I am a collage artist working with multiple mediums such as paint, photography, video, audio, and performance. As a New Orleans’ native, I have a unique history that is unflattering, for my history echoes that of America’s historical misdeeds. I make sociopolitical art because I am of a historically oppressed people. I make art that celebrates my diverse culture that is a collage of Native American, African, and New Orleans’ French Creole.

You Don't Have to be Good, is a nonfiction collection of prose, poetry and graphic memoir set in New Orleans, central Florida, and points in between. In this coming-of-age memoir, I recall the abrupt end of my dad's life, the 24 years of my life in which he was alive, and the years after his death—remembering him while living without him in his hometown of New Orleans. Along the way there are meditations on language, race, gender, dreams, addiction, and ecology. My family and I encounter Hurricane Katrina and Mardi Gras, and at least one shuttle launch. These are the stories I find myself telling at parties, and also those I've never voiced until now.

This thesis examines the philosophical notion of selfhood in visual representation. I introduce the self as a modern and postmodern concept and argue that there is a loss of selfhood in contemporary culture. Via Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gerhard Richter and the method of deconstruction of language, I theorise selfhood through the figurative and literal analysis of duration, the frame, and the mirror. In this approach, selfhood is understood as aesthetic-ontological relation and construction based on specific techniques of the self. In the first part of the study, I argue for a presentational rather than representational perspective concerning selfhood by translating the photograph Self in the Mirror (1964), the painting Las Meninas (1656), and the video Cornered (1988), into my conception of a cinematic theory of selfhood. Based on the presentation of selfhood in those works, the viewer establishes a cinematic relation to the visual self that extends and transgresses the boundaries of inside and outside, presence and absence, and here and there. In the second part, I interpret epistemic scenes of cinematic works as durational scenes in which selfhood is exposed with respect to the forces of time and space. My close readings of epistemic scenes of the films The Congress (2013), and Boyhood (2014) propose that cinema is a philosophical mirror collecting loss of selfhood over time for the viewer. Further, the cinematic concert A Trip to Japan, Revisited (2013), and the hyper-film Cool World (1992) disperse a spatial sense of selfhood for the viewer. In the third part, I examine moments of selfhood and the forces of death, survival, and love in the practice of contemporary cinematic portraiture in Joshua Oppenheimer’s, Michael Glawogger’s, and Yorgos Lanthimos’ work. While the force of death is interpreted in the portrait of perpetrators in The Act of Killing (2013), and The Look of Silence (2014), the force of survival in the longing for life is analysed in Megacities (1998), Workingman’s death (2005), and Whores’ Glory (2011). Lastly, Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011), and The Lobster (2015) present the contemporary human condition as a lost intuition of relationality epitomised in love.

We are inundated by a constant feed of media that responds and adapts in real time to the impulses of our psyches and the dimensions of our devices. Beneath the surface, this stream of information is directed by hidden, automated controls and steered by political agendas. The transmission of information has evolved into a spiral of entropy, and the boundaries between author, content, platform, and receiver have blurred. This reductive space of responsive media is a catalyst for immense political and cultural change, causing us to question our notions of authority, truth, and reality.

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

In this dissertation I investigate photographs not only as images of something, or as objects we can hold, but I also investigate how they are acts grounded in place. That is, I consider the photograph as event. The backbone of my research is a hybrid social science and visual art undertaking in which I produce both academic texts and art installations through visual inquiry into the intensely imagined places that are Canadian national parks. I examine how the myth of wilderness is made concrete in visual images of Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta. I explore the situatedness of photography through ethnographic and archival research into the conditions that produced over four-hundred photographs of Waterton from the late 19th century to the present. This research advances understanding of how specific historical photographic events shape dominant systems of environmental knowledge in Canada. I explore the intertwined histories of place and representation in Waterton over the past 150 years and how they emerge in the present. To unravel the politics of representation in national parks in Canada I address three key questions: First, how do images that portray and represent wilderness in Canada affect not only our imagination about national parks, but our experiences in, and actions in, national parks? In particular, how are photographs not just representations of national parks but how do we form a relationship to space and place through them? Second, I carry out a visual investigation of Waterton Lakes National Park to study the photograph as event, and ask, how photographs, not just as images and objects, are acts grounded in place? Finally, I ask: What new approaches can be deployed to investigate existing visual collections and to bring them to bear on the history and present of the national park space? I describe how visual methods can generate new ways of thinking about photography and place.

