Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Marvelous Monsters, Thomas Bourque

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Thesis Dossier, together with the MFA Thesis Exhibition Marvelous Monsters (2021), presents: a Comprehensive Artist Statement; Practice Documentation; a Case Study on Canadian artist David Altmejd; a Bibliography; and my curriculum vitae. The Practice Documentation section of this dossier highlights key pieces of my creative explorations over my time in the Visual Arts Department at Western University as well as photographic documentation of Marvelous Monsters. Taken as a whole, this MFA Thesis Dossier explores and situates immersive digital installation studio practice with research into beauty, abjection, monstrosity, hybridity, Surrealism, and speculative worlding as guided …

Unearthing Strata And Changing Waters: A Landscape For Today, Mallory P. Burrell

Masters Theses, 2020-current

My current practice culminates in generative acts that respond to the objects that I collect from Blacks Run in Harrisonburg, VA. The writing and artworks are extensions of my interest in hybridity and spaces where organic and artificial matter intersect. This thesis provides a conceptual framework for Unearthing Strata and Changing Waters: A Landscape for Today, an MFA body of work by Mallory Burrell.

Chinese-American Landscape, Jessica Wen

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Cultural hybridity is an unwillingness to succumb to the notion of choosing sides when it comes to mixed heritage and culture. The approach taken to identity has a place in the artistic sphere as well. Through an investigation of my art practice in painting alongside a contemporary and historical context, the hybrid space between Chinese and Western landscape painting is explored and determined. The goals of nature depicted through distorted perspective, abstraction and simplification of objects, and emphasis on texture are techniques employed by both artistic spheres. By utilizing these goals and mixing materials of both Chinese and Western painting, …

Imaginative Geographies: Visualising The Poetics Of History And Space, Clive Barstow

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This essay presents a visual dialogue about our relationship to place. I adopt Henri Lefebvre’s model of cumulative trialectics (1991) as a new thirdspace that more accurately represents the complexities of modern day geographies and hybrid communities by extending the binary analysis of the past and present and beyond the real and the imagined. Trialectics expand our understanding beyond physical geographies by suggesting a cerebral space that searches for new meaning and is therefore more radically open to additional otherness and toward a continuing expansion of [human] spatial knowledge and imagination.

Julia Lossau describes thirdspace as a space that ‘…tends …

Betwixt / Between: Hybridity In Asian American And Christian Identities, Sherry Xiao

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Hybridity is defined as the fusion of worlds that were once separate in one’s self. Both cultural and religious identity are sites of hybridity and dialogue with one another to shape conceptions of sacred and profane. My research explores historical accounts and anecdotes in which cultural understanding informs expressions of faith. My practice takes elements of Eastern and Western visual culture and art history and frames them within a Christian perspective through painting, printmaking, and installation. By participating in the legacy of religious art through a hybrid lens, I seek to adopt cultural ownership of Christianity.

Red Detachment Of Women And The Enterprise Of Making ‘Model’ Music During The Chinese Cultural Revolution, Clare Sher Ling Eng

Music Faculty Scholarship

Artworks produced with official sanction during periods marked by turmoil and human suffering are challenging subjects for scholars who would like to discuss them in a fair and responsible manner. If they aestheticize the works’ form and political affiliation, how would they be doing justice to these works whose creation and content are so meshed with the politics of their time? On the other hand, can an approach that takes ideology into account be developed that does not appear to ignore, condone or support the odious acts of violence associated with those periods? This article explores the latter question with …