Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 Bassnet

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 …

In Society's Shadow: Identifying Structural Violence In Muna, A Burial Community From Late Intermediate Period (1100 - 1470 Ce) Pachacamac, Peru., Ashley C. Ward

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Structural violence (SV) highlights how social structures harm communities via inequities in health, risk of trauma, and post-mortem treatment, however its applicability outside of Euroamerican capitalist contexts is unclear. Fifty-nine individuals from the MUNA cemetery (Pachacamac, Perú) from the Late Intermediate to Late Horizon Periods (1100-1532 CE) were analysed for evidence of SV. Nonspecific stress markers, osteoarthritis, pathological dental conditions, and physical trauma were recorded and compared as they related to age, sex and/or status and then contextualised using the Spanish Chronicles, ethnographic, and archaeological research. Inequities in resource or labour distribution but not amount to SV, but SV did …

Photography And 21st-Century Migration, Sarah Bassnet, 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 Bassnet

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 Bassnet

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 …

Art, Work: Subsumption, Posthumanism And Artistic Responses To Surveillance Capitalism, Anna Mirzayan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation brings together multiple discourses, including surveillance studies, autonomist Marxism and posthumanism, as the groundwork for a novel discussion of contemporary visual art— in particular surveillance art, that is, art that addresses and problematizes the omnipresent digital monitoring now part of everyday life. Because in this dissertation contemporary art is defined as necessarily political, aesthetic (in the Kantian sense) and responsive to conditions of current history and society, I use Marxist theory to identify the particular features of contemporary capitalism that this art is responding to. I first characterize post-Fordist capitalism, focusing on the increasing reliance on extracting network …

Classical Reception In The Pre-Revolutionary Art Of Jacques Louis David, Christopher Neibert

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

No abstract provided.

Doris Mccarthy: Life And Work, Sydney T. Mcarthur

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This project involved research for Prof. John Hatch’s monograph on the Canadian landscape artist Doris McCarthy, with the objective of completing all preliminary research by the end of the internship period. The resulting book will be published by the Art Canada Institute with an expected publication date of Fall 2023.

Attached includes a powerpoint/video summary of my research and what I learned. As well as an essay, and proposed sub-section of the book, titled McCarthy as a Woman Artist, which goes into detail on how McCarthy's life and career corresponds with social issues at the time.

Life In Between: Prehispanic Settlement Patterns Of The Carabamba Valley, Northern Peru, Amedeo Sghinolfi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is an archaeological study of the Carabamba Valley (ca. 150 - 3,500 m.a.s.l.) in Northern Peru, which aims to reconstruct settlement patterns through the longue durée (ca. 1800 B.C. - A.D. 1532). This study also documents the relations occupants of this frontier zone maintained with neighboring polities on the Peruvian North Coast (Virú Valley) and in the Northern Highlands. The valley features the resource-rich ecological niche called chaupiyunga, fed by rainwater that flows towards the Pacific Ocean and by a number of springs, where crops like coca, fruits, and vegetables can be easily grown. The Carabamba Valley also …

Neoliberalism, Institutionalism, And Art, Declan Hoy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As contemporary art has expanded to encompass further disparate activities under its umbrella, the various institutions of art can be looked to as the only constant and defining characteristic of art. These institutions are often seen in sharp contrast to spontaneous collectivism, the real, and radical creativity—attributes deeply valued within contemporary art. This creates a troubling situation in which institutions are seen as limiting the possibility of what art could be, and artworks are perceived as needing to escape the very institutions which define them in order to be deemed worthy. In this structure, contemporary art follows and validates the …

No, Not Forgot - Were Unable To Reach: Literary Readings Of Desire In Land Art, Ioana Dragomir

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis provides a literary reading of desire in contemporary land art. Using literature as a tool to supplement more traditional theory, an analysis of desire may become poetic, open-ended, and allow for interdisciplinary slippage. The chapters are structured as case studies which explore the use of natural light in James Turrell’s skyspaces and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves; the function of distance in Walter de Maria’s Lighting Field and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red; and passages of time in Ana Mendieta’s tableau works and siluetas alongside Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva. The seeking out of desire in these works …

Mozart And Genius: Music And Philosophy, Aidan Witvoet

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This output poster serves as an overview to my efforts and responsibilities throughout the duration of the internship. Here I also showcase a brief sample of the concepts and areas of exploration within which I have been immersed, both in regards to the the content of the book I am helping to prepare for publishing as well as accompanying readings and discussions.

