Abstract
This project has been generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts Graduate Program in Visual Arts
York University
Toronto, ON
Acknowledgements:
I would like to acknowledge the ancestral and traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat, who are the original cohabitants and custodians of the land on which I live, work and create.
Thank you to my thesis supervisory committee Janet Jones, Graham Wakefield and Yam Lau for their guidance, discourse and trust in the creation of this project.
A special thank you to B, I am eternally grateful for your endless support and love.
Like the dispersion of life through a liminal pool, mixed orientations are based on non-fixed points; they are active, slippery and non- delineated positions, affected by the influx of shifting entities. Can these porous, non-individualistic and divergent states of being reframe or aid our ability to live in an inconstant, mutable geopolitical existence?
A Troubling, Soft Underfoot delves into the spatiality of complex otherness, and investigates pluralistic, non-delineated and deviant embodiments of place, race, gender, and sexuality through cross-bred processes of drawing, painting and sculpture. Through thin washes of pigment extended onto aluminum, a disquieting exchange is generated amidst thresholds in contemporary drawing, painting and sculpture; the resulting work takes shape between the spaces of control and accident, opacity and transparency, porosity and rigidity, alignment and disruption, seen and unseen. The multiple and mutable optical and physical formations in this work propose a reconsideration of the thresholds between all things, organisms, animals and humans, to uncover the invisible symbiotic entanglements in which we all exist.
Key Words:visual art, mixed media art, painting, drawing, sculpture, symbiosis, liminal, geology, ecology, metamorphosis, mutation, geopolitics, queer, feminist, phenomenology, diaspora, migrant, mixed ethnography, intertidal, oceanic, marshlands
Artist Bio
Shea Chang activates an artistic practice in-between and outside of the traditional paradigms of the art and design field. Informed by her multi-racial and queer identities, her work investigates ecological symbiosis, divergence and mutation and its relationship to diasporic and queer phenomenology. These porous, shifting and slippery ecological and cultural conditions are reflected in her visual work through cross-bred modes of digital and analogue painting, drawing, mark-making and printmaking/reproductive processes, computer generative processes and digital fabrication.
Chang’s experiences in creating public murals, illustrations, workshops, zines and exhibitions have allowed her to work collective and collaboratively driven visual art and design projects across Canada. In 2011 her Illustrated children’s book, Tarentelle (published by Marchand De Feuilles) won a Governor General’s Finalist Award. Chang is a currently a candidate in the MFA Visual Arts Program at York University and is Assistant Professor of Illustration at OCAD University.