curated by
Stu Monck
PREFACE afterword is a reflection on the intellectual journey that
we, as students in the graduating class of Visual Studies, undertook at the University of Toronto.
This exhibition showcases the program’s multifaceted and open-minded framework, which allowed twenty individuals from diverse backgrounds to express their unique take on contemporary art practice. Set at a transitional moment in our artistic careers, afterword illustrates the establishment of our artistic personalities.
i • afterword
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Aptly, the title of this year’s Thesis exhibition refers to an epilogue, found at the end of a piece of literature, that outlines how a creative endeavour came into being, and how the ideas and concepts were developed. Therefore, our forward acknowledges the dedicated efforts of this year’s Thesis students, whose artworks for the show represent the culmination of four year’s study in the Visual Studies program at University of Toronto. Participants in the Thesis course start with several proposals in the first term that are edited and refined to their final projects. In addition to producing artworks, students are responsible for all aspects concerned with the show, including fundraising, publicity and the production of a catalogue. As instructors of this course, it has been gratifying to oversee the development of ideas towards finished artworks, and to contribute to the process. It is an intense experience and one that is distinctly invigorating. We are proud to see the manifestation of this year’s efforts. Your energy and creativity are inspiring, and we wish you great success in your future achievements. John Massey Joanne Tod ii • afterword
This show would not have been possible without the help of the following:
Stu Monck John Massey Joanne Tod Lisa Steele Kim Tomczak Joanne Wainman Vicky Dingillo Elizabeth Legge The Department of Visual Studies FASU ASSU We would also like to thank our professors, friends and family for their continuous support.
iii • afterword
Minhee Bae
Tamed and Dead Oil on canvas 2012-13 Series of three 28” x 38”
Minhee Bae was born in the States and was primarily raised in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her paintings, as well as works of other media, are generally influenced by narratives, film form and modes, and ambiguous states of personal identity. Tamed and Dead is a series of oil paintings, which lays out elements from selected memories and stories, such as fables and folklore, to produce mythologized personal histories. I utilize visual cues that describe my childhood realizations of national identity, in contrast to my current attitudes towards the notion of nationalism.
01 • afterword
Emily Butko
ETHNOGRAPHIC PORTRAITS Video Installation 2013
Emily is currently pursing a BA from the University of Toronto, Majoring in both Visual Studies and Fine Art History. Time based media. including video and performance art, are her main artistic mediums. Much of her work deals with themes of gender roles and identity as well as heteronormitivity. The Stories presented are interactive portraits that reveal a number of characteristics about the subjects, from experiences to psychological make-up. The accompanying videos are my interpretation of the relationship between the subject and myself. My video portrait series is meant to be a modern day interpretation of the portrait. 02 • afterword
Victor Chu
I D.I.D. Ink on paper 2013 36” x 72”
Victor was born in the UK and raised in Hong Kong. He is currently studying at the University of Toronto, majoring in Visual Studies and Fine Art History. He has been recently shaping his art focus towards mental diseases after he has found to be a Dissociative Identity Disorder patient in 2008. Aiming to reveal the truthfulness of mental patients and rectify the outsiders’ misunderstanding, I am cannibalizing a portion of my personal history of suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.) into an autobiographical art piece. I translate a batch of personal diaries into a narrative illustration drawing describing the “appearance” and “behavior” of me as a mental patient.
03 • afterword
Mauricio Contreras-Paredes Of constant lengths in Prussian blue. Acrylic Gouache on Wood 2012-13 48’’ x 36’’
Mauricio is a Guatemalan born, Toronto based artist. His recent work explores distance, both as a physical and as an imaginary concept, through its psychological effects on the body, memory and identity. Marked by a deeply modernist aesthetic, such as that found in movements such as Bauhaus, Russian constructivism and American minimalism, this series furthers an exploration of distance I began a few years ago. Distance, treated as a complex, embodied sum of psychological and corporeal sensations and emotions, is abstracted and transcribed onto the canvas, creating a dialectical conversation between the self and the outer world. www.cargocollective.com/ mcontrerasparedes
04 • afterword
Andrew Eason FRACTURED THOUGHT Intaglio-Type Print on Paper Series of Three - 8”x10” 2012-2013
Andrew was born and raised in Toronto and is currently finishing up his degree at the University of Toronto, majoring in Sociology and Visual Studies. In the past few years Andrew has shifted his focus to the art of printmaking, concerning himself primarily with the mechanical/technical processes involved in creating Intaglio-type-ImagOn prints. By creating unlikely narratives through cut-and-paste collage, viewers are faced with the choice to either find a rational explanation of the work or reject it completely. The images created reflect the product of convoluted thought that is derived from interactions between people and their environment; a realisation that society is much more complex than anyone can explain holistically.
