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Full-Text Articles in Art Practice

Speculative Subjectivities: Essayistic Forms And Material Bodies, Eeva Siivonen Feb 2022

Speculative Subjectivities: Essayistic Forms And Material Bodies, Eeva Siivonen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This practice-based research project focuses on selected contemporary moving image practices that work with strategies of experimental documentary, essayistic filmmaking, and site-specific installation. It focuses on the specific tactics employed by three artists, Dani ReStack, Rachel Rose and Diana Thater. The forms and strategies employed in these practices are analyzed through case studies of ReStack’s Draft 9 (2003), Rose’s Sitting Feeding Sleeping (2013), and Thater’s Delphine (1999). The specific purpose of this research is to illuminate how these contemporary moving image practices describe subjective experience, in both single-channel and installation forms, to critically engage with anthropocentric and humanist notions of …


Disaster As A Framework For Social Change: Searching For New Patterns Across Plant Ecology And Online Networks, Christina Battle Jan 2019

Disaster As A Framework For Social Change: Searching For New Patterns Across Plant Ecology And Online Networks, Christina Battle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation looks to disaster as a framework for enhancing community and the ways in which small gestures of artistic practice might be utilized for change. Embracing the complexity of disaster, the dissertation weaves linkages across a number of disciplines: disaster studies, climate science, contemporary art, internet studies, and plant ecology, in order to seek out potential tactics. Utilizing artistic strategies, especially an embrace of failure as part of methodology, this dissertation accepts the contradictions of such complexity, asserting that following patterns of overlap is a necessary tactic for approaching emergent and speculative futures. The overall project takes cues from …


On Coming And Going, Quintin Teszeri Jan 2016

On Coming And Going, Quintin Teszeri

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dossier and the accompanying exhibition On Coming and Going (presented at the Artlab Gallery in January 2017) constitute my MFA in Visual Arts thesis. The first chapter of this dossier is a Comprehensive Artist Statement in which I reflect on how my art, thinking, and life engage different meanings of coming and going in different ways. The statement approaches a deeply subjective and aggregate philosophy, or perhaps an attitude, or perhaps most appropriately if also most cliché, a way of being, in the face of relentless transience. The second chapter is a review of Michel de Broin’s 2016 Castles …


From 'Means To Ends': Labour As Art Practice, Gabriella Solti May 2014

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 …


"A Painter's Brush That Also Makes Poems": Contemporary Painting After Northern Song Calligraphy, Andy J. Patton Jun 2013

"A Painter's Brush That Also Makes Poems": Contemporary Painting After Northern Song Calligraphy, Andy J. Patton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

There is no Western equivalent to the practice of calligraphy in pre-modern China, an aesthetic form which does not resolve itself into a literary object or a visual one. Calligraphy was sustained by a rich and complex body of thought that can fully rival art criticism and theory in the West. To undertake this project, I immersed myself in the study of both key works of calligraphy and the aesthetic that sustained it during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) in China—not in order to practice calligraphy but to transform my own understanding of art and make contemporary Western paintings out …


Relational Viewing: Affect, Trauma And The Viewer In Contemporary Autobiographical Art, Matthew Ryan Smith Aug 2012

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 …