Art and Design Commons^™

Wax Bodies: Candles, Queerness, & Taking Up Space, Moya Shpuntoff

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My partner and collaborator Callaway Fox and I use queer surrealist installation, craft practices, and performance in order to address queer and disabled temporality, articulating our experiences as disabled queer femme artists through abstracted and literal exploration of femme bodies in space. In performance and installation works Hospital Performance: Part I and Hospital Performance: Part II, we responded to our experience of marginalization, medical malpractice, and emotional isolation, ultimately exploring queer and disabled temporality through queer surrealism. Hand-poured scented candles became metaphors for queer and disabled bodies, and along with other craft practices used in this work, are a …

Marginalia, Scott Edward Vander Veen

Senior Projects Spring 2016

To explain, in a phrase, Marginalia is a space of queer esotericism. These terms may be evocative at best; rational understanding, through careful language, is inherently at odds with Marginalia itself.

Queerness, esotericism— both are nebulous terms because they invoke rejection and subversion as a means of orientation. They are always antitheses. They reject canon where it comfortably stands: the canon of contemporary aesthetics, of rationality, of identity, sexuality and body. Marginalia, as much as it is able, exists explicitly and intentionally outside the narratives that we are most familiar with.

Estranging itself from normative structures, Marginalia is given …