Art and Design Commons^™

At Dusk, Michelle Paterok

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In supplement to my Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, this dossier is composed of an extended artist statement, photographic documentation of artwork, a transcribed interview with artist Ben Reeves, and a curriculum vitae. These components contextualize the motivation and research that inform my studio work in painting. The extended artist statement describes the personal and theoretical foundation of my Master’s thesis project—a series of paintings collectively titled At Dusk, which documents everyday interior space in order to explore the invocations of colour, light and atmosphere. The interview with Ben Reeves provides insight into his artistic practice in painting, …

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 …

The Embroidered Tablecloth: How Locale Influences Eastern European Jewish Textile Production, Elena Solomon

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recent scholarship frames craft as distinct from art and as an encapsulation of cultural expression at a given moment. Building on that framework, this thesis analyzes the shifting attitudes towards the production of handmade textiles among Eastern European Jews in the US in the twentieth century, as influenced by their migration. To demonstrate the textile environment at that time, this thesis examines pre- and post-migration primary sources and autobiographical writing, including Mary Antin’s The Promised Land, supplemented with interviews of first- and second-generation immigrants to Chicago. In contrast with stereotypes about craft as historically stable, defining craft as regional …

Music Sounds Better With You, M Gillian Carrabre

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Electronic Dance Music (EDM) is a catalyst for creative expression, from the solo dance form known as shuffling, to “Flow Arts” activities (forms of self-expression inducing a flow state) like poi, hula hooping, orbiting, and gloving. Gloving is a subcultural practice and artform that couples LED lights with dexterous finger movements. It is a method of expression for dance music enthusiasts (also known as ravers) and has become an important component of the EDM scene, particularly over the past decade. Glovers engage in “secondary” performances to live music (DJs) using complex techniques such as symbolism, word painting, and what the …

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 …

Embodiment Of Creative Thought And Visual Logic In Bookmaking: An Example Of Intermediality In Word-Picture Adaptation, Diana Bychkova

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This interdisciplinary study discusses word-picture translation for book illustrations and brings together visual art, book/illustration history, the materiality of the book, literature, and library science. The focus is on communication between the creator, the work of literary and visual art, and the receiver. Theories that observe verbal-visual relations appear typically disconnected from the practical aspects of bookmaking and publishing. In bridging practice and theory, I have developed my own method of word-picture interpretation that can be applied to any adult fiction text.

The thesis discusses the outside and the inside of illustration-making, presents the methodology and theoretical framework, explores such …

An App A Day Keeps The Doctor Away: A Visual Case Analysis Of The Self-Optimization Ideologies Downloaded Onto Apple Users As They Download Applications, Ismahan Yusuf

MA Research Paper

This visually thematic qualitative case analysis seeks to advance cyber-sociology by analyzing the hyper-under-attended relationship between interfaces and discourses. Here, the interface under investigation is the Apple App Store, examined for the ways in which the platform is discursively encoded with particular ideologies, ideals, desires and narratives downloaded onto users as they download applications. Such is explored via a two-part research question inquiring: Which type of applications enjoy the most promotion on the Apple App Store and what cyber-architectural tools are herein used to optically exalt them? To investigate this, an iOS 11-operating iPhone was used to frequent the store’s …

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 …

Spanning, Mary Katherine Carder-Thompson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dossier consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 is a comprehensive artist statement describing my system for spirit communication that leverages the latent power of wool processing tools. This system borrows strategies from varied sources including living history, paraconceptualism, and bricolage. Chapter 2 visually documents my studio practice over the two years of my MFA candidacy at Western University. Chapter 3 is a case study of Luanne Martineau’s 2009 drawing, Who are they you salute, and that one after another salute you. This case study addresses Martineau’s engagement with Modernism’s legacy and discusses how her work builds an equitable …

Philosophical Archeology In Theoretical And Artistic Practice, Ido Govrin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The aim of this thesis is to examine philosophical archeology and the feasibility of knowledge that derives from researching it simultaneously through theoretical and artistic practice.

Philosophical archeology essentially embodies one’s relation to history and historiographic research—a research methodology at the core of which lies a “historical a priori”, that which a priori conditions the historical development of a phenomenon. However, this research conceives of philosophical archeology more broadly, as a multifaceted term that traverses the discourse of the humanities at large.

By pursuing this doctoral research, my original contribution to knowledge is twofold: (1) I historicize philosophical archeology—a …

Synchrotron Radiation Analysis Of Daguerreotypes: Surface Characterization, Electrocleaning, And Preservation, Madalena S. Kozachuk

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The first commercially viable photographic image, the daguerreotype, captured images from 1839 to 1860. While daguerreotypes provide a significant historical record of 19^th century individuals and events, deterioration now disfigures many of these images. This work describes the application of synchrotron radiation (SR) to the study of daguerreotypes.

