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 - 10 of 10

Condemned to a Perpetual Jacuzzi… With Millions of Your Best Friends
(University of Waterloo, 2020-05-21) Witt, Kayla; Kirton, Doug; Cluett, Cora
Condemned to a Perpetual Jacuzzi… With Millions of Your Best friends is a multi-media exhibition that investigates the personal, the socio-political and the cultural notions of home. The mind’s vision of home is most often held as an idealized place – the location where meanings and attachments are personal and symbolically intense. Forms of utopian thinking are embedded as the very cornerstone of what the home represents, especially in contemporary media iterations of the home. My work grapples with the lived experience and materiality of the home by redrafting the imagery presented in Interior Design and Architectural publications. Through collage, painting, video and performance to camera I subvert the structured and predictable media’s language of desire by creating unusual viewing. At first glance, my work appears “homey”, as the magazine source material is evident, but as details register and accumulate, it becomes apparent that there is a tension between comfort and discomfort in the images. There is disruption and unpredictability in these inaccessible, aspirational spaces. You wouldn’t actually want to live there even though it feels like you might.
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.
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.
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.
Provisional Zones
(University of Waterloo, 2018-05-18) MacLean, Aaron; Kirton, Doug
Provisional Zones is an installation made up of found or discarded objects to which I apply paint or painterly conventions. I do this to make something new from that which was forgotten or unremarkable. I place unusual combinations of objects together to create a sense of strangeness in the gallery space - a strangeness that takes the viewer out of the ordinary everyday experience of the world and into a heightened space - one that points to a threshold between what is known and what is unknown. This in-between space is important to my work because it allows for the possibility of instability and “not knowing” by myself and the viewer. I choose this field of instability when I work because it provides the most fertile ground to make an affective connection between myself and the objects of the world.
Put a finger down if you've ever been personally victimized by social media algorithms
(University of Waterloo, 2022-04-27) Guenette, Ashley; Thompson, Jessica; Kirton, Doug
Put a finger down if you’ve ever been personally victimized by social media algorithms is a collection of critical reflections on embedded social media microaggressions reflecting acts of racism, body shaming, the glorification of mental health disorders (such as ADHD, depression, anxiety and eating disorders), as well as ‘That Girl’ routines, and the biased algorithms that make them tick. Using strategies such as humour and exaggeration to my advantage, I translated this digital content into hand-based methods (drawing, painting, soft sculpture, and linoleum carving) to reinterpret this seemingly playful content and to offer the viewer time to reflect on the more hateful sides of social media which are normalized by Pop Culture.
Restrictions of Routine
(University of Waterloo, 2018-04-27) O'Neill, Eryn; Cluett, Cora; Kirton, Doug
The exhibition, Restrictions of Routine, consists of a series of paintings inspired by a co-dependent relationship I have with running and painting. Through the gestural application of paint combined with clear references to objects and architecture, the work becomes a visual journey through a known and familiar place. The perspective and vantage points vary from piece to piece, ranging from close-cropped compositions to wide-angled landscapes exaggerating the disorientation experienced while running. The images are in direct response to the non-fixed perspective of a runner in a state of heightened awareness; my perspective is not that of a stationary observer. Reactions are amplified when running through a contested space, where uneven footing, intersections and hidden driveways are a persistent hazard. The paintings are the product of months of repetitive outings, in all conditions, to gather enough information, visually and mentally, to create sensorial charged paintings that are suggestive of a figure navigating an unsettled environment. Areas of the paintings dissolve into unapologetically surface-based brushstrokes juxtaposed with careful detail—a constant search for spatial cues.
To Catch A Glimpse of Things
(University of Waterloo, 2019-05-22) McLean, Paula; Kirton, Doug; Tingley, Jane
My exhibition To Catch a Glimpse of Things is an exploration into concretizing and prolonging temporary, ephemeral gestures. Through the repetition of ambiguous forms as well as the recurring imagery of distorted, amorphous figures, an attempt is made to reconstruct the complex and fragmentary phenomenon of perception and the way meaning is created retrospectively through the extraction and arrangement of disparate moments and details from lived experience. Employing the mediums of painting, drawing and sculpture, the exhibition presents a body of work in which the process of reproducing, abstracting, and translating distorted images into other variations mirrors the universal activity of the meaning-making mind, a mind which analyzes, prioritizes, erases, or substitutes aspects of experience as a means of negotiating a fluid world.
Uncertain Memory
(University of Waterloo, 2016-06-24) Murawski, Veronica; Kirton, Doug; Cluett, Cora
"Uncertain Memory" features a series of figurative oil paintings on canvas and paper inspired by photographs from my family archive. My paintings are developed in stages; beginning with a process of mining and selecting specific images, which are then manipulated before being translated into paintings as works on paper or canvas. I focus primarily on female figures as I search for a sense of strangeness within each image as well as an uncertainty about the figure’s actions or whereabouts in the scene. I am drawn to ambiguity as a means of exploring relationships between past and present, reflecting a personal need to establish a sense of identity and understanding of my family’s past, as well as examining the universal and intimate relationship we have to photographic images.

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Browsing Fine Arts by Author "Kirton, Doug"