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Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Maria Gindhart, committee chair; Susan Richmond, Akela Reason, committee members. Electronic text (82 p. : ill. (chiefly col.)) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed July 14, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-82).

My thesis tilled Feminist Poetics: Symbolism in an Emblematic Journey Reflecting Self and Vision, consists of thirty oil paintings on canvas, several preparatory sketches and drawings in different media on paper, and is supported and elucidated by an exegesis. The paintings on unframed canvases reveal mise en scènes and emblems that present to the viewer a drama about links between identities, differences, relationships and vision. Images of my daughter, friends and myself fill single canvases, suites of paintings, diptyches and triptychs. The impetus behind my research derives from my recognition of the cultural means by which women's experience is excluded from a representational norm or ideal. I use time-honoured devices, such as, illusionist imagery, aspects of portraiture, complex fractured atmospheric space, paintings and drawings within paintings, mirrors and reflective surfaces, shadows and architectural devices. They structure my compositions in a way that envelops the viewer in my internal world of ideas. Some of these features function symbolically, as emblems. A small part of the imagery relies on verisimilitude, such as my hands and their shadow and my single observing eye enclosed by my glasses. What remains is a fantasy world, ‘seen’ by the image of my other eye, or ‘faction’, based on memories and texts explaining the significance of ancient Minoan symbols. In my paintings, I base the subjects of this fantasy on my memories of the Knossos Labyrinth and matristic symbols, such as the pillar, snake, blood, eye and horn. They suggest the presence of a ritual where initiates descended into the adyton (holy of holies) or sunken areas in the labyrinth. The paintings attempt a ‘rewriting’ of sacrality and gender by adopting the symbolism of death, transformation and resurrection in the adyton. The significance of my emblematic imagery is that it constructs a foundation narrative about vision and insight. I sought symbolic attributes shared by European oil painting and Minoan antiquity. Both traditions share symbolic attributes with male dying gods in Greek myths and Medusa plays a central part in this linkage. I argue that her attributes seem identical to both those of the dying gods and Minoan goddesses. In the Minoan context these symbols suggest metaphors for the female body and the mother and daughter blood line. When the symbols align with the beheaded Medusa in a patriarchal context, both her image and her attributes represent cautionary tales about female sexuality that have repercussions for aspects of vision. In Renaissance and Baroque oil painting Medusa's image served as a vehicle for an allegory that personified the triumph of reason over the senses. In the twentieth century, the vagina dentata suggests her image, a personified image of irrational emotion that some male Surrealists celebrated as a muse. She is implicated in the male gaze as a site of castration and her representation suggests a symbolic form pertaining to perspective. Medusa's image, its negative sexual and violent connotations, seemed like a keystone linking iconographic codes in European oil painting to Minoan antiquity. I fused aspects of matristic Minoan antiquity with elements of European oil paintings in the form of disguised attribute gestures, objects and architectural environments. I selected three paintings, Dürer's Setf-Portrait, 1500, Gentileschi's Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1630 and Velazquez's Las Meniruis, 1656 as models because 1 detected echoes of Minoan symbolism in the attributes of their subjects and backgrounds. My revision of Medusa's image by connecting it to Minoan antiquity established a feminist means of representation in the largely male-dominated tradition of oil painting. These paintings also suggested painting techniques that were useful to me. Through my representations of my emblematic journey I questioned the narrow focus placed on phallic symbols when I explored how their meanings may have been formed within a matricentric culture. I retained the key symbols of the patriarchal foundation narratives about vision but removed images of violence and their link to desire and replaced it with a ritual form of symbolic death. I challenged the binary oppositional defined Self as opposed to Other by constructing a complex, fluid Self that interacts with others. A multi-directional gaze between subjects, viewers and artist replaces the male gaze. Different qualities of paint, coagulation and random flow form a blood symbolism. Many layers of paint retaining some aspects of the Gaze and Glance, fuse and separate intermittently to construct and define form. The sense of motion and fluidity constructs a form of multi-faceted selves. The supporting document, the exegesis is in two parts. In the first part, I discuss the Minoan sources of my iconography and the symbolic gender specific meanings suggested by particular symbols and their changed meanings in European oil painting, I explain how I integrate Minoan symbols into European oil paintings as a form of disguised symbolism. In the second part I explain how my alternative use of symbolism and paint alludes to a feminist poetic.

Through an exploration of Toronto-based artist Allyson Mitchell’s craft-art, this thesis investigates the complexities surrounding the functions and roles of public and private spaces; particularly the home and the fine art museum within Canadian society. I propose a reading of Mitchell’s art practice, activism, scholarship, and curatorial activities that focuses on a queering of both private domestic space and public social space through a conflation of the two. Mitchell’s textile installations make intimate and cozy the otherwise impersonal space of the public art museum, while Mitchell queers the heteronormative space of the family home by turning it into a public art institution, an archive and a classroom. Mitchell’s bright textile enclosures, "Hungry Purse: The Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalism" and "Menstrual Hut, Sweet Menstrual Hut," for example, visibly disrupt the sanitized and impersonal space of the art museum, disrupting the dominant ideological framework that privileges normative assumptions of sexuality and sexual identity, and exclusionary hierarchies of class, able-bodiedness and access. While Mitchell’s theatrical textile installation, "Ladies Sasquatch," has predominantly been theorized as a queer critique of the myths of femininity, gender, sexuality, and the detrimental treatment of the female body within popular media; I present a reading of "Ladies Sasquatch" as a radical decolonizing spectacle that has the potential to interrupt larger nationalistic and colonial narratives reproduced by museums. Through these powerful interventions in public and private space, I suggest that Mitchell’s crafty installations offer playful acts of resistance that create counter narratives which function to decolonize our physical, psychic and emotional space, while also creating new imaginings that undermine the status quo. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2013-01-14 15:58:08.015