Three goals were addressed in this thesis: 1) to utilize SR to further elucidate the physics and chemistry of the daguerreotype and how the surface varies with time, 2) to study the effects of the electrocleaning system on the daguerreotype surface, and 3) to propose suggestions to improve their preservation and …

Bone Meal, Johnathan Onyschuk

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My research explores the material properties of gaming interfaces and the paranoiac virtual spaces of male fantasies. The first chapter of this thesis is an extended artist statement and a summary of influences in my work. Topics include the relationship between fantasy violence and real violence, digital avatars, and the limits of empathy in digital space. This chapter also contains documentation of works produced throughout the course of my MFA candidacy as well as the contexts and concepts behind those works. The second chapter is a case study exploring the work of artist Neo Rauch, whose paintings quietly critique and …

The Medieval Genesis Of A Mythology Of Painting, Colin Dorward

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Abstract: The Medieval Genesis of a Mythology of Painting.

Author: Colin Dorward

Principal Advisor: Sky Glabush.

Advisory Committee: Dr. Kathryn Brush, Patrick Mahon.

This dissertation attempts to enrich awareness of the late antique and early medieval preconditions of art which fortified today’s capacity for painted representations to fulfill a demand for the presence of absent individuals, such as in the case of portraiture. Chapter one contextualizes this program of research in terms of my practice as an oil painter, where figuration plays a prominent role. Key aspects of my studio work are introduced, such as my commitment to working from …

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 …

Creative ‘Class’: Leading Innovation With Digital Pedagogy In Cultural And Creative Industry (Cci) Programs, Dana Morningstar

The Dissertation in Practice at Western University

Leaders of cultural and creative programs (CCIs) in Ontario community colleges are key to realizing potential in higher education related to digital pedagogy, creativity, industry partnerships, entrepreneurship and innovation. In this Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP), the role of an academic leadership group is considered from Ontario-centric creative industry and innovation policies and college processes. The problem of practice is the gap of harmonized leadership strategy between higher education classroom practices and regional and provincial overarching educational strategy to increase innovation through digital pedagogy. Colleges have collective capacities in innovating with digital pedagogy in creative industry programs and providing graduates with …

Then Again, Maybe I Won't, Claire Bartleman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dossier and accompanying exhibition at MKG (Toronto, Ontario) both titled Then again, maybe I won’t, constitutes my Master of Fine Arts Degree at the University of Western Ontario. Within this dossier are a comprehensive artist statement, an interview with artist Jennifer Rubell and documentation of my art production over the course of my degree. These components contextualize my practice within the contemporary art world and outline the motivations and theoretical research that drives my work. Specifically, I look at affect theory, femmage, the burden of ownership and art theorist Jennifer Gonzalez’s notion of autotopography and how they are …

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 …

And Where Is The Body?, Tyler Durbano

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In combination with a Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, and where is the body?, this dossier offers the following as accompanying components: an extended artist statement, a transcribed interview with artist Francisco-Fernando Granados, documentation of my artwork and my curriculum vitae. The section containing documented artwork provides a selected overview of my creative research and material exploration made during my time at Western University. These components complement my creative research and expand on ideas of queer identity, performance, vulnerability, assemblage and drag that are explored in my thesis exhibition.

Slower Than Time Itself, Matthew S. Trueman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This paper is combined with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, Slower Than Time Itself. There is a significant discontinuity between how duration is measured by clocks and how it is perceived by the individual. This discontinuity generates pressure both on the individual and the environment. The concept of dualism constructs a dichotomy between people and nature, devaluing that which can not be measured. In Slower Than Time Itself the thesis, sculptural and video works aims to dissolve this dichotomy not by rejecting technology but by embracing it. Can one use clocks to escape time itself? I investigate the …

Virtual Archaeology, Virtual Longhouses And "Envisioning The Unseen" Within The Archaeological Record, William M. Carter

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

We are of an era in which digital technology now enhances the method and practice of archaeology. In our rush to embrace these technological advances however, Virtual Archaeology has become a practice to visualize the archaeological record, yet it is still searching for its methodological and theoretical base. I submit that Virtual Archaeology is the digital making and interrogating of the archaeological unknown. By wayfaring means, through the synergy of the maker, digital tools and material, archaeologists make meaning of the archaeological record by engaging the known archaeological data with the crafting of new knowledge by multimodal reflection and the …

