Category Archives: MFA Thesis

Natasha Harvey: Layered Landscapes

Natasha Harvey is a current MFA candidate at The University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus.

Layered Landscapes: Landscape Art, Politics and Connection

My artwork consists of a series of collaged landscape paintings and linocut prints, which seek to represent and communicate the effects of human interference on the environment while evoking the participatory spirit of love and beauty of nature. I spend time deepening my connection with the land in the Syilx peoples’ unceded territories, walking and connecting through place-based research. Over time, during these walks, I have found the expansion of dwellings, homes pushing up the mountainsides around and over wetlands, impacting wildlife habitat and ecology. Construction cuts into the land. Culture and economy reshape the horizon, thus rendering ‘space’ politically complex. Therefore, achieving the colonial sublime is not a simple image of beauty without erasure. Can my depictions of the landscape illustrate this complexity and thus encourage a conversation about our expanding contribution to the detriment of the land.

I have been considering landscape depiction in Canada. The legacy of the Group of Seven has contributed to the Canadian national identity and art. The most popular and recognizable paintings by this group depict a pristine land, devoid of human evidence. This interpretation and representation of landscape omit industry and human interaction. As an artist, I feel an urgency to try to depict a comprehensive version of landscape art in this time of climate crisis and environmental emergency. My version of landscape depiction illustrates a vista that is manipulated and used for human development. The landscapes illustrate land commodification and colonial capitalism with the intention to encourage discussion about our impact on natural spaces.

My family has a local construction business. We participate in manicuring and manipulating the landscape. Green grass, geometric ponds and infinity pools replace indigenous habitats. My family’s livelihood comes from the commodification and development of the landscape. At the same time, I observe the detrimental construction management and practices happening in the Okanagan and recognize my part in it. My position within the construction industry is difficult. My love for the environment and local landscape has always been sincere however I recognize the paradox.

The collaged landscapes consist of juxtaposing images combined with found materials, photographs and expressive painting techniques. There are moments of tight and linear marks alongside messy and chaotic areas to construct or weave a layered poetic narrative. Collaged layers are built up and create meaning. I intend to illustrate the many contextual layers within a landscape. I use found construction materials that have been salvaged from worksites encroaching and overtaking the forest trails where I walk. The construction materials are juxtaposed with the photographic images of forests and living things I have documented during such walks. The linocut prints depict a forested wild landscape. The trees illustrated no longer exist, in their place, houses have been built or are in the process of construction. The prints are large and detailed. The process is meticulous, it takes time, love and care. Documenting forests that have been clear-cut through the slow process of relief printmaking is like a memorial of sorts.

Building my paintings is laborious. The linocut prints are challenging and time-consuming. It is physical work that mimics the labour involved when constructing a home. The paintings reflect industry with their large scale and overbearing proportion. These constructed landscape paintings are large in scale. It is meant to feel both encompassing and obstructive. A push and pull, as though you could physically enter the landscape however, it may also feel like a barrier. This implied barrier operates as a symbol of the disruptive nature of development and private property

Veneration is created to motivate discussion and awareness concerning our impact on ecology. This discourse could potentially encourage choices of care and contingency towards the environment. Rather than seeing the environment as a resource to be used, love and connection could alter this perception from resource to relative, as we are all elemental.

 

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Plastic Grass: MFA Thesis Exhibition

This exhibition held at the Lake Country Art Gallery featured the thesis work of MFA Visual Arts students Michaela Bridgemohan, Natasha Harvey, Scott Moore.

Scott Moore’s artwork addresses the way we relate to our environment. Moore’s hyper-real digital and sculptural renderings of everyday objects compel us to examine the world around us and our concept of ‘place.’

Natasha Harvey’s large-scale collage and lino-print works deal with the paradox of living and revering the beauty of natural spaces while being overcome by its canceling through rampant development.

Michaela Bridgemohan’s work explores topics around relational connections and cultural identity, diving into stories through ritualistic use of both traditional and unconventional materials.