Exhibitions As Artworks - Research Output, Kaitlyn German

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Slide 1: Hello, my name is Kaitlyn German and I was the USRI Intern of Professor John Hatch this summer.

Slide 2: The goal of my USRI internship under Professor Hatch was to conduct research and find academic articles for Professor Hatch to aid in the design of a university undergraduate course. As such, there was a steady amount of research that was required in order to properly find information on the topics that Professor Hatch requested. To further my researching skills, I attended various Professional Development sessions including: Intro to Literature Searches and Information Evaluation, wherein I learned about …

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 …

(End)Zones And (Out)Fields Of Production: Contemporary Conditions Of Labor And Artistic Critique, Stephanie G. Anderson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In a 2013 exhibition publication titled It’s the Political Economy, Stupid!, John Roberts made the observation that “Over the last ten years we have become witness to an extraordinary assimilation of art theory and practice into the categories of labor and production.” Whereas once art claimed for itself a critical capacity in relation to the larger system of capitalist domination by its status as a putatively ‘autonomous’ sphere of production from which it leveraged its difference and critique, today it is largely acknowledged that there is no longer any such ‘outside’ to be aspired to. If, in the recent …

The Habits Of Settlement: A Critical Phenomenology Of Settlerness, Deanna L. Aubert

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis investigates the role of settlers in maintaining settlement in Canada. I problematize settler bodies to deliberate on their potential for performing decolonization. My discussion seeks to complicate theoretical approaches that position the onto-epistemological stance of the settler as their impediment to decolonizing action. Drawing from the fields of phenomenology and affect theory, I discuss habit formation in bodies. I use case studies that discuss settler-Indigenous land relations to ground these theories of habit. I look to Indigenous leaders, artists and scholars, who offer valuable insights into the habituations of settlement as an institutionalized arrangement and a mode of …

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

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, …

Indisciplined Ceramic Outhouses And Blob-Like Glass Bunnies: Four Case Studies On Canadian Prairie Ceramics And Glass, Julia Krueger

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The field of craft has been dominated by debates surrounding types of objects and material, how-tos, lists, and genealogies, and today there is an increasing turn towards craft theories which do not necessarily address an object. This study brings the object back into craft discourse. “Indisciplined Ceramic Outhouses and Blob-like Glass Bunnies: Four Case Studies on Canadian Prairie Ceramics and Glass” is an object-inspired study of the work and craft-related practices of Victor Cicansky (Saskatchewan), Ione Thorkelsson (Manitoba), Marty Kaufman (Alberta), Altaglass (Alberta), and Mireille Perron (Alberta).

Part one of this dissertation focuses on Cicansky and part two focuses on …

Encountering Others: Degeneration, Distortion, And Disability In Interwar German Visual Culture, 1918-1933, Kathryn Carney

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis project examines the interrelationships of Weimar Körperkultur (“body culture”), interwar photographic practices broadly known as “Neues Sehen,” and Verist “Neue Sachlichkeit” painting to interrogate visual representations of bodily difference in Weimar media and art. Through close analysis of select case studies in Weimar film, photography, and painting, I argue that the lines between aesthetic, sociopolitical, and bodily deviance are blurred by many artists of the period. Such focus on the body as the site of an intermedial, interdisciplinary debate about aesthetic, social, political, and national “values” has historically been overlooked by scholars. I ultimately …