The Tapestry Of Memory, Kathryn M. Lawson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Rationality points to the complete annihilation and end of a life when the body perishes, and yet when a loved one dies we continue to experience that person in a myriad of ways. The focus of this thesis will be a phenomenological exploration of the earthly afterlife of those we have loved and lost. By positing the subject as always intersubjective and as temporal in nature, this thesis will investigate how we continue to create and interact with the deceased upon the earth. In the introduction, this work will be placed in the context of the phenomenological tradition. The first …

La Vida Y Andanzas De Un Libro Antiguo En Nueva España Y La Península Ibérica. Cultura Escrita En La Obra Hierofánica Del Doctor Don Alonso Alberto De Velasco, Raul Manuel Lopez Bajonero

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 1688 a legal text, Renovación, was printed in Mexico City, the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, that explains a twelve year trial that focuses on determining if a 16^th century sculpture miraculously renewed itself. The final decision came from the Archbishop of Mexico City. A year after the book’s publication, the sculpture was recognized as miraculous. In 1699, ten years after this event, the author of Renovación wrote another book that narrates the same sculpture's history, Exaltación, but addressed a wider audience, and from a religious and pious perspective. The Exaltación was republished a …

The Longest Way Round Is The Shortest Way Home, Sarah Munro

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In combination with a Masters of Fine arts thesis exhibition, The Longest Way Round is the Shortest Way Home, this dossier has three components: An extended artist statement with an introduction, documentation of my work and a comparative case study of Geoffrey Farmer and Hannah Hoch. These components will illustrate my research, visual development and engagement with items of home décor, ornamentation and design elements of daily life.

Lesser Than Greater Than Equal To: The Art Design Paradox, Charles Lee Franklin Harris

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Alongside a Masters of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Greater Than Lesser Than Equal To, this dossier has five components: an introduction to the dossier, an extended artist statement, documentation of my work with an introduction, an interview with Sean Caulfield and my Curriculum Vitae. Together they present and illustrate my research around the question of art and design, and a brief exploration of how they operate (mutually and competitively) within the everyday of contemporary North America. As well, they allude to how my work developed in its present form. Through the “print-structures”, I explore the nature of design and art …

Emphatic Tension, Mina Moosavipour

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This Master of Fine Arts integrated thesis contains three chapters. Chapter one is an extended artist statement that explores my paintings, which examine human physiological characteristics during day-to-day activities and their relation to one another. It investigates how visual possibilities in this practice are studied to reveal the tension of environment in a specific time with regards to internal human senses that simultaneously intensify various moods in a particular situation. Chapter two is the practice studio documentation of the selected work that I have created during my candidacy at Western University. Each work is accompanied with a brief description. Chapter …

Thin Skin, Jason Stovall

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis contains two distinct chapters as well as a section of photographs of my paintings. The first chapter is a comprehensive artist statement that outlines my approach to image making using Heewon Chang’s autoethnographic method. This approach emphasizes cultural analysis and interpretation of the researcher’s behaviours, thoughts, and experiences in relation to others in society. Chapter two is a case study on the artist, John Brown. In addition to being a significant influence on my practice, Brown and I are both deeply concerned with representations of the body in contemporary painting as well as the formal capabilities of paint. …

Estetica Urbana De Una Polarizacion, Edgar E. Yanez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This work examines the changes in the Venezuelan city of Caracas during the Bolivarian Revolution during the years 1999 through 2013, under the rule of Hugo Chavez Frias (1954-2013). Stressed by a profound polarization (commonly interpreted as political), this period brought aesthetic and spatial changes, which have affected the life and perception of the city. From a neo-populist discourse inspired by the idea of the establishment of the republic under a socialist model, the Bolivarian Revolution has stripped issues that affect the sense and urban rooting such as identity, racial segregation or class struggle in addition to political differences. Reflecting …

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 …

Evangelizing The ‘Gallery Of The Future’: A Critical Analysis Of The Google Art Project Narrative And Its Political, Cultural And Technological Stakes, Alanna Bayer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores the digitization initiative Google Art Project and the ways in which the Project negotiates its place between rapidly developing Web technologies and the often-contradictory fine art tradition. Through the Project’s marketing and website design, Google constructs a narrative that emphasizes the democratization of culture, universal accessibility and a new progressive future for the art world while obscuring more complex political, social and cultural questions. Bringing together scholarship from various disciplines including library studies, digital studies, art history, and cultural studies this thesis highlights how the Project might open up a space to talk about art publics and …

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 …