Art Practice Commons^™

A Space Without Memory: Time And The Sublime In The Work Of Janet Cardiff And George Bures Miller, Margherita N. Papadatos

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The central question of my investigation is: how do artists present the unpresentable when presentation itself is impossible? Concentrating solely on Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s artworks Opera For a Small Room (2005) and The Killing Machine (2007), I redevelop Jean François Lyotard’s concept of the sublime as put forth in his The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, in order to ask how Cardiff and Miller give shape to the unpresentable in their work. Opera and Killing are works that dynamically problematize and play with ideas of presentation, subjectivity, memory, and time. Thus, I explore my central question of …

Turning To See Otherwise, Jennifer L. Martin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis dossier, in combination with an exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery, considers whether an archival collection can generate an alternative narrative other than that which may already exist in the original film and photographic documents. Rather than represent a singular truth, I seek to articulate the transformative realities of collective memory by re-orienting the material for broader viewer identification. I have mined photographic and filmic materials from a personal family archive to focus fragments that specifically record the gesture of the turning face—the turning towards the observer. This “turn” then includes both the turn towards the initial film-maker embedded …

The Things We Know But Cannot Explain: An Inquiry Into The Nature And Significance Of Artistic Knowledge As A Subset Of The Larger Category Of Tacit Knowledge, David Kemp

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is an inquiry into the nature and significance of artistic knowledge, as a subset of the larger category of tacit knowledge. Art, both in its production and reception, encompasses many diverse forms of knowledge, so by artistic knowledge I am referring to the intangible components of art that do not conform to traditional notions of codified, propositional or explicit knowledge.

Such forms of qualitative and subjective knowledge are undervalued within our current Western context, which is dominated by a rational, objective and scientific mode of thought. This is primarily due to the impossibility of quantifying such intangible knowledge, …

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 …

Just As It Should Be: Painting And The Discipline Of Everyday Life, Jared R. Peters

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this Master of Fine Arts Thesis dossier, I focus on contemporary painting’s capacity to question and challenge the roles and behaviors expected and directed by the social order. I am specifically concerned with the production of a normative subjectivity through the organization and configuration of domestic spaces and objects. Through a Case Study of Belgian artist Michaël Borremans, in a Comprehensive Artist Statement of my own art practice, and in examples of my work in the Practice Documentation section, I demonstrate how the discipline of painting can reveal and resist the everyday disciplinary procedures of contemporary society. Through its …

From 'Means To Ends': Labour As Art Practice, Gabriella Solti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis discusses labour from three different historical and theoretical viewpoints, namely Karl Marx’s perspectives on labour, Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Action and Jacques Rancière's radical view of workers as an aspirational class, including how their respective philosophies influenced discourse on labour in contemporary art. To examine the aesthetic consequences of these labour theories, my discussion of each writer is accompanied by a case study of a contemporary artist whose work operates in dialogue with the philosophical ideas presented. In conclusion, I bring these theories together by focusing on how they implicate art making as labour, and I point to …

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 …