Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Degree

Master of Fine Arts

Program

Visual Arts

Supervisor

Kelly Jazvac

Abstract

This thesis dossier combines a writing practice component in the form of an article response to an exhibition, a comprehensive artist statement and a documentation section. Part One: Helen Marten’s Whiteness offers a critique of artist Helen Marten’s exhibition No borders in a wok that can’t be crossed. Its main questions evaluate the exhibition’s cultural provocations and analyze assertions made by a “post internet” generation in an art context. These issues are presented as contributing factors in the content of Marten’s work, its representations, and modes of authorship. Part Two: Comprehensive Artist Statement, expands on my artistic concerns with specific materials and processes that can destabilize engagement with interior space and its contingent systems. It does this through an examination of haptic aesthetics, processes of intactness, and through a logic of reversals exemplified through sculpture, installation, and video. Key questions ask: How do we engage in an awareness of the systems, objects and materials that produce comfort in interior space? Can an aesthetic engagement lead to new forms of awareness and criticality of how these conditions are operating in the built environment? These questions are presented as visual problems, expanding the research through my practice as a visual artist. Chapter Three: In Practice presents a streamlined visual document of works installed for exhibition or critique over a two year period.

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