Opening reception: Thursday April 11, 5:00–8:00 pm
The Department of Fine Arts and UWAG present the first of two thesis exhibitions by Master of Fine Arts (MFA) candidates from the graduate program in Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo. MFA Thesis gives the campus and community-at-large an opportunity to see the end result of two years of intensive research and studio production by emerging visual artists.
Gallery
One
Lauren
Prousky
JunkDrawerPhantomDressUpSoirée
JunkDrawerPhantomDressUpSoirée 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. Combining 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. The poetic 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.
Gallery
One
Patrick
Allaby
Customer
Service
Customer Service is a 30-minute autofictional hand-drawn slideshow consisting of around three hundred and fifty drawings that explore that most ubiquitous twenty-first century labour experience: the call centre. Call centre employees are both dehumanized by callers fed up with waiting for hours on hold, and by their employers, who are eager to process calls at ever increasing rates. Customer Service weaves personal and political criticisms together against late capitalism, and focuses on the difficulty of reducing one’s self to the flesh appendage of a computer, a creature whose only function is to deliver algorithmic logic with an empathetic tone. Customer Service combines the artist’s interests ranging from pop music, cinema, early animation, experimental theatre, literature and comics into one cohesive work.