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

1,2,3,4
(University of Waterloo, 2018-05-22) Martens, Tess; Cluett, Cora; Videkanic, Bojana
My thesis exhibition, 1,2,3,4, consists of four performances: Announce It!, A Second Hand Emotion, Slow Change and Portrait-Self-Portrait. The performances will take place on scheduled days at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. 1,2,3,4, is also a multidisciplinary project, as each performance produces leftovers that will remain installed in the gallery. In addition, the title, 1,2,3,4, references the counting and chanting used in various sporting practice sessions. The installation evolved through the use of remnants of the props, materials and detritus from each performance. The act of preserving the leftovers of each performance serves as both a reminder of each action, as well as a form of documentation. I invite the audience to become witness to, and in some cases also actively participate in my performances. I ask audience members to be a witness to a juxtaposition of empowerment and vulnerabilities within the framework of how I use my body as a tool to produce works. I think of my performances as empowering, comedic, and, at times even tragic. Although these acts are intensely personal, they are open enough to allow witnesses to bring their own experiences to the performances.
1b, black legs, 52"
(University of Waterloo, 2021-04-30) Mitchell, Karice; Videkanic, Bojana; Thompson, Jessica
1b, black legs, 52” is an effort to reconcile with history. Through the recontextualization of black pornographic images, this exhibition serves as a re-imagining of what black women’s futures could be. By creating images that are hyper visible in presentation, yet ambiguous in their representation, these works seek to foster images of the black female body that demand to be seen and understood removed from the historical construction of blackness that has been upheld and perpetuated through white supremacy. Giving the black female body a new meaning, we can begin to cultivate new possibilities for it to be understood differently, and for it to exist in its multiplicity. This show creates space for black women and their sexuality to be unapologetically represented, while also allowing ourselves the grace to acknowledge the historical legacy of racism in an effort to subvert it––ultimately, striving towards reclaiming our agency.
The Chicken Is Just Dead First
(University of Waterloo, 2021-04-30) Rowe, Racquel; Thompson, Jessica; Videkanic, Bojana
My thesis exhibition encapsulates my lived experience as a Black woman from Barbados who moved to Guelph, Ontario at eighteen. My studio and artistic research is focused on the ways that food, ritual, hair, and colonialism intersect with the Black female body. By employing the medium of performance art and research into the history of colonization, I use my body to challenge preconceived characterizations (loud, angry, aggressive) often used to define Black women. This research culminated in my MFA thesis that takes the form of performance for the camera and installation. The outcomes of my performances for the camera are as important as my deep-rooted memories they uncover, often prompting further exploration into images I create and their meanings such as for example the seemingly mundane action of washing rice. Keeping traditions (food, ritual, hair) alive through acts of image making is important to me because the videos I create echoe the oral nature of the way things have been passed down to me. The exhibition consists of three large-scale projections with my solo performances for the camera on each, featuring my body against bright, colourful backdrops. Two wall-mounted monitors display video artwork with my family, filmed in domestic environments such as my mother’s kitchen, living room, and granny’s kitchen. Lastly, several small CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) televisions are placed on the floor of the gallery displaying scenes from the East Coast of Barbados.
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.
In The Mix: An Exhibition of Black Diasporic Studies, Remix Culture, Astrology and Sound
(University of Waterloo, 2024-05-27) Charles, Charlie Star; Thompson, Jessica; Videkanic, Bojana
As a Black biracial woman disconnected from my heritage, I research Afrosonic music histories to connect to my Afro Caribbean culture, while gaining a deeper understanding of the historical and social context of music in the broader Black diaspora. My thesis exhibition, In The Mix, encapsulates this research through a site-specific, interactive installation that incorporates sound, music, collage, personal family photographs and archives, disc-jockeying and experimental turntablism. In addition, as a unique expression of my multifaceted identity, I incorporate astrology as a theoretical and formal framework to analyze unseen elements behind musical releases, as well as to create sonic compositions that evoke ideas of time and space. Through my engagement with remix culture, I utilize both audio and visual samples from existing works and create new works. This process of recombination and repurposing of existing work has enabled me to promote a more nuanced and varied understanding of the complexities of Black identity and diaspora. I embrace a more inclusive and diverse range of perspectives in hopes that my work can resonate with a wider audience and contribute to a more comprehensive narrative of the Black experience.
