Digital Commons Network^™

Confined By Darkness, Alyssa C. Sweeney

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In addition to my Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, this dossier is arranged with an extended artist statement, documentation of a photographic series, a case study on artist Brian Ulrich, and a curriculum vitae. These portions of the thesis exhibit the themes and pursuit that inform my studio practice in photography. The comprehensive artist statement describes the attachments and personal background that informs my overall approach. The second chapter consists of a series of images titled, Confined by Darkness, which is an archive of significant spaces documented at night that evoke nostalgia or are prominent in my everyday …

The Other Neighbour Of El Otro Lado, Anahi Gonzalez Teran

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This written thesis is in support of a Master’s of Fine Arts degree at Western University. The thesis dossier explores themes of Mexican migration in Canada engaging with ideas of human labour and various indexes of Mexican culture, trade, and economic exchange. The thesis also consists of documentation of public exhibitions and other various creative production components including videos, photography and multi-media installations. This thesis is separated into three major sections. The first is an extended artist statement which outlines my artistic research and my creative process as an artist. The second is a portfolio of photographic documentation of artworks …

Muddying The Lens: Photographs Of The Canadian Expeditionary Force, Sarah Leilani Hart

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the course of the First World War 4, 507 photographs were produced by the Canadian War Records Office. These photographs were used as propaganda to promote victory overseas and were popularized in exhibitions, magazines, books, and other wartime ephemera. Produced simultaneously to this official record was private soldiers’ photography which is comprised of albums, scrapbooks, personal snapshots, and soldiers’ portraits and communicate a narrative that is both similar and disparate from the official record. This thesis examines the ways in which private and official photographs were formed and how they were used to communicate soldiers’ wartime experience. It argues …

Rui(N)Ation: Narratives Of Art And Urban Revitalization In Detroit, Jessica Ks Cappuccitti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation considers the City of Detroit as a case study for analyzing the complex role that artists and art institutions are playing in the potential re-growth and revitalization of the city. I specifically look at artists and arts organizations who are working against the popular narrative of Detroit as “ruin city.” Their efforts create counter narratives that emphasize stories of survival and showcase vibrant communities. By focussing on artist-led and institutional initiatives, I emphasize the importance of art in both community and narrative-building.

This research has taken the form of a written dissertation and two adapted projects, and positions …

More Than A Spasm, Less Than A Sign: Queer Masculinity In American Visual Culture, 1915-1955, Thomas D. Baynes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This research considers the contribution of visual culture to queer masculinity among white American men during a profound reorientation both in popular understandings and the practical conditions of eroticism between men. From about 1915 to 1955 a pragmatic libidinal economy centered on the theatrical effeminacy of “fairies” was displaced by one founded on the presumption of strongly delineated and relatively fixed hetero- and homo-sexual identities. Although medical discourses about queerness had been developing since the middle of the Nineteenth Century in Europe, what Americans of the opening decades of the twentieth century knew about queerness they learned unsystematically from hearsay, …

Exhibiting Human Rights: Making The Means Of Dignity Visible, Amy J. Freier

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the visual communication of human dignity. With the opening of human rights museums, such as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, human dignity’s visual communication has been exposed to new issues of corporeal and mediated expression. In response to photographic mediation and theory, which often poses individuals as central claimants or possessors of human dignity, human rights museums openly suggest that communities and relationships between individuals are central to human dignity’s visibility outside of the law. As such, I propose that curatorial mediation is important to the contemporary apprehension of human dignity because its notable forms – …

Liminal Space: Representations Of Modern Urbanity, Matthew Tarini

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This Master’s Thesis Dossier is made up of three sections including a Case Study, a Comprehensive Artist Statement, and a Practice Documentation section. The case study analyzes George Shaw’s artistic practice and explores his interest in memory and place. In the artist statement I discuss my painting practice, which explores how the structure of urban and suburban environments affect people’s moods and behaviours and their social connections. I outline the art historical precedents for this type of subject matter and my work’s connection with Romanticism and photography. I also include research done on urban design by Jan Gehl and Charles …

