Opening reception: Thursday May 2, 5:00–8:00 pm
The Department of Fine Arts and UWAG present the second 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
Zahra
Baseri
Tell
All
The
Truth
But
Tell
It
Slant
Tell All The Truth But Tell It Slant is the result of my research on the problematic nature of binary oppositions and their causal relationship with power dynamics. From the viewpoint of an Iranian living in the Diaspora, I create images, objects, and spaces that subtly speak to the collective phenomenological experience of a shared melancholia that those who self-identify as Iranian are undergoing. The exhibition addresses complex issues of the oppressive ruling system in Iran that continually and deliberately produces socio-political turmoil as a way to control its citizens. I employ allegory and representation of culturally and historically significant imagery from Persian and Islamic art and architecture as a commentary on political and social issues. While accentuating the importance of materiality, my work questions the subject-object duality to more profoundly bring the political into the material realm
Gallery
Two
Paula
McLean
To
Catch
A
Glimpse
of
Things
To Catch A Glimpse of Things is an exploration into concretizing and prolonging ephemeral gestures. Through the repetition of ambiguous forms and recurring imagery of distorted, amorphous figures, an attempt is made to reconstruct the complex and fragmentary phenomenon of perception, and the way meaning is created retrospectively through the extraction and arrangement of disparate moments and details gathered from lived experience. Employing the mediums of painting, drawing and sculpture, the exhibition presents a body of work in which the process of reproducing, abstracting and translating distorted images into other variations, mirrors the universal activity of the meaning-making mind, a mind that analyzes, prioritizes, erases, or substitutes aspects of experience as a means of negotiating a perceptually fluid world.