Current Masters Students

Current PhD Students

Studio Graduate Students

Brown, Kyla

My installation-based painting and drawing practice focuses on land-space relationships, and the knowing /experiencing of sentimental space through shape. I am interested in landscape narratives in terms of Canada’s historical and environmental identities. Through shaping personal spaces and sourcing maps, aerial photographs and city diagrams, as well as technological mapping events like Google Earth, my research investigates painting as a building process that reflects conceptual and formal aspects of organization. Here mapping is a way of understanding the places we act in and upon. I think of space both in and around painting, so that the building of space happens in my work through indexing a real place.

Hobot, Barbara

Barbara Hobot is a sculptor currently working with found objects like rocks, sticks, and rope. Her decision-making process often encompasses elements of balance and chance.
Her work has recently been shown at the Harbourfront Centre, Toronto; Galerie Kurt im Hirsch, Berlin; Chiellerie Gallery, Amsterdam; Peak Gallery, Toronto; Cambridge Galleries, and in Waterloo Region’s Biennial, CAFKA.11. Hobot has participated in residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, Saugatuck, Michigan; Art Factory, Bialystok, Poland; and Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, Canning, Nova Scotia. She is the recipient of awards from the Ontario Arts Council and, most recently, an Ox-Bow Residency Scholarship.
She holds a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo. www.barbarahobot.com

Mitrow, Laura

For Laura Mitrow, an Ontario native, the distant oceans and the life that lives within serves as one starting point for her material driven works. Experimenting with textures and surfaces Laura attempts to create forms that are situated in the space between the organic and formal structure. Referencing many natural structures such as antlers, bone, corals, shells and crustaceans, Laura transforms these into both two and three dimensional abstractions. Using a process of creation in which her work grows in a similar method to the life forms that inspire her, Laura attempts to construct evolving systems that bridge together the organic and inorganic, worlds and merge life with art.

Martin, Jennifer

Moore, Tegan

My practice makes tactile inquiries into single-use materials, drawing on their disposable associations to invite new ways to transform them into sculptural objects and moving images. After finding a structural logic, the material, or combination of materials is compacted or expanded relative to its everyday use. My current research considers an ethos of contemporary consumers and observers, making intuitive, imitative material gestures that seek to find alignments between object driven relationships and experiences of impermanence. Website: www.teganmoore.com

Peters, Jared

Solti, Gabriella

My art practice currently centers on artist books and drawings. I print my artist books - handmade limited edition letterpress books - under my publishing imprint Gold Deer Press. Though my books belong to the fine press category and are collected by special collection libraries in Canada and abroad, none of my books deal with traditional subjects. I am interested in using the book as an artform to critically examine its history, its making, its usage, its content and its value.
In my drawing practice I am interested in using objects as drawing tools that are charged with cultural, political, social or environmental history (a salmon fishing net or a brick from the Berlin Wall for example). These objects with their built-in complexity encompass the potential to expand my work beyond recording their physicality and substance.
Website: gabriellasolti.com

Whitaker, Giles

My studio research involves developing interactive systems or “ludic environments”, that are a critique of or alternative to commercial video games. Machinic subjectivities are developed through our interactions with video games and other high-tech tools – and these tend to involve the reinforcing of dominant (capitalist) ideologies. Video games act as instruments of “biopower” - a concept developed by Michel Foucault to describe the decentralised methods of control in technological societies. Biopower extends into video games, with the mechanisms of play mimicking disciplinary structures in the “real” world.

In my research I am seeking to develop interactive systems that are complex, engaging, and arouse curiosity and awareness of one's own processes of perception and cognition, instead of perpetuating normative ideologies or critiquing them in a didactic manner.

Thea Yabut

My main artistic discipline is drawing with which I explore abstraction, materials, and process. The abstraction that I am interested in aims to fuse forms observed in reality with images from my imagination. The result is a collection of semi-abstract images which intend to defy categorisation and stimulate visual associations from the viewer. I view semi abstraction as an “archive” of images that make up personal visual language and identity. I am also concerned with installation and how my drawings may be placed in response to the space in which they are installed. I consider the installed drawings as a family of objects that acquire meaning through the manner of their display.

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/jUux9zrMqz1N3CcdT954mDjwxuA4yM5EjjY6aHZU8u0?feat=directlink

Yoo, Diana

In my art practice, I am interested in the politics of space, perception and multiple viewpoints. My research is based on how we, as individuals, experience architecture on a subjective level, but also on a socio-political one. I am drawn to the experience of geometric lines, interior corners and various angles that refer to the grid. I feel driven to photograph public spaces that were made for development and growth of individuals. In my work, I question how experiencing public spaces may be vehicles of change, which in turn can legitimate the space of a “place” in contemporary society.