In Time But Not Of Time: Jessica Eaton And Erin Shirreff's Counterpoints Of View, Ruth Skinner

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study is situated within an ongoing investigation of photography's ontology, objecthood, and materiality. Jessica Eaton, Erin Shirreff and their cohort continue a conceptual tradition of experimentation with photography's singularity, plasticity and referential nature. The contemporary photographic is both the culmination of and contributor to our conceptions of time, space, and subjectivity. In the post-digital era it is the access point for new durational and phenomenological encounters, even as it extends backwards to reinvigorate past aesthetic approaches. Shirreff's Signatures and Monograph series shift the familiar sensory qualities of the sculptural object onto the photographic, opening up its two-dimensional confines. In …

Hand-Eye, Michael S. Pszczonak

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This integrated article thesis has two distinct chapters: The first chapter is a case study on a selection of works by German artist Sigmar Polke using Hal Fosters writing on the historical and neo-avant-gardes. The study traces the way Polke revisits the first avant-garde project and comprehends its attempted traumatic rift from dominant ideologies for the first time. The second chapter is a comprehensive artist statement which simultaneously outlines the theoretical underpinnings of my work as well as the process leading to the body of work on display at McIntosh Gallery. The research sets out to answer the following question: …

Preservationist Aesthetics: Memory, Trauma And The New Global Enclosures, Kate Lawless

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation is a comparative study of the role of memory in four intersecting spheres of contemporary cultural production: (memory) art, (war) photography, (trauma) literature and the (memory) museum. It argues that the sites of memory in this study—including museums of memory and human rights, the famous Sonderkommando photographs and experimental works in conceptual art and literature—are characterized by a preservationist aesthetic, which names the principle of preservation at the heart of new practices of cultural resistance and new forms of enclosure through which social, political and economic exploitation are reframed, as aesthetic problems, in terms of loss and erasure. …

A Photographer Develops: Reading Robinson, Rejlander, And Cameron, Jonathan R. Fardy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study examines the historical emergence of the photographer by turning to the writings of three important photographers of the nineteenth century: Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813-1875), and Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). The photographic works of each of these photographers has been the subject of much historical and interpretive analysis, but their writings have yet to receive significant scholarly attention. It is the claim of this study that this archive opens a new set of questions: What did it mean to claim: “I am a photographer” at photography’s advent? How did these individuals come to identify themselves …

Turning To See Otherwise, Jennifer L. Martin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis dossier, in combination with an exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery, considers whether an archival collection can generate an alternative narrative other than that which may already exist in the original film and photographic documents. Rather than represent a singular truth, I seek to articulate the transformative realities of collective memory by re-orienting the material for broader viewer identification. I have mined photographic and filmic materials from a personal family archive to focus fragments that specifically record the gesture of the turning face—the turning towards the observer. This “turn” then includes both the turn towards the initial film-maker embedded …

The Things We Know But Cannot Explain: An Inquiry Into The Nature And Significance Of Artistic Knowledge As A Subset Of The Larger Category Of Tacit Knowledge, David Kemp

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is an inquiry into the nature and significance of artistic knowledge, as a subset of the larger category of tacit knowledge. Art, both in its production and reception, encompasses many diverse forms of knowledge, so by artistic knowledge I am referring to the intangible components of art that do not conform to traditional notions of codified, propositional or explicit knowledge.

Such forms of qualitative and subjective knowledge are undervalued within our current Western context, which is dominated by a rational, objective and scientific mode of thought. This is primarily due to the impossibility of quantifying such intangible knowledge, …

A Photographic Ontology: Being Haunted Within The Blue Hour And Expanding Field, Colin E. Miner

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What are the current boundaries of the photographic and how can an ontology of photography take form as a material and conceptual program of research? Responding to the difficulty inherent in any definitive attempt to grasp photography, this dissertation places emphasis on the less determined act of evoking as a model of dialogue, and engagement, with the photographic. This dissertation is composed of two parts that engage both the question “What is photography?” and the ontological anxiety that shadows it. These lines of questioning are pursued in two ways: directly through considering the qualities of the photographic as elucidated by …