05 • afterword
Regina Efendieva DYSMORPHIA Pencil on Paper 2012-13 Series of Two 14x17
Regina Efendieva was born in Moskow, Russia. She proceeded to live in a variety of cities across Europe and Asia, till finally settling overseas in Canada. She is currently studying at the University of Toronto pursuing a double major in Visual Studies and English Literature. I intend to explore the unnatural moulding of the human body through the pressures of socialization and media. I will not cast moral aspersions, but rather challenge the view of an autonomous and fully-organic human experience, through experimenting with visual aesthetics and discomfort.
06 • afterword
Rayana Hossain BANGLADESH What does it mean to be a Bangladeshi? What is my culture? Where do I belong? Digital print 2013
Rayana was born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She currently resides in Toronto, studying at the University of Toronto, pursuing a double major in Architecture and Visual Studies. My work shows the dichotomy that is created in the minds of the people and the loss of Bangladesh’s own culture under the influence of both Indian Bollywood and Islam and addresses people’s struggle to find their true identity under the influence of these two different cultures.
07 • afterword
Elena Iourtaeva BZMLN Digital Archival Print 2013 13� x 20�
Before settling in Toronto, Elena Iourtaeva has lived in Moscow, Geneva and Paris. Her artistic investigations concentrate on formal characteristics of digital photography and related computerized processes. Outside her art practice, Elena is an aspiring medievalist, with academic interests in depictions of saints, abstracted animal motifs in metalwork, and marginalia in illuminated manuscripts. BZMLN, a noun I invented, designates a sequence of physical, digital and mental alterations applied to a material, following a meditative sensibility to the aesthetic vector of a section of that material. A section is gradually transformed and refined during the process of BZMLN; a material undergoes a series of BZMLN before being exhausted.
08 • afterword
Jenny Kim
Ibid. Projected audiovisual presentation 2012-13
09 • afterword
Jenny Kim’s artistic practice revolves around the issue of identities, and the process of constructing and examining them in a cultural context. She is an interdisciplinary artist, who is always exploring new mediums. She currently works primarily with digital imaging, video, and painting. Our identities are a series of simulated images, influenced by the ways in which we perceive reality. Every “individual” is a version of something, or someone that they have experienced at one point in their life. By presenting, or rather bombarding the viewer with different fictionalized identities that are presented to us as normative and “real”, I want the viewer to question the authenticity of their own selfhood.
Vivian Kong
Social Energies Audiovisual presentation 2012-13 Series of Four
Vivian Kong was born and raised in the Durham Region of the vast Ontarian landscape. After finishing her education at University of Toronto (majoring in Visual Studies and double minoring in Math and East Asian Studies), Vivian hopes to pursue her creative passions wherever they may take her. I will explore intersections between personality traits (introversion/ extroversion). By finding contradictions and similarities between these vastly different temperaments, I hope to help others understand society better, by interjecting the metaphor of technology into the set definitions of social temperaments, I aim to posit new dimensions to social temperaments. 10 • afterword
Lynn Yuhan Lin
LIFE Mixed Media on Panel 2012-13 Series of Ten 18’’ x 24’’
Lynn Yuhan Lin is a Toronto based artist who was born in China.With the rooted interests in materials, she is currently exploring inter-media art with everyday substances. The complexity and juxtaposition of her works illustrate the human life cycle and the relationship between man-made world and nature. The serial abstract paintings with the juxtaposition of art media and non-art substances challenge the definition of art, reflect the excessive consumption, poke fun at the contemporary art making process, and serve the analogy of the progression of human life. It derives from personal experiences and extends to universal phenomena.
11 • afterword
www.yuhanlin.com
Vlad Lunin
Constructing America Digital Archival Print, Plexiglass Face Mount 2013 Series of Five 30” x 40”
Vlad Lunin was born and raised in Chervonograd, western Ukraine before moving to Toronto. He is an interdisciplinary artist working in installation of still and moving imagery. Guided by the observation of people and their environment, his ideas are founded in an interest of how things change, progress, and build. American history of the now. I document and analyze different fields to come up with a new understanding of how complex systems work. Using only my own images, I create works that stand separate from their origin, communicating the nature of progress and interconnectedness of separate pieces that generate its own new form and reality. www.vladlunin.com
12 • afterword
Stu Monck UNTITLED Cyanotype on linen, Plexiglas 2013 30” x 40”
Stu Monck’s practice encompasses a wide range of media, including installation, photography, video and text; across these various media, his work could be characterized by an ongoing engagement with language, process, and perception. The themes explored in Monck’s oeuvre are executed with a clear attention to material and conceptual clarity.