Art History Graduate Students

Angove, Samantha

Generally speaking, my interests are in contemporary political art practices and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within art institutions. More specifically, I am drawn toward issues relating to indigenous or settler cultures that live in/occupy a nation-state, such as Canada, U.S.A, Australia. Often, I direct my attention to the spaces that bridge, clash, or blur such cultural relations. My most recent work has begun to consider the concept of cultural continuity rather than cultural difference.

My M.A. thesis, We Come in Piece, looks at three contemporary art exhibitions that turned to science fiction narratives, metaphors, and archetypes as a means to democratize postcolonial theory for its audience. Some of the parallels the exhibitions drew upon were the affiliation between Otherness-Alienness, Marginalization-Outer Space, and Colonization-Interplanetary Travel. We Come in Piece questions whether the exhibitions explored its’ postcolonial concepts in a nuanced yet accessible way. In other words, was the connection made between science fiction and postcolonial theory reductionistic? The three exhibitions to be discussed are only a sample of the pool of exhibitions that look at these issues. As such, this thesis also aims to critique a recent trend in curatorial practices that has been largely underdeveloped in academic scholarship.

Samantha is from Thunder Bay, Ontario. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with honours in Psychology from Lakehead University. In 2010, she completed a portion of her B.A. at Charles Sturt University in Australia. Currently, she is completing her Master of Arts degree in Art History at Western University, Canada.
ca.linkedin.com/pub/samantha-e-angove/29/260/a7b/

Borland, Nicole

GAIZAUSKAS, Amy

McINTOSH, Karly

PAPADATOS, Margherita

Romano, Natalie

My Thesis interests are generally concerned with contemporary public art exhibitions that interrogate, expose, and reformulate the discourses that govern cultural knowledge. The subject of my thesis is Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, an annual one-night public art exhibit. My intention is to outline the emergence of the public art exhibit, drawing on the history of the salon and biennial. More specifically, I want to show how public art exhibitions like Nuit Blanche create a ‘carnivalesque’ atmosphere. Cultural theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin introduces the idea of the ‘carnivalesque’ as those moments in society when societal norms are turned on their head. Just like the Black Out in August 2003 in Toronto, Nuit Blanche is a fleeting moment that seeks to bring people together in different ways. I will reference post-structural theorists, which will assist me in answering and arguing my questions: What do public art exhibits, like Nuit Blanche seek from us? What are they asking of us more than out physical involvement? What are their ideological cultural functions? And how have they evolved?

Skinner, Morgan

I am interested in the work of the artist Cao Fei as a model for understanding how art depicting utopian ideals can permeate society as a form of activism. Cao Fei’s ideal society is realized in her creation of RMB City which is present in the virtual world of Second Life. I want to apply the work of Miles Malcolm, who explores alternative settlements as a space for the possibility of utopian ideals to exist, to the work of Cao Fei. I am positioning my argument to privilege fantasy as the fuel of the world showing how the virtual or fantastical can be more tangible than what exists outside the realm of the imagination. I will utilize the theory produced by Zhai Zhenming on the ontological equivalency of the ‘real’ world and virtual worlds to support this notion.

TSOTSOS, Elyse

VOLF, Sara

Webster, Cierra

In the UWO Master’s program, I am working on an integrated-article thesis that examines contemporary art practices through queer methodological frameworks. Particularly, my thesis will examine the Hide/Seek Smithsonian exhibition, Kent Monkman’s paintings, and General Idea’s FILE Megazine publication. I situate Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture and its censorship controversies in queer politics and the homonormative movement, and ask, what are the implications of Hide/Seek as the first successful major gay art exhibition? Furthermore, in analysing Kent Monkman’s painting series from 2010, I argue that Monkman mutually imbricates queer studies and settler colonialism to deconstruct and unsettle the stereotypes and mythologies found within the dominant art culture. Lastly, I argue that General Idea’s FILE Megazine, published from 1972 to 1989, sought new modes of presenting and expressing queerness that distanced itself from the growing gay mainstream ‘alternative’ movement. Applying these concepts to very different but equally important areas of visual culture should generate a rigorous examination of queer theoretical ideas and shed light on how they can help us better unpack particular art practices. As such, my thesis will be situated in queer theory discourse, but will also contribute to opening up new avenues for art theory.

Wittich, Stephanie

My research will seek connections between the Middle Ages and modern art of the early twentieth century in Germany, using as a case study the artistic theory and practice of Wassily Kandinsky. My investigation will examine the influence a late nineteenth century revival of interest in medieval culture had on a generation of artists reacting to the perceived materialism of an industrialized Europe. This renewal was exemplified in the desire to return to nature, handicraft, and to rediscover one’s cultural roots.

Within this context, my study of Kandinsky will explore how medieval influence, linked to his Russian heritage and career in Germany, surfaces in his spirituality, writings and artistic production. Research will span his formative artistic years in Munich; follow his explorations with Der Blaue Reiter; and continue into his years at the Bauhaus.