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 …

Duration And Depravity: Religious And Secular Temporality In Puritanism And The American Gothic, Taylor Kraayenbrink

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Duration and Depravity identifies a temporality of “sinful feeling” operating in the archive of Puritan writings of personal piety, such as diaries, autobiographies, conversion narratives, and sermons, and persisting into early American gothic literature. This temporality of sinful feeling is an attempt to discipline the self through temporal projection oriented towards the theological fact and religiously experienced feeling of sinfulness. Duration and Depravity engages with the proliferation of postsecular criticism in American literature studies generally, and Puritan studies more specifically. Postsecular criticism in literary studies is a style of historicism that reconsiders its primary archive’s position in newly complicated narratives …

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.

The Simultaneous Book: Women's Writing In Contemporary Art, Maryse Lariviere

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Novels written by women authors who don’t adhere to the classification “visual artist” are nonetheless gaining momentum in today's contemporary art world. Yet works by authors such as Chris Kraus or Catherine Millet are often not recognized as artist’s novels because their authors are not or/and do not consider themselves to be visual artists. I contend that we can usefully situate their work within the genre of the artist’s novel by addressing how they invent artistic postures and artistic alter-egos within the autofictional worlds of their texts. My dissertation The Simultaneous Book proposes to open up the definition of the …

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, …

Imaginaire De La Fin, Icônes, Esthétique. (Ir)Représenter La Post-Apocalypse Dans La Bande Dessinée Et Le Cinéma Du Génocide Tutsi., Alain Agnessan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cette étude sur la bande dessinée et le cinéma du génocide tutsi s’écarte de l’analyse désormais canonique des politiques mémorielles et pratiques testimoniales pour en investir le parti pris post-apocalyptique . Elle s’agence en deux volets, ou, plutôt, en deux lieux de regard. Envisageant l’imaginaire de la fin qui s’est constitué autour du génocide tutsi, le premier volet de l’étude s’attelle à décrire une scène « cross-traumatic » ou transtraumatique, appelée génoscape, sur laquelle la pensée, les images et les discours critiques lient le destin éthique, esthétique et épistémique du génocide tutsi à celui de la Shoah. Cette démarche …

Sanaugavut: Art From Kinngait, Nakasuk Alariaq

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

“Sanaugavut: Art from Kinngait” explores 20^th century Inuit art from an Inuk’s perspective to highlight the work Inuit participants contributed to in the development of commercialized art production in the North. The author Nakasuk Alariaq is from Kinngait (Cape Dorset) and is the first Inuk graduate student at Western University to be offered space within the university’s formal settings to curate an Inuit art exhibition. This exhibition and thesis go hand in hand and are therefore very important to advocates of Indigenous self-representation in academia and in galleries. The exhibition “Sanaugavut: Art from Kinngait” was …

Han And Dada: Early Expressions Of New Affliction, Maxwell Hyett

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis studies affliction as it appears in the proto-avant-garde art movement of Dada. I analyse affliction through the theoretical frameworks of the ‘neuronal’ and ‘immunological,’ as presented by cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society. By applying Han’s theories to Dada, I challenge Han’s argument that our affliction underwent a shift at the end of the Cold War: No longer produced by negativity (the immunological), affliction is now produced by excess positivity (the neuronal). Such excess blocks our access to and erodes the existence of ‘somewhere else,’ causing a crisis in the arts, which I argue should …

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 …

Affective And Sensuous Critique In The Undergraduate Art Classroom, Claire Bartleman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Drawing on the ways that art history, art theory, and art criticism have used affect theory, I ask how an affective approach can align the undergraduate classroom art critique with the historical definition of aesthetics, or aesthesis, and create a space for sense and feeling. The first chapter reviews literature in the field and demonstrates the perceived benefits and drawbacks of current critique models. In the second chapter, I consider how affect has the potential to disrupt traditional approaches to critique in order to assist in rethinking stated goals, disrupt power dynamics in the classroom, and generate transformative knowledge. In …