Fine Arts

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/9878

This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Fine Arts.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

Waterloo faculty, students, and staff can contact us or visit the UWSpace guide to learn more about depositing their research.

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Now showing 1 - 13 of 13

Any other name would smell as sweet
(University of Waterloo, 2020-05-05) Matheson, Tyler; Andison, Lois; MacDonald, Logan
Any other name would smell as sweet is an exploration of personal and shared experiences of feeling queer. This exhibition serves as an aesthetic and material investigation of the performativity of othered bodies, identities, and visibility. The process of becoming and adapting to surroundings is conceptually and experientially present in my work. When creating installations, I employ mirrors and queer-coded reflective materials. By choosing materials that have the visual capability to shift and transform their appearance depending on the viewer’s body and position in relation to the work, I create a spatial dynamism where each individual's experience is uniquely their own—where the viewer and the work are reliant on each other. In this codependent performance, the gallery becomes a site where viewers can be projected into queer liminal space—a bridge between worlds.
Borrowers and Bullies
(University of Waterloo, 2022-05-17) Irish, Jacob; Andison, Lois; MacDonald, Logan
Borrowers and Bullies is an exhibition of sculpture, installation, and video. I was highly impacted throughout the making of this work by the Covid-19 pandemic, which began immediately preceding my acceptance into the UW MFA program and has endured to the present at the time of writing. By walking the same paths daily, in my home and in the park behind my home, I more clearly saw my own habits in settler-colonial greenspaces and the built environment. Central to this work is my understanding of a habit as not just a set of repeated behaviours but as a central, life-configuring scaffold for building and maintaining relationships to one another, the built environment, and the land. During the summer of 2021, my collaborative partner and I harvested materials, documentation, and experiences from settler-colonial greenspaces in Southern Ontario and The Maritimes, while asking myself: How does my social muscle memory inform how I understand my home, my neighbourhood, my nation? And do these habits inform my ethics? I see my collaborative art practice as an opportunity to manifest anti-colonial and anti-capitalist ethics by tugging at relationships between subjectivity and materiality. Borrowers and Bullies is an exhibition with its eyes turned to the colonial-capitalist enclosure of time and land, and how that enclosure configures the knowable, the thinkable, and the imaginable. This exhibition, Borrowers and Bullies, is a document of work that took place in very interior spaces. What is in the gallery is residue from the work embedded in my body and my collaborator’s; I proceed from this thesis work transformed.
Borrowers and Bullies
(University of Waterloo, 2022-05-17) Hall, Julie; Andison, Lois; MacDonald, Logan
Borrowers and Bullies is an exhibition of sculpture, installation, and video. I was highly impacted throughout the making of this work by the Covid-19 pandemic, which began immediately preceding my acceptance into the UW MFA program and has endured to the present at the time of writing. By walking the same paths daily, in my home and in the park behind my home, I more clearly saw my own habits in settler-colonial greenspaces and the built environment. Central to this work is my understanding of a habit as not just a set of repeated behaviours but as a central, life-configuring scaffold for building and maintaining relationships to one another, the built environment, and the land. During the summer of 2021, my collaborative partner and I harvested materials, documentation, and experiences from settler-colonial greenspaces in Southern Ontario and The Maritimes, while asking myself: How does my social muscle memory inform how I understand my home, my neighbourhood, my nation? And do these habits inform my ethics? I see my collaborative art practice as an opportunity to manifest anti-colonial and anti-capitalist ethics by tugging at relationships between subjectivity and materiality. Borrowers and Bullies is an exhibition with its eyes turned to the colonial-capitalist enclosure of time and land, and how that enclosure configures the knowable, the thinkable, and the imaginable. This exhibition, Borrowers and Bullies, is a document of work that took place in very interior spaces. What is in the gallery is residue from the work embedded in my body and my collaborator’s; I proceed from this thesis work transformed.
Customer Service
(University of Waterloo, 2019-04-29) Allaby, Patrick; Cooper, Tara; Andison, Lois
Customer Service is a half-hour storytelling performance that uses PowerPoint and drawing to discuss my experience working at a call centre in Moncton, New Brunswick. The performance uses this autofictional narrative to discuss labour in late capitalism and the toll it can take on mental health. The piece serves as a platform to combine a variety of my interests, from storytelling and drawing to pop-music, animation, and experimental theatre. Ultimately all of these elements fold back into Customer Service and contribute to the work’s exploration of the tension between my personal need to escape capitalism and inability to do so.
Dup-boug-a-dad
(University of Waterloo, 2016-05-16) Thomas, Aislinn; Andison, Lois; Blatherwick, David
