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

9 Sum Sorcery
(University of Waterloo, 2017-04-25) Hildreth, Alexis; Cooper, Tara; Cluett, Cora; Taylor, Bruce
9 Sum Sorcery is a multimedia exhibition comprised of video and sculpture. Nine screens depict 'The Player' performing with an assortment of augmented found materials within the framework of a board game. The Player continually re-organizes the components of the game-space (a social, political, psychological, and spiritual body) in an attempt to come to terms with their place in it. In addition to appearing in the videos, the game's components are present physically in the gallery, enclosed in a vitrine. Each video offers a first-person perspective of The Player in various states of communion with the game system. This system complicates itself through The Player's desire to simultaneously project narrative onto, and remove narrative from, the components of the game. 9 Sum Sorcery encourages engagement in a spiritual ordeal, where the potential for transformative power can become an ossifying psychosis in the absence of The Player's and the visitors' capacity to de-code and re-code meaning.
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.
dollhouse: An Exhibition of Installation
(University of Waterloo, 2016-05-17) van Milligen, Carol-Anna; Videkanic, Bojana; Cooper, Tara
"dollhouse" is a dreamy, peachy, pretty little private space saturated with sickly sweetness. The installation consists of three rooms built inside the shell of a 1971 Airstream trailer, filled with objects, forms, and colors associated with conventional femininity. As a whole, "dollhouse" simultaneously asserts the value of this so-called “feminine” affinity for embellishment and color, and questions the ideals, assumptions, and expectations through which women and girls are jointly framed and perceived by society. In order to illuminate some of the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the work, this paper explores dollhouse through five interrelated sections: ambivalence, hyperfemininity, artifice, beauty, and sexuality.
forms of relief
(University of Waterloo, 2022-01-19) Pearson, Sara; Cooper, Tara; MacDonald, Logan
I am calling this paper, and the body of work that it supports: forms of relief. The word relief has a couple of meanings: in the sculptural sense, the Latin root word relievo means to “raise or to lighten”, visually resulting in sculpture that combines two- and three-dimensional forms, where the sculpture remains supported by a background of the same material. Relief as an emotion, means to feel a lightness after a period of anxiety, stress or pain has been experienced and has passed. The artwork in my thesis examines the dual reality of relief and chronic pain through material and conceptual explorations. To live with chronic illness often means to live in friction with the hyper-performance of modern western society; to live in resistance to behaviors of individualism, acceleration and competition. It is my opinion that the labour of illness is connected to every other aspect of an ill life. For me, this raises questions about the role that art can play in cognitive and physical restoration practices. What can communicate ideas of imperfection, simulation, trust, time, and importantly, support? How can I both maintain my physical well-being, and my love of building things and fabrication? The sculptures in this exhibition manifest the ideas, philosophies, physical labour, energy expenditure, conversations, research and heart that has made up the last two and a quarter years of my life as I worked to heal and rehabilitate my body and mind, in tandem with making the art presented here.
Heavy as a Cloud
(University of Waterloo, 2022-08-18) Williams, Amber Lee; Cooper, Tara; Cluett, Cora
Heavy as a Cloud is a collection of phenomena that alludes to the fragility and transience of life; clouds drifting away, waves rolling in, flowers fading in the sun, a lingering fragrance, and crumbling sandcastles. Using photographic and sculptural mediums, this exhibition considers human experiences such grief and memory, mediated through everyday objects and elements of nature, to represent states of impermanence. Exploring how grief can be contained within objects and photographs, but also felt in the world around us, this work investigates some of the ways in which we contain loss. Using ephemeral themes and materials, the work asks the questions: How do you hold something that doesn’t exist? And how will we be remembered after we die? This work resides in a place of desire or longing to hold things that cannot be held, to fix a moment that is gone, to make physical things out of the intangible.
I Have No Home But Me
(University of Waterloo, 2020-05-15) HU, WANZHI (BRUBEY); Cooper, Tara; Kirton, Doug
I Have No Home But Me explores themes of home and duality through personal narratives embedded in my paintings and artists’ books. A duality that exists within a body does not necessarily exist as a pair of oppositions. The pair can also be complementary to each other, or live at the same time as coexistence. This paper examines how the idea of duality threads its way through the key themes in my studio practice: painting and colour theory; ambiguity and disconnection created by minimalistic work; and the concept of home and identity. These themes—ambiguity, formal structure, and home—coincide with my personal narrative, which is also present. Examples of artworks by Agnes Barley, Gustav Klimt, and Agnes Martin are discussed in relation to these themes with a focus on architecture and memory, the window as a dualistic spatial device, and how grids influence the physical and mental states of the human body.
