Thesis defence: Cassandra Lesage Fongué

Abstract:

We live in a world shrouded in greenness. A world made of places, of places made of sites, of sites which make the landscape. I speak to all current and latent gardeners; to all of those unaware, yet fascinated by green.

Ultraviolet Gardens invites you into a photographic garden; a reframing of how ‘green’ has been, can be, seen and rediscovered; to find greenness within plastic plants, fuzzy chlorophyll, and the illusions of green.

Within ultraviolet gardens, the banal and mundane are estranged, and as such made visible. With film and photo making, I share the strange dimensions of greenness that arise in familiar places.  Central to the argument is that a rediscovery of green must happen first by estrangement of the body, of both the external optics of vision and the internal perceptions of the mind.

In the photographic process, an image is created when light reacts with a light sensitive surface. Silver halides are permanently converted to elemental silver, matter is changed by other non human matter; put in contact they create the repository of images central to this thesis: The Aesthetic of Contact.

Not simply an image, the photograph, unlike painting or architectural drawing, shares more then just likeness to its subject; it is a part of, or an extension of its reality.

I use camera-less and camera-using photography to curate a garden of images, not of ‘others’, but made in collaboration; autobiographies of the nonhuman. I seek through them an (un)representation of green that does not come from my sight, nor from architecture’s primacy of vision; a way of seeing capable of awakening a fascination of greenness.

The examining committee is as follows:

Supervisor: Linda Zhang
Committee member: Jane Mah Hutton
Internal-external reader: Fiona Lim Tung
External: Christian Flemm

The defence examination will take place:
Wednesday, July 31, 2024, 11:30 a.m.
In-person, ARC-1001 - Main Lecture Hall.
A copy of the thesis is available for perusal in ARC 2106A.