Opening reception: Thursday May 5, 5:00–8:00 pm
The Department of Fine Arts and UWAG present the second 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.
*Please join us in celebrating the thesis work of our MFA candidates in-person! Visitors are required to comply with campus safety guidelines
Julie
Hall
&
Jacob
Irish
Borrowers
and
Bullies
Central to this work is our understanding of a habit as not just a set of repeated behaviours but as a central, life-configuring scaffold for building and maintaining relationships to one another, the built environment, and the land. During the summer of 2021, we harvested materials, documentation, and experiences from settler-colonial greenspaces in Southern Ontario and The Maritimes, while asking ourselves: What was our social muscle memory in our home, our neighbourhood, our nation? And do these habits inform our ethics? We see our art practice as an opportunity to manifest anti-colonial and anti-capitalist ethics by tugging at relationships between subjectivity and materiality. Borrowers and Bullies is an exhibition with its eyes turned to the colonial-capitalist enclosure of time and land, and how that enclosure configures the knowable, the thinkable, and the imaginable.
Julie and Jacob are a collaborating couple working in video, audio, and sculpture. They work seasonally: collecting materials in warm weather, and synthesizing their haul when winter comes. This methodology emerged from their first four years collaborating while at NSCAD University and continued through the next four years moving around Southern Ontario. They make sculptures that explore the materials that build our psychological, social, and economic realities
Julie Hall & Jacob Irish, a policy of neglect (video still), 2021, single channel video and stereo audio, 6:37 min. Image courtesy of the artists.