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 - 7 of 7

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.
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.
kupferschmidt / kupferschmid / kupferschmidte
(University of Waterloo, 2024-04-29) Smith, Jill; MacDonald, Logan; Coutu, Joan
kupferschmidt / kupferschmid / kupferschmidte is a sculpture and installation-based thesis exhibition which uses materiality and autobiography to question the role of preservation in my life, as a Jewish woman. In this body of work, I have focused on materials related to my cultural lineage (such as copper, jewellery, and pickles), as well as those associated with preservation (including paraffin wax and glass jars). I use these to develop metaphors that demonstrate the tension I feel between the responsibility to hold on to the past and the natural desire to grow. Likewise, metaphorical containers delineate the work: tethered, suspension, and potential. These containers also serve as signifiers of time, grounding the work in a cyclical relationship through past, present, and future.
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.
Something to soften the blow
(University of Waterloo, 2023-04-27) Martin, Sarah; Videkanic, Bojana; MacDonald, Logan
Something to soften the blow is a visual arts exhibition featuring photography, textile, and video artworks that explore feminist critiques of representation in film, specifically looking at the slasher genre. What began as a casual consumption of horror films bloomed into a binge-watching experience over the last 3 years during the COVID-19 pandemic, which inspired the themes incorporated into this body of work. In referencing select films from the 1970’s to 2020’s, I consider parallels to contemporary culture and how patriarchy and misogyny feature in representations of real and fictional women. This text is split into twelve subtitled chapters that reflect the approach to my artistic practice, choice of materials, and conceptual underpinnings.

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