À travers l’analyse d’œuvres de Tadeusz Kantor, Pina Bausch, Jan Lauwers, Pippo Delbono et Emma Dante, cette étude propose une ouverture des outils traditionnels des études théâtrales aux concepts de la psychanalyse et aux méthodes des études visuelles pour rendre compte de l’expérience émotionnelle intense que les créations de ces artistes induisent. La notion de symptôme, théorisée par Freud et reprise dans le champ de l’histoire de l’art par Georges Didi-Huberman, permet de dépasser une vision de la scène comme « système de signes » « à lire » – sous l’influence de la sémiologie et du structuralisme – et de penser au contraire ce qui, dans les images proposées, ne se laisse pas saisir immédiatement. Après avoir montré les limites des outils dramaturgiques, il est possible de mettre en évidence les moments d’irruption du geste-symptôme dans les œuvres, en adoptant une attitude plus phénoménologique. Le paradigme du rêve, comme modèle analogique d’une organisation-désorganisation, peut nous permettre de comprendre l’agencement des éléments scéniques. Ce qui touche le spectateur ne se situe plus au niveau de la représentation, mise en branle par la présence du symptôme, mais sous celle-ci et entre les éléments. Le rapport au réel qui s’instaure pour le spectateur relève alors plus de l’imaginable que d’une forme de mimèsis : les images ouvrent le regard et modifient la position du spectateur touché corporellement et émotionnellement. Le sujet théâtral diffracté porté par le corps de l’acteur amène le spectateur à faire l’épreuve de l’Autre en scène. Les œuvres à l’étude proposent ainsi une expérience de subjectivation et de symbolisation qui réactive les processus de la construction psychique de l’individu mise en crise dans la société contemporaine. Dans le corps-à-corps qui s’installe entre la scène et la salle, c’est à sa position de sujet face aux autres, à lui-même et au monde, que le spectateur accède. / Through an analysis of works by Tadeusz Kantor, Pina Bausch, Jan Lauwers, Pippo Delbono and Emma Dante, this thesis attempts to open up the traditional analytical tools that tend to be privileged by the discipline of theatre studies to concepts stemming from psychoanalysis or visual arts, which are more appropriate for rendering the intense emotional experience that these works induce. The notion of symptom, theorised by Freud and reappropriated by art history thanks to the work of Georges Didi-Huberman, can allow us to see the stage as more than a “system of signs”, “to be read”, under the influence of semiology and structuralism, but also to go beyond the image, towards something that is not immediately evident. Having shown the limitations of dramaturgical tools, it is possible to highlight the specific moments when a symptomatic gesture irrupts within these works by relying on a more phenomenological analysis. Dream patterns, which have the similar quality of being models of an order-disorder, are essential to our understanding of the organization of stage elements and processes. Whatever moves the spectator, is no longer strictly conditioned by representation, which is itself disrupted by the symptom, but is situated beyond it, under it, between the different scenic elements. The audience’s perception of reality becomes more reliant on imaginable rather than on some form of mimesis: images open up the gaze and alter the spectator’s stance, touching him physically and emotionally. The diffracted theatrical subject contained in the actor’s body helps the public witness Otherness onstage. The works studied here involve an experience of subjectivation and symbolisation, which activates the constitutive elements of the individual’s psyche, in crisis in contemporary society. Within the very physical relationship that is built between stage and audience, the spectator experiences his own position as a subject facing others, himself and the world.

This dissertation analyzes the representations of immigrants from North Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe in Spain. As engaged scholarship, it seeks to better the portrayal of immigrants in the mass media through the study of literature, film, and music about immigration spanning from the year 2000 to 2016. Because misconceptions continue to propagate in the media, this dissertation works to counteract anti-immigrant, xenophobic representations as well as balance out overly positive and orientalized portrayal of immigrants with a call to recognize immigrants as human beings who deserve the same respect, dignity, and rights as any other citizen. Chapter 1 examines and analyzes the background to immigration in Spain by covering demographics, the mass media, and political theories related to immigration. Chapter 2 analyzes Spanish music about immigration through Richard Rorty’s social theory of ‘sentimental education’ as a meaningful way to redescribe marginalized minorities as full persons worthy of rights and dignity. Chapter 3 investigates the representation of immigrants in Spanish filmic shorts and cinema. Lastly, Chapter 4 demonstrates how literary portrayals of immigrants written by undocumented immigrants can give rise to strong characters that avoid victimization and rear empathy in their readers in order to affect a social change that minimizes cruelty.

The purpose of this project is to ascertain the ways in which Orange is the New Black uses its platform to either complicate or reify narratives about the prison system, prisoners and their relationship to the state. This research uses the works of Giorgio Agamben, Colin Dayan, Michelle Alexander and Lisa Guenther to situate the ways the state uses the prison and social narratives about the prison to extend its control on certain populations beyond prison walls through police presence, parole, the war on drugs and prison fees. From that basis, this work argues that while Orange does challenge some narratives about race and sexuality, because of its reliance on “bad choices” as a humanizing trope and its reliance on certain racialized stereotypes for entertainment, the show ultimately does more to reify existing narratives that support state interests.

Navigating the Interim attempts to build a framework for the ways in which visual art, media studies, and forms of social practice might intermingle within a career in the arts, as well as within a thorough art education curriculum. From broad theoretical analysis to the specificity of technical exercises and prompts, this paper serves as a roadmap for the ways in which production, teaching, and organizing might begin to merge into a single holistic practice. The author’s projects provide an anchor from which to analyze the various conceptual trajectories of art that have stemmed from modernism throughout the 20th century, as well as to challenge the anti-aesthetic phenomenon that has emerged out of this evolution, which has influenced paradigms within art education and leads to an analysis of the author’s own creative impulses, such as media activism, noise-based and appropriative tactics, and concerns about Debordian Spectacle. These self-analyses and reflections are situated within various binary oppositions: object-action, opacity-transparency, deconstruction-enstrangement, replacement-extension, and static-progressive.