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.
An Interior
(University of Waterloo, 2017-04-27) Lincoln, Jessica; Cooper, Tara; Kirton, Doug
The work An Interior is a painted room. It grew from the proposition, ‘What if I painted wallpaper?’ This proposition is related to my ongoing interest in the psychological and social functions of decor and labour spent decorating. Some questions I ask are: How do people use the spaces of their homes and the stuff they keep in them to build and maintain their relationships to themselves and others? And, a longstanding puzzle in contemporary practice, what is the relationship between decor and art, especially with regard to gender? The paintings in An Interior are an investigation of these questions through the lens of my body and experiences. This document expands on that investigation in three sections. The introductory section is a formal discussion of the work. The second section provides an overview of the complex relationship between the contemporary home, its decor, and its inhabitants which compelled the work An Interior, and the last discusses specificities of my painting practice and process as a mode for understanding this relationship.
New Day. New Painting.
(University of Waterloo, 2023-07-06) Garbett, Brent; Cooper, Tara; Kirton, Doug
The thesis I’m presenting is an investigation of the perceptual experience of my day-to-day life as a student undertaking the graduate program at the University of Waterloo. It consists of observational paintings, which are organized into four groups detailing my home, the campus, my six-week research trip (June – July 2022) to Charleston, South Carolina, and the walk to my car—an experience that was interrupted when a stand of trees that seemed almost familial were unexpectedly cut down.
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.
Seedlings
(University of Waterloo, 2022-05-05) Galarneau, Sarah; Videkanic, Bojana; Cooper, Tara
Seedlings is a fictional, constructed ecosystem. It is a garden-like installation consisting of a coming-together of numerous printed, gathered, gifted, and reconstituted components that “cross-pollinate” the gallery space. This biomimetic amalgamation is characterized by themes of collaboration, cyclicality, potentiality, and adaptability in both its process and visual aesthetic. In its form and execution, Seedlings is open to various modes of transformation and myriad future iterations. My methodology is defined by what I have called “recuperate, reconstitute, reconstruct.” What can I collect from what was once destined for the landfill? Will it eventually decompose? Can it combine with other elements to form something new? In blurring the boundary between plant life and the built world, Seedlings engages in breaking down the outdated Western theoretical binary between what is and isn’t considered “nature.” My research, presented in this support document, represents a fusion of two subjects that deeply fascinate me: ecology and visionary fiction. As a strange and fictitious environment, Seedlings reflects my interest in visionary worldbuilding and alternative worlds. This combination of subjects reflects my desire to imagine radically hopeful futures beyond the status quo and the current ecological crisis. A seed is an oft-used metaphor for an idea. “Planting a seed” can be a reference to how new ideas are formed in one’s mind. If a seed is an idea, perhaps a seedling is an idea that is taking physical shape.
You Can Never Go Home
(University of Waterloo, 2016-05-16) Akkermans, Jennifer; Cooper, Tara; Taylor, Bruce
My thesis exhibition, You Can Never Go Home, reflects the idea of irreconcilable, parallel homes, one that’s here and one that’s there. Moving from Calgary, Alberta, to Waterloo, Ontario, to pursue my Master of Fine Arts, I have used myself as a two-year case study to examine how one might make a new place a home. The installation consists of an abundance of handmade objects: life-sized selfies displayed in lightboxes, sculptures in the form of houses and other symbolic buildings (some containing lightboxes and short video loops), as well as my collections of curios, tools and building materials. As an installation, the work examines concepts, concerns and emotions that accompany the process of moving a long distance— longing, memory, nostalgia, absence, belonging, family, lost-ness, place, time, anxiety, resilience, futility, humour, loneliness, rhythm and routine. It is an anxious, obsessive, yet humourous manifestation of my attempts to feel at home in a new place, just as I am about to leave.

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Browsing Fine Arts by Author "Cooper, Tara"