This thesis investigates the work of the Canadian artist and filmmaker Joyce Wieland (1930-1998) from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s in relation to its historical conditions of production and considers both her film and non-film work, including quilts, embroidery and prints. To examine these artistic media together not only provides a means to re-contextualize Wieland’s work, but rethinks disciplinary boundaries and contributes to a renovation of both art historical and filmic methods of critical inquiry. Wieland’s work from this period serves as an exemplary case study of the ways in which female artists have consistently had to negotiate contemporaneous constructions of femininity/feminism, modernity, and representation in relation to their art practice. I argue that Wieland consistently explored, through aesthetic means, the terms by which contemporary re-conceptualizations of gendered, classed, and raced identities were being defined as new national subjects within the Canadian nation-state. I begin by outlining the ways in which Wieland’s work as been constructed within the dominant narratives of Canadian art and film, and argue that the disciplines that generated them, with their formalist and textual foci, inhibit larger discussions of the historical, political and cultural contexts of Wieland’s art production. Each chapter subsequently examines an identity that emerged as a collective during the late 1960s in Canada –women, the working classes, French Canadians, and aboriginal peoples– that Wieland aesthetically explores. Through her engagement with second-wave feminism, the development of the New Left in English and French Canada, Québécois nationalism, and shifting notions of aboriginal identity, Wieland’s art production visually materializes the intersection of feminism and nationalism –discourses that were actively circulating in Canada during this period. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2007-12-21 06:48:06.423

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2008. Graduate programme in Women's Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 400-444). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR51669

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in Women's Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 336-370). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR51698

Quilts can be blankets that keep you warm at night. They can be several pieces of fabric that are purposefully sewn together to make a beautiful, meaningful pattern. Quilts can be gifts. They can be pieces of artwork that someone has poured their heart into. Over time, quilts can become more meaningful to their owners. They can become a memory of their maker. I hope that the quilts I have made in the last year live on and become more meaningful in time. They are an expression of a young woman in 2017 and her quarrels with tradition.

A pesquisa propõe uma revisitação da crítica feminista das políticas de representação considerando a intersecção de seus principais debates e premissas com as críticas contemporâneas às políticas de identidade, sugerindo perspectivas pós-identitárias nas estratégias representativas empregadas por Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons e Martha Rosler. Problematizando a tendência da representação de perpetuar na imagética feminista um sujeito fixo e uma categoria estável \"mulher\", atenta-se para a importância da formulação de estratégias artísticas representativas antiessencialistas que evoquem criticamente \"mulheridade\" evitando a reificação da categoria, do sujeito e das estruturas heteronormativas que sustentam o termo. Assim sendo, as análises propostas na pesquisa sugerem que, ao apropriarem-se de imagens de mulheres advindas do repertório dos mass media (revistas, cinema, televisão, anúncios publicitários etc.), as artistas selecionadas proporcionam um olhar crítico à imagética cultural e desestabilizam não somente as retóricas nela historicamente arriagadas, mas também a própria noção de \"mulheridade\" como categoria identitária estável, coerente, natural e universal. / This research provides an analysis based on the intersections between the feminist representational politics critique and the contemporary identity politics critique, suggesting that the strategies employed by Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons and Martha Rosler manifest post-identity perspectives. By exposing the representation\'s tendency to perpetuate, in feminist imagery, \"woman\" as a fixed subject and stable category, this research stresses the necessity to elaborate antiessentialist representational artistic strategies that might be able to critically summon \"womanliness\", though avoiding the reification of the same category, subject and heterosexual structures that sustain this term. Therefore, I will argue that by appropriating images of women provided by the cultural imagery (magazines, cinema, television, adds etc.) these artists enable a critical gaze towards this particular visual repertory, destabilizing not only their historically rooted rhetorics, but also the very idea of \"womanliness\" as a stable, coherent, natural and universal identity category.

De caráter político, feminista e autobiográfico, a ideia que conduz esta dissertação é a abordagem do percurso traçado desde a minha infância, passando pela relação problemática com minha mãe, pelas experiências com a pichação, pelo redescobrimento no graffiti, até chegar à produção artística atual, compondo, desta forma, a persona Anarkia Boladona. O processo de pesquisa foi ordenado por visitas, criadas ao acaso, por cidades do globo, onde as diferenças culturais chocam-se de forma a me fazer compreender quem sou, o porquê desta minha construção e como ela se reflete em meu processo artístico. São oito anos completos de graffiti, treze de pichação, quinze como professora e vinte dois de desenho, mas uma vida toda pensando e produzindo arte / This dissertation is driven by political, feminist, and autobiographical ideas. It proposes to address the path I followed since childhood beginning with my problematic relationship with my mother, experimentation with graffiti, and rediscovering graffiti, to my current work as an artist, thus forming the persona Anarkia Boladona. The research process was developed at random by visiting cities around the globe where cultural differences collide in order to understand who I am, why I built this, and how it is reflected in my artistic process. Eight years of graffiti, thirteen years of pichação, fifteen years as a professor, and twenty-two as a drawing teacher, but truly a lifetime of thinking about and producing art