her career path, and the importance of instilling a love of the arts in children.

Perspectivas Transatlánticas De Una Serie Pasionaria Del Pintor Novohispano José Ibarra (1685-1756), Alena Robin

Hispanic Studies Publications

Este artículo estudia un ciclo pasionario firmado y fechado en 1744 por el afamado pintor novohispano José de Ibarra. El conjunto de 15 lienzos, ahora en una colección particular, no había sido catalogado dentro de la producción pictórica conocida del maestro. La serie fue adquirida por un exitoso mercader español activo en el puerto de Veracruz en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII. El ciclo ilustra consideraciones de transferencias culturales en el mundo hispano de aquella época y sugiere cuestionamientos en relación a los modelos globales de comunicación y de intercambio. La serie se analiza aquí desde varias perspectivas transatlánticas, …

Mapping The Presence Of Latin American Art In Canadian Museums And Universities, Alena Robin

Hispanic Studies Publications

This essay overviews how Canadian museums and universities have historically accessioned Latin American visual culture and identifies potential ways of sustaining interest, streamlining initiatives, and promoting access. The larger project aims at contributing to a hemispheric and transnational understanding of the history and growth in Canada of the field of Latin American art and its subfields of Pre-Columbian, colonial, modern, and contemporary art. While the study of art history among Canadian museums and universities has kept up with the decades-long interest in Latin American art and visual culture, there remain considerable challenges in bringing Latin American art to the forefront …

Art History & Mass Media: The Role Of Architecture In Narrative, Jacqueline Grassi

2017 Undergraduate Awards

Art history and visual culture is portrayed by popular media in various contexts, from blockbuster to documentary, and approached through vastly different methods, ranging from the perpetuation of popular myth to academic commentary. A dichotomy arises between representations of art history from the perspective of scholarly research and the appropriation of art history as a source for creative inspiration. A veritable academic approach is perceived to depict an accurate, factual engagement with visual culture, yet large crowds bring commercial success to sensational re-imaginings of history, despite an awareness of a removal from historical truth. However, this notion that there is …

Greek At Chartres, William S. A. Dale

Visual Arts Publications

This study of the so-called Headmaster of the West Portals of Chartres Cathedral attempts to demonstrate that this sculptor was probably a Greek, as suggested by Revoil.

First, it describes the present setting of the West Portals, and reviews the evidence for their change in location. Next, it distinguishes between the hand of the Head Master and those of his associates in the carving of the column figures of all three doorways, and describes his illusionistic use of low relief and a form of linear projection in the Maiestas Domini of the central tympanum.

A brief demonstration of the difference …

The Bioarchaeology Of Care, Lauren Ouellette

2014 Undergraduate Awards

In archaeology, human skeletal remains are often dealt with separately from their social context. However, by taking a biocultural approach to reconstruct both biological identity and sociocultural context, the discipline of bioarchaeology can be used to diminish this divide concerning the human body and can provide important perspectives on human behaviours. One such behaviour is caregiving, and this paper explores the ability of bioarchaeology to identify evidence of human caregiving from human remains. Tilley’s (2012) four-stage “bioarchaeology of care” methodology is reviewed as a framework for future researchers to follow. The capacity of bioarchaeology to interpret caregiving behaviour using theories …

The Bog Body As Mnemotope: Nationalist Archaeologies In Heaney And Tournier, Anthony Purdy

French Studies Publications

The sometimes beautifully preserved Iron Age bodies that used to turn up from time to time in the peat-bogs of Northwestern Europe have moved and intrigued writers since P.V. Glob published his classic archaeological account, The Bog People, in 1965. Locating the specificity of the literary bog body in its ability to compress time, to render the past visible in the present, the article seeks to read the figure as a mnemotope, defined provisionally as any chronotopic motif which manifests the presence of the past, the conscious or unconscious memory traces of a more or less distant period in the …

Unearthing The Past: The Archaeology Of Bog Bodies In Glob, Atwood, Hébert And Drabble, Anthony Purdy

French Studies Publications

Within the narrative poetics of the archaeological find, accounts of the discovery of beautifully preserved Iron Age bodies in the peat-bogs of Northwestern Europe constitute a particularly complex, well-defined and resonant subgenre. A reading of the genre’s founding text, P.V. Glob’s The Bog People, reveals a repertoire of tropes and topoï that will inform subsequent fictional treatments of bog body finds. Arguing that the poetic specificity of the bog body lies in its extraordinary capacity to abolish temporal distance and mediate between past and present, this essay seeks to define the figure as a special kind of chronotopic motif, or …

The Science Behind Francesco Borromini's Divine Geometry, John G. Hatch

Visual Arts Publications

No abstract provided.

Machian Epistemology And Its Part In František Kupka's Painterly Cognition Of Reality, John G. Hatch

Visual Arts Publications

A consensus has emerged amongst art historians that portrays the work the Czech painter, František Kupka (1871-1957), as fluctuating between differing styles and never resolving itself into one straightforward and single-minded direction beyond abstraction. Visually this is true, but for Kupka the visual was secondary in that it plays a subsidiary role to the process involved in the creation of the work itself. A failure to properly understand this process has resulted in an inaccurate reading of Kupka's art, essentially missing the point that his paintings embody in their imagery the cognitive process involved in their creation. Significantly, as I …

Nature's Laws And The Changing Image Of Reality In Art And Physics: A Study Of The Impact Of Modern Physics On The Visual Arts, 1910-1940, John George Hatch

Visual Arts Publications

No abstract provided.