Exhibition dates: June 4th to July 16th, 2022

(images 1 to 6 show the work of Scott Moore; images 7 to 9 show the work of Natasha Harvey; images 10 to 1 show the work of Michaela Bridgemohan)

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Yunhe’uwe nén Ohnékanus – MFA Thesis by Amberley John

Abstract

As a Haudenosaunee artist/researcher, my work and thinking are influenced by community-based, Traditional Indigenous Knowledges (TIK) and my responsibilities as a mother. My objectives are to create artwork expressing survival of land-based identity, ethics and values, (Simpson, 2014), such as seven-generation sustainability. The art produced will create a visual, physical environment and invite viewers to reflect on Water and stories shared in this thesis. I argue that TIK embodied through art can transform how individuals see, value, and develop a relationship with Water. Indigenous art can teach humans to recognize that Water is a human right and more; Water is sentient and has rights independent of humans. Water needs to be understood beyond its current subjugation to capitalism, war, and unceasing domination. (Tamez, 2015) (Syilx Youth Water Group, 2014) (Nielson, 2014) The thesis exhibition consists of a series of 7 art pieces, two large mixed-media paintings and installation. Some reflect the threads of Water in our traditional stories, the centrality of women and embody Haudenosaunee mothering practices transmitting knowledges for future generations, specifically with my children and immediate kinship in mind. In my research I have valued the principles and teachings of Water through many distinct Indigenous Nations’ and Territories.

 

 

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Grounding, In Touch / Inland Waters II

MFA Thesis Exhibition, Grounding, In Touch / Inland Waters II by Brittany Reitzel and Sam Neal

 

Brittany Reitzel is currently an MFA candidate at UBCO whose primary interests are grounding practices, forest bathing and site-specific expanded painting practices. She graduated from Brock University in 2016 with a BFA (Honours). In her current practice she works at the intersection of painting, ceramics and performance. She positions herself as a settler and long-term visitor on unceded Syilx territory, where she is interested in the boundaries of our human bodies in relation to the land. Her work posits a tactile unlearning of settler values and attitudes when working with and on the land.

Grounding, In Touch is a body of work that documents my process of grounding myself through creating site-specific artwork on the unceded traditional lands of the Syilx nation. As a settler I work directly on and with the land to open my body to ‘touch’ and be ‘touched’ by the land and provide a direct translation of the sensations I feel. I create works bare-foot and trade my paint brushes for my hands and other body parts, relating to the mindfulness theory of ‘grounding’, whereby is a process which our bodies “electrically reconnect to the earth when our skin is in direct contact with it”.
Like the permeable boundary of body, the canvas and clay are places of ‘encounter and transformation’. Through clay I am able to explore the softness of material, the absence and presence of the body and the movement from matter to object. The growth and decay of nature and the body’s natural cycles are my inspiration. Using my hands as the primary tool to create, the work reveals the material’s relations to my body and its movements. The hand is exaggerated in my work leaving pinches, mini recesses and fingerprints. With my hand emphasized, connections are made to the process and the resulting final form reveals its own creation.
The work talks to my role in that creation and bears vulnerability to the presence of my own body. It comments on the interface of myself and other natural forms. Prying open raw material as grounds to discover the interwoven relationship between my body and other natural phenomena. Like a flower in bloom the sculptures reveal the gradual opening up between myself, the material and the land. Recording the stages of growth and transformation as I become further attuned to the Okanagan valley.

Sam Neal is currently studying for his MFA in Visual Arts at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus. His most recent work utilizes cyanotype, a photographic process, to create a collaboration between the artist and the environment. He accepted the Graduate Scholarship Award in 2020 and has been a teaching assistant in photography since 2019. He is also a research assistant for Living with Wildfire, a project funded by the New Frontiers in Research Fund. Neal has exhibited most recently at The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art. He also exhibited for the Spring Festival of the Arts 2021, which featured a video installation at the Rotary Centre for the Arts.

Inland Waters II is an exploration of time, place and process. Using cyanotype chemicals, a photographic process discovered in 1842, I brush large pieces of paper that become sensitive to UV light once dry. Each of the works is created in collaboration with a body of water. I have been drawn to how water can appear to change color when light moves across it, how we can see water’s surface and its depths and how it reflects and refracts to create caustics. I carry the sensitized paper to the water and let the water impact or flow over it. The paper is then left to expose and dry at the site in which it is created. The connection between the overlapping of water, light and my engagement with the process explores a performative relationship with nature that can be visualized as a direct mapping of a place.
Inland Waters II features detailed prints that incorporate digital and screen printmaking, alongside the original cyanotypes. The prints depict the reaction between chemicals, water and light on the paper’s surface during the initial contact with water and after it oxidizes in the following days.
Each body of water acts as a potential threat to the land around it through processes such as shoreline erosion, flooding and other forms of environmental degradation. The cyanotypes in this space are left unfixed, and they retain sediment that is carried along with these bodies of water. They are impermanent objects that are susceptible to growth and decay.
Fixing a cyanotype would require me to thoroughly wash the material and let it dry to its final state. By leaving them unfixed, sediment, algae, and other deposits that reacted with the chemicals remain on the paper’s fibre. The sediment and any other organic material can grow, fall off or stay in place. Ultimately, each piece is a living object within an interior space, reflecting its original environment.