JunkDrawerPhantomDressUpSoirée
(University of Waterloo, 2019-04-30) Prousky, Lauren; Videkanic, Bojana; Cluett, Cora
This exhibition analyzes the archive as a malleable tool for art making through the creation of a personal archive comprised of concepts for images that were then used to construct various projects over a two-year period. With my work (sculptures, paintings, drawings and text), the archival form becomes the groundwork for storytelling and poetry, subverting the idea that the archive is something statically formal, bureaucratic or paramount to its anarchival byproducts. My archive creates an evolving network within the exhibition space, where meaning is continually wrapped around the archive and subsequent projects through a non-hierarchical gathering of materials, text and images.
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.
rinse and repeat
(University of Waterloo, 2023-05-26) Wilson, Stephanie; Videkanic, Bojana; Coutu, Joan
rinse and repeat is a collaborative thesis exhibition of art created by my plant collaborators and I that uses the visual language of sculpture, photography, performance, audio narratives, and collaboration to question the devaluation of life within imperial-capitalist culture. I work intimately with Fungi and Moss through attempts at listenings to seek to unlearn individualism and apparati of separation. This thesis exhibition consists of both indoor and outdoor components, as collaboration with the Land is vital to redefining the personhood or beinghood of autonomous beings and the white-cube gallery is an inhospitable environment for my collaborators. Materials range from gathered wooden limbs to Soil, sawdust, plywood, copper gilding, gold gilding, and photography on paper, as well as Moss and Fungi. Each artwork has undergone a transformative process through iterative choices that lean towards interspecies collaboration and away from scientific-mechanistic indoctrination. By working alongside different Fungi and Mosses, I have come to realize that my upbringing in the imperial-capitalist system was unethical, violent, and delusional. The breadth of my research is sustained through thoughtful actions that have real life consequences, as all life is intrinsically linked and ethically bound together. The aim of this thesis is to address alienating ways of living, making, and behaving, and extending collaboration to gallery visitors through walking tours and performance. This accompanying support paper has three sections that articulate artistic methodology and theoretical contexts for the thesis artwork. The first section, “Intangible Transference: A Reevaluation of Beinghood”, is a mixture of descriptions, reflections, and conceptual underpinnings about each artwork. Forming the pieces began with simply connecting to beings in habitats, recording auditory reflections of site-specific areas, constructing, or sculpting habitats, and taking meditative walks through the in-between spaces of the urban and peri-urban landscape. This research is inclusive of experiencing and observing relationships in the more-than-human world, making vessels for collaborators, extensively reading and learning about and from Moss, Fungi, decolonization, and habitats, growing Fungi and Moss in multiple ways, and continually processing and synthesizing the many failures that come with such a non-linear practice. In this work I attempt to develop interrelation between decolonial practices, relational ways of knowing, and climate change. Through this work I seek to revaluate beinghood as an essential facet for moving through the climate crisis. Relational ways of knowing and living are intrinsic to the Indigenous Nations of the Turtle Island and the Sámi people of Sápmi. In weaving together the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Leo Killsback, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Merlin Sheldrake, a comprehensive understanding of relational ways of living works towards an appreciation for the complexities of interspecies life. These connective ways of living are supported by the theoretical writings of Achille Mbembe, Kathryn Yusoff, David Graeber, and Ariella Azoulay by contemplating necropolitics, white geologics, imperial archives, and imperial taxonomy. The second section of the paper, “Methodology on the Haldimand Tract”, is an overview of the methods I applied in making the thesis artworks, and how certain choices became necessary. Lastly, in the section “Contemporary Practices as a form of Oneness,” I discuss establishing listening as a foundational practice to building interspecies bonds through the writings of Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, and Katya García-Antón and Liv Brissach. By examining the artistic works of Paula Kramer and Máret Ánne Sara, I unfold an understanding of what listening is, leading to a synthesis of how deeply embedded ritual is in art, and how art blurs the lines of living with intention.
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.
shrimpychip YouTube
(University of Waterloo, 2020-05-22) Wijshijer, B.; Videkanic, Bojana; Thompson, Jessica
shrimpychip YouTube is a series of YouTube videos that explore the ways in which digital intimacy and capitalism intersect. The performances, designed for YouTube, strategically exploit emotional responses to the body, the home, and notions of privacy in order to highlight the counterintuitive relationships embodied in digital capitalism. The structural aesthetics of social platforms are deliberately employed in my videos to stress the strangeness of these new economic, cultural, social and personal relationships. In documenting myself using the algorithmic structures embedded in these systems, the work functions as a digital archive of actions and perceptions, providing a firsthand account of the body and thoughts as they are mediated by technology. By tirelessly following trends to the point of ridiculousness, the online persona of shrimpychip empathizes with the internet culture while simultaneously highlighting our vulnerability within these systems.
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.
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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