Dup-boug-a-dad is a video installation that is curious about different ways of being in the world. Its form and content address the body and some of the many ways of being bodied. In parts intervention, documentary, document, performance and music video, it features David Gunn, a friend of mine who has a physical and intellectual disability. David loves cheerleading. Living in rural Nova Scotia, as he does, his main access to the sport is through YouTube. The footage in Dup-boug-a-dad was taken when David visited Kitchener-Waterloo and practiced with the University of Waterloo cheerleading teams in 2015. David loves to sing. Being deaf, as he is, he sings in his own language. The song in Dup-boug-a-dad is, at least in part, about lifting a cheerleader up with one arm. He sang it while “hearing” his voice for the first time that we know of. This was made possible by his standing on a vibrotactile platform that vibrated in response to the sounds he made, translating his voice into a felt, tactile sensation. Two of these platforms and a vibrotactile bench are present in the gallery space. My artistic practice is quite varied in nature, so although I am exhibiting just one work in my MFA thesis show I wanted to write supporting documentation that spoke to the life and sustainability of a wide-ranging practice as a whole. As a result, the first section of this support document, How to Be In the World? touches on many of the concerns that currently inform my approach to art and life by grappling with title’s question. It’s written in a declarative (though not definitive) voice, and operates as a manifesto of sorts. I see it as both a record of my present stance and an aspirational text. While the concerns in How to Be In the World? have undoubtedly shaped my thesis exhibition in both obvious and subtle ways, the second section of this support document speaks more directly to, and about, this work. Dup-boug-a-dad: Process & Description and Installation describe the piece itself, its making, and the specifics of its life in the gallery.
In Places Rarely Seen
(University of Waterloo, 2021-05-25) Blackburn, Jordan; Cooper, Tara; Andison, Lois
In Places Rarely Seen is an interdisciplinary exhibition bringing together print installation, video, photography, sound and text. This thesis exhibition considers my own shifting perception of what Nature is and how I relate to it. This shift is informed by my lived experiences as someone from a French settler background, exploring what it means to create ecologically focused art, temporal investigations, Indigenous ways of knowing Nature and land, as well as the similarities and differences between art and science. There are four sections: Poetry and Narrative; (Authentic) Experience; Temporality; and The Environmental Crisis. A self-authored poem bookends each section—as a trio the poems contextualize my experience of, with, and in Nature.
In Search of Wholeness
(University of Waterloo, 2023-05-29) Laratta, Clara; Andison, Lois; Cooper, Tara
In Search of Wholeness is an exhibition of sculpture, alternative photography, and video. The work examines connections to healing and being. “The English ‘health’ derives from Old English ‘hælth’, which is related to ‘whole’ ‘a thing that is complete in itself’ (Oxford Languages). But what constitutes being whole? How does one know if they are whole or complete in themselves? And, if one is not whole or complete, how does one become, or ensure that they are? Is wholeness even possible if everything is in a state of flux: transient, ephemeral, and uncertain? Is completeness something to move towards? My research is a quest to answer these questions. It examines what I think I know, ways of healing and being, and familial connections. The artworks utilize food waste, found materials, construction matter, alternative photography techniques, and video, as material archives documenting aspects of healing. This cyclical story of healing draws on a lifelong journey with chronic illness. It moves between and merges, modalities, and connections to look at personal and collective healing. The works reference fragility and strength, dissonance and connection, loss, and hope – in essence life.
Pacing the House
(University of Waterloo, 2021-08-04) Perreault, Carrie; Andison, Lois; Kirton, Doug
Surveying my through a feminist approach to autotheory, Pacing the House is an exhibition that uses material inquiry to reframe personal trauma into a site of investigation. By creating systems of organization—categorizing, formatting, grouping—I work against dissociation to create meaningful connections in the physical world and use this process-based method as a form of knowledge gathering. By temporarily suspending external and dominant narratives that have upheld the stories I have repeatedly told myself, I recover and articulate my personal experiences through the creation of objects, installations and drawings that reflect these conceptual intensions. In my research, I seek ways to dismantle gendered and psychological abuse and to formulate those results in an experiential language while referencing residential architecture and childhood memories.
Rat, Plastic, Wood
(University of Waterloo, 2021-08-19) Simmons, Maria; Andison, Lois; MacDonald, Logan
