Art and Design Commons^™

Final Experiential Learning Report: The Stratford Festival Archives & Ecuador Women’S Empowerment Trip, Julia Campbell

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

To fulfil my SASAH experiential-learning requirement, I worked as an intern at the Stratford Festival Archives in 2017 and travelled to Ecuador as part of a Women’s Empowerment trip in 2018. At the Festival, my colleague and I were responsible for designing the Archives’ first-ever digital catalogue. We researched the provenance of each costume piece, which often included looking through design bibles and conducting informal interviews. We then photographed and wrote detailed descriptions for each costume piece. By the end of the summer, my colleague and I had written over 300 complete entries, laying the groundwork for future interns. My …

Still, Unfolding, Ramolen Mencero Laruan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Together with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, still, unfolding, at Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, Ontario), this dossier constitutes the following accompanying components: a comprehensive artist statement, documented artwork, an interview with artist Erika DeFreitas, and a curriculum vitae. These components contextualize my subject-position, and outline theoretical research, motivations, and reflections that drive my work. I expand on the diasporic experience, politics of knowledge, and the autobiographical genre as they are linked methodologies in the retrieval of immigrant histories. The fusion of autobiography and fiction becomes a hopeful approach in challenging forgotten or omitted history and confronts the expectations …

A Queer Politics Of Imperceptibility: A Philosophy Of Resistance To Contemporary Sexual Surveillance, Andie Shabbar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis journeys through a series of events to develop a concept of “imperceptibility” as a mode of resistance to contemporary sexual surveillance. The events I examine include biometric recognition of gender and race at airport security checkpoints, the heteropatriarchal colonial surveillance of Indigenous peoples at Standing Rock, various protest actions, and the political potentials of glitch art. Exploring their unexpected points of connection, my goal is to bring into view acts of resistance against sexual surveillance that already operate below and above the threshold of everyday perception.

The project advocates for a philosophy of resistance that underscores the political …

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

Through Google-Colored Glass(Es): Design, Emotion, Class, And Wearables As Commodity And Control, Safiya Umoja Noble, Sarah T. Roberts

Media Studies Publications

This chapter discusses the implications of wearable technologies like Google Glass that function as a tool for occupying, commodifying, and profiting from the bio- logical, psychological, and emotional data of its wearers and those who fall within its gaze. We argue that Google Glass privileges an imaginary of unbridled exploration and intrusion into the physical and emotional space of others. Glass’s recognizable esthetic and outward-facing camera has elicited intense emotional response, partic- ularly when “exploration” has taken place in areas of San Francisco occupied by residents who were finding themselves priced out or evicted from their homes to make way …

Towards Romantic Syncretism: Liminal And Transitory Women In The Work Of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Michelle Bunton

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Throughout his career, Dante Gabriel Rossetti struggled with a poetic and visual synthesis of the ideal with the sensual, exploring and attempting to resolve the complex paradox of Victorian sexuality, a feat not easily achieved during an era of such fervent morality. Developing his own Romantic Syncretism, Rossetti presents a synthesis of multifaceted symbolism and allegory in his work, combining pagan and Christian themes to create a liminal space in which the divided natures of his female subjects, their object versus subject-hood, are unified. His approach to Christian symbology, via a fleshy and aesthetic representation of the female form, retains …

Reading Boredom In Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, And Christina Rossetti, Rebekah Ann Lamb

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Focusing on the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poetry and paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the early poetry of William Morris and the poetry and prose of Christina Rossetti, this thesis examines how boredom emerges in Victorian aesthetic culture. Drawing from writings in visual culture, gender studies, social history, and recent returns to new formalism in Victorian studies, this thesis attends to how renderings of boredom open up our understanding of the relationship between poetry, art, temporality, embodiment, and explorations of everyday life and living in Victorian England.

Chapter One of my thesis is an introductory explanation of boredom …

Liquidation, Amanda A. Oppedisano

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dossier is an accompanying document to my MFA thesis exhibition, Liquidation (2014). Within my dossier, I articulate the formal and material considerations of my art making practice in which everyday household goods acquired primarily from the dollar store are manipulated in order to consider the “abject” qualities inherent to these items. Observed through the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva in her essay, Powers of Horror, the “abject” as a term is critically and historically applied to the art objects I create in order to explore the dollar store as the basis for my material selection, but also as a …

Relational Viewing: Affect, Trauma And The Viewer In Contemporary Autobiographical Art, Matthew Ryan Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the communicative relationship between contemporary autobiographical art and the viewer. By analyzing the work of six artists, Richard Billingham, Jaret Belliveau, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Lisa Steele and Bas Jan Ader, I maintain that lived experience and personal history condition the way viewers respond to autobiographical art. I turn to literary theory as a critical methodology to argue that autobiographical art operates as a catalyst for identification, memory and self-discovery. I use affect and trauma theory to demonstrate how artwork produces meaning and discourse through the viewer’s feelings, emotions and bodily sensations. Consequently, I survey the importance …