Since hitting mass markets in the 1920s, refrigerators have occupied a lovable corner not just in American kitchens but also in American culture. The story of humankind has always been the story of food, around which we congregate, negotiate power, and explore methods of control. As the U.S. transitioned to industrial, mechanical convenience in the twentieth century, refrigerators replaced hearths as household communication centers, and it has become commonplace to decorate refrigerator surfaces with photographs, keepsakes, lists, and other items of visual culture. As meaningful, expressive arrangements, the curatorial dimensions of such displays have called for their investigation. From January to June of 2013, the Other White Cube Project studied the cultural phenomenon by collecting photographs and questionnaires online at theotherwhitecube.com. From 200 submissions, the project connected activities at home with institutional roles at large. The educational effort performed post-museum theory, in which audiences and institutions share power, build community, and promote awareness. By equating museums with everyday spaces, curators with everyday people, and art with everyday objects, the Other White Cube Project approached three keys to learning in art museums - comfort, relevance, and readability. The project also examined the aesthetic, social, and practical barometers that direct daily choices, which shape consciousness and subsequent interactions with space. In that sense, everyone is a curator - of some kind and of some place.

Rabbit Lake explores the concerns of citizens who testified at hearings held by the Rabbit Lake Uranium Mine Environmental Assessment Panel throughout Saskatchewan in 1993. The poems that form my thesis are both lyrical and experimental, derived in part from the voices found in the Rabbit Lake transcripts. Inspired by rhizome theory and rhizomorphous structures, the voices in my thesis are nomadic: their primary impulse is to map interconnected histories and geographies; in so doing, these voices transcend boundaries and coalesce to form a polyphonic, non-linear narrative. The influence of ecocritical theory is reflected in poems that draw the reader’s attention to the non-human world affected by uranium mining, most notably in an interspersed series of experiments detailing various forms of lichen found throughout Saskatchewan. Various other textual experiments, including collage and erasure, are lines of flight within the rhizome of the thesis. The inclusion of “(inaudible)” passages found in the transcripts is intended to draw the reader’s attention toward what was misheard or left unsaid at the hearings. The presence of an “unknown” speaker is designed as a poetic and political intervention that enables elaborations. Beginning with Canada’s historical involvement in the Manhattan Project, that is, the United States’ earliest attempt to build a nuclear weapon, my thesis moves from Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, and into the lakes and waterways of Saskatchewan’s north. The voices that emerge, situated in association with lakes and rivers, include a chorus of women and a chorus of Indigenous elders, an invented uranium mining corporation, “Uraneco,” and several scientists, including a biologist and geophysicist, as well as an invented cosmochemist and limnologist. From Saskatchewan’s northern waterways, the voices wander outward, evoking sites affected by the nuclear industry beyond Saskatchewan’s borders, from crops in the province’s south historically affected by fallout from nuclear weapons’ testing in Nevada, to radioactive detritus left in the deserts of Iraq due the United States’ use of depleted Canadian uranium in munitions. The intention behind this figurative explosion of the thesis is to illustrate the extent to which a seemingly isolated uranium mine may affect the whole world.

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This thesis is focused on the material known as the Mesolithic portable art. Earlier research have interpreted the material as representative art relating to ideology, mythology, prestige, ritual practices,and tribalism. Such interpretations are based on theoretical frameworks that build on hylomorphism and Cartesian metaphysics. By a change of theoretical framework, to a new animistic perspective based on a combination of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome theory, Tim Ingold’s meshwork and Giordano Bruno’s theory of bonds in general, followed by the use of ChantalConneller’s method rhizomatic chaîne opératoire, I conclude that the motifs on the tools and pendants are communications to the animated subjects that make up and inhabit the environment. Furthermore, I conclude that the binary positions of function and ritual cannot be applied when studying the formgenerating process of this material, as the tools and pendants along with their applied motifs are a result of what is in between these binary positions.