In Monck’s recent photo-based works, a discourse emerges between digital images and traditional photographic principles. His process involves applying traditional photographic processes, such as cyanotype impressions, to found and appropriated images. These images, which would have otherwise escaped from collective memory, are reconfigured through chemical processes; as a result, the reworked images attain a material quality, permanence, and affinity with the history of image-making. 13 • afterword
Shayna Moor
RUGGED Ink Prints on Paper Series of Two 15”x60” 2013
Shayna was born and raised in Blenheim, a small town in Southern, Ontario. She is currently studying at the University of Toronto, working towards her Honours Bachelor of Arts degree with a Specialist in Visual Art and Minor in Human Geography. My work is inspired by the mark making of tires on highways and how powerful of an act this is, not only the force it takes for it to make the mark but also the event that causes it to occur. Through using print making as my medium, I am recreating and capturing the power of tire markings from exploded tires in an image.
14 • afterword
Jessica Muraca ESTRANGED Digital photo composite 2013
Jessica Muraca is an artist and illustrator born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, who is currently pursuing a degree in Visual Studies and Architecture at the University of Toronto. Her fine art practice primarily consists of works in series, exploring typological representations of digital culture and fictional subjects. Focusing on figurative stylization, I have become aware of the influence of conventions of attractiveness, youth, and neotenous features, as well as my internalization of these habits in my own work. Expressing my discomfort, I will explore and subvert these conventions, in pursuit of defamiliarizing them to both my viewers and myself.
15 • afterword
Andrew Rutherdale Dark Precursor Digital Rendering Dimensions Variable 2013
Andrew Rutherdale’s work presents an alien, denatured view of species in order to draw attention towards ecological issues. Employing computer graphics software and digital fabrication, the work aims to unify the virtual with the material. Dark Precursor explores the materiality of light. Light acts as a force of physical transformation. It contains energy that affects the growth or deterioration of geological, plant and animal bodies. When it is gathered at a high intensity its effect on matter is observable. The piece employs three forms produced by laser processes in order to explore the generative potential of light.
16 • afterword
Natalie Schiabel IMMANENT Multimedia on Wood 2013 30” x 132”
Natalie Schiabel has been studying art for the past ten years. She attended Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts high school where she specialized in Visual Arts, and is currently completing a double major at the University of Toronto in Architectural Design and Visual Studies. She is interested in creating works on wood that are abstract, yet self referential and are based in the field of design. My work aims to combine the fields of architecture, industrial design, art and metaphysical thought to create works which can be looked at deeply, but can also be seen strictly as design work. Evolving ideas of personal insight are represented by a focus on materiality and development of stylistic language.
17 • afterword
Danit Shneiderman DECONSTRUCTION Mirrors on Wood 50”x50” 2013
Danit Shneiderman was born in Florida, USA and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. She moved to Canada in 2010 and lives in Toronto since then. She is currently doing a Bachelor of Arts at The University of Toronto with a Specialist in Visual Studies and a Minor in Fine Art History. Space is subjective, but usually we have a consistent approach to it. In this installation I will generate three different realities for the viewer to experience. I will manipulate what they see and its physical form by using mirrors, projections and tricking the eye.
18 • afterword
Polina Teif Sandwich Bag (Selection Brand) Archival Photo Print 2013 48” x 48”
Polina Teif was born in Minsk and raised in Israel and South Africa. Now residing in Toronto and exhibits primarily as a member of XXXX Collective. Works primarily in the mediums of photography, video and installation. This series investigates the common objects we surround ourselves with. The dryer sheets and plastic sandwich bag were specifically chosen since they are inexpensive items, commonly available in all supermarkets. However, they do not constitute the basic necessities of life, subtly signaling at the privileged economic environment in which we live.
19 • afterword
Shellie Zhang Mythologies Acrylic on Canvas 2012-13 Series of Five 30x40”
Shellie was born in Beijing and raised in various parts of China, the United States, and Canada. Her practice takes a critical perspective on mass media and contemporary pop culture, while reflecting on nostalgia in the 21st century. She works primarily through painting, photography and installation. Past depictions of women are easily categorized as ancient even though their influence still permeates today’s culture. Mythologies unites the fabrications surrounding female icons of the past with present day constructions of women, demonstrating a criticism of the history and a cautionary reminder of the state of the present. www.shelliezhang.com
20 • afterword