Rat, Plastic, Wood is an exhibition of hybrid sculptures centering the physical manifestation of interspecies intra-action and natural forms of contamination-as-collaboration. In the gallery space a central structure of wood and plastic becomes the locus of boundaryless activity where soil, yeast, plants, fermentation, hardtack and garbage all share space and interact. While making your way, you may collide with fruit flies while inhaling the aromatics of fermenting pine, noodles, dirt, and rotting banana. You may hear the low rumble of a dehumidifier, ultrasonic rat communication, and possibly the wet sizzle of dry soil sucking up water. Taking direction from the artmaking process I have chosen to approach the writing of my support paper in a hybrid manner, combining the conventional essay with moments of irregularity—dialogue, manifesto, material and dialogical lists, recipes— forms of writing that resist conformity. In this way, the paper not only supports the work, but occupies the same conceptual and aesthetic space. I will be drawing from feminist theorist Karen Barad in exploring the concept of lichenization, using the theory of intra-action to decentralize the human and refocus our understanding of relationship-based living. Concepts of contamination-as-collaboration will be based on ideas developed by philosopher Alexis Shotwell and anthropologist Anna Tsing. These concepts will provide a framework for understanding my approach to developing artwork. I will present these ideas and explain the importance of hybrid artistic methodologies that guide my artistic outcomes. The three sections: Rat, Plastic, and Wood which form the exhibition title structure the paper: Rat introduces the exhibition and sets a conceptual framework for the artwork, Plastic speaks to the theoretical dimensions of the work, in particular, the Capitalocene and the need for transformative metabolization, and Wood concludes by discussing my materials, methodologies and processes. That said, although these divisions exist, be prepared for cross-contamination.
The Re-examined Life
(University of Waterloo, 2017-05-19) St Marie, Denise; Walker, Timothy; Andison, Lois; Videkanic, Bojana
The Re-examined Life is an interdisciplinary exhibition of contemplative and interactive artworks that use the expectations of conventional belief systems to question widespread perceptions and value judgments of our current culture. Each piece is created collaboratively, beginning with dialogical investigations that attempt to clarify what it means to be-in-the-world. These inquiries take us beyond accepted models of social organization and lead us to question and uncover the illusions of our current systems. The result is an exhibition of five modules: a Social Bank, an Identity Centre, Reflective Sculptures, Community Tables and a Listening Lounge. Each module reimagines familiar objects and settings, revealing the unstable nature of human knowledge. Visitors are encouraged to interact and openly reflect on how the authority of physical space and social systems shape who we are in the world.
The Re-examined Life
(University of Waterloo, 2017-05-19) Walker, Timothy; St Marie, Denise; Andison, Lois; Videkanic, Bojana
The Re-examined Life is an interdisciplinary exhibition of contemplative and interactive artworks that use the expectations of conventional belief systems to question widespread perceptions and value judgments of our current culture. Each piece is created collaboratively, beginning with dialogical investigations that attempt to clarify what it means to be-in-the-world. These inquiries take us beyond accepted models of social organization and lead us to question and uncover the illusions of our current systems. The result is an exhibition of five modules: a Social Bank, an Identity Centre, Reflective Sculptures, Community Tables and a Listening Lounge. Each module reimagines familiar objects and settings, revealing the unstable nature of human knowledge. Visitors are encouraged to interact and openly reflect on how the authority of physical space and social systems shape who we are in the world.
Search Party
(University of Waterloo, 2018-05-17) Wilman, Tait; Andison, Lois; Thompson, Jessica; Cooper, Tara
Search Party is an installation and video exhibition that explores my identity—how it is constructed and consumed, and how representations of landscapes and discourses of ‘Canadiana’ play in its formation. Since moving to Southern Ontario from Alberta, I feel lost without the Rockies. Attempting to comfort this disorientation, I developed the idea of an alter ego or a persona, a ‘stand-in’ fake for the real. The development of a persona allows for an examination and questioning of the troubled relationship that I have with my own identity. Throughout this body of work, my alter ego attempts to navigate the landscape in search for a place of comfort and a relationship with space. Through the guise of memory and souvenir, the exhibition uses personal memory, strategies of re-enactment, and various familiar display methodologies to explore the aestheticization and commodification of identity, land, and nature.
Tell All The Truth But Tell It Slant
(University of Waterloo, 2019-05-09) Baseri, Zahra; Andison, Lois; Videkanic, Bojana
Tell All The Truth But Tell It Slant is an exhibition of sculpture and drawings that focuses attention on the socio-political turmoil brought about by the ruling system in Iran. It also speaks to a shared melancholia in those who self-identify as Iranian. In Iran the oppressive regime continually and deliberately controls its citizens through enforcement of restrictive religious ideology. As a female artist of Iranian descent, using Karen Barad’s notion of agential realism, I seek to address power structures, and hegemonic systems of domination, while questioning dualisms and the sharp boundaries they produce that further impact power relations. Addressing life and politics in contemporary Iran, I purposely layer and fuse cultural and historical imagery from Persian and Islamic art and architecture along with contemporary images, ideas, and mass media stories. My practice accentuates the importance of materiality in relation to this political content by questioning subject-object relationships, and by revealing the agency that materials and spaces have.

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Browsing Fine Arts by Author "Andison, Lois"