 

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Seen | Unseen by Jacen Dennis

Seen|Unseen

by Jacen Dennis

Artist Statement: Seen|Unseen

 

Jacen Dennis’ digitally animated and projected artwork links the creative process of animating to creating a meaningful relationship between his gender transition to his sister’s death, of connecting a new body to the past, and a past body to the future. He positions himself as a transmasculine artist who started transitioning shortly before his sister died of an unexpected overdose in late 2018.  His work explores the fact that he did not have the opportunity to recontextualize his relationship with his sister and how this impacts the parallel positive experiences in transitioning. Seen|Unseen is the final exhibition for his Masters of Fine Arts thesis at UBC Okanagan.

His artwork, it both nourishes and consumes expresses the joy of authenticity and gender euphoria in gender transition; what is seen on the surface of the body. At the same time, what is unseen, under the skin, touches on gender dysphoria.

The artwork seismic reversal represents gender transition and the sudden familial loss both existing together and existing separate. When viewing seismic reversal as a metaphor, the implied positions of the bodies at the graveside (standing over and buried under) are in opposition. Whether or not the earth is reversed to allow the one buried to stand once again, the implied bodies will never stand at the same time, one will always be horizontal in death.

The works the mark left on the carpet and her grass that grew thereafter contend directly with the sudden loss itself. Making the mark is the last action his sister took, but the animation imbues that horrific symbol with continued life. Her graveside in her grass that grew thereafter allows for exploration of the conflict between what is seen and what is unseen, under the surface.

The imagery for the artworks was derived through a process of active imagination, a process within analytical psychology, and constructed within frameworks of expressive art therapy. These methods have allowed unconscious thoughts to be surfaced through the artwork and facilitate healing through the creation thereof. Jacen’s animations are designed as slow and ambient works, ones that move through time and experience change gradually, reflecting his physical transition and process of grieving.

 

 

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Lindsay Kirker: Away We Go

I paint images of construction with Nature as a way to reinterpret the world around me. This method of painting within my current body of work developed significantly after experiencing loss. I intuitively began taking pictures of construction sites, as a need for stability, manifested itself through an attraction to structure. Life felt chaotic, but I found salvation in scaffolding, cranes, and concrete. Through my artistic practice, common themes emerged: the idea of home and a sense of place, but more so, preservation, fragility, demolition, and creation. There was an immediate agency to create, and my paintings became both a response and a way to make sense of the nonsensical.

My thesis developed from a concern for the emotional and ethical disconnect required to live in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is the suggested renaming of our current epoch by geologists and earth scientists. There is no place on earth that has not felt the anthropogenic impact. We have transformed the earth system, and the evidence of this is species extinction, severe weather fluctuation, and ocean acidification.

Away We Go implies both a journey and a fear of saying goodbye. Contemporary philosopher Claire Colebrook suggests that for the first time, our extinction can honestly be imagined. The paintings displayed question the ideas and structures we put into place to protect us from these uncertainties.

The cityscape communicates structure. A sense of order is established through line, grid, and repetition, assuming pattern and stability, but this also suggests that life unfolds linearly. That we take the same unconscious routes among clearly defined paths, and that there is an order between our experience and the people we come into contact with. The painting reflects the human mind and behaviour, spontaneous encounters that occur outside of these assumed patterns of activity.

My paintings are a preservation and conservation of place and response to personal observations. Everything is connected. The process reflects the question, the narrative, and the concern. Layers show history, a struggle or an attempt to cover up that history, but human presence is felt, and the navigation towards understanding is left behind. What I am interested in far surpasses prefabricated concrete slabs constructed to contain. I am interested in the foundations of Being. When integrated with nature, the city’s infrastructure stands as a metaphor to explore all that we perceive as separate. The construction site is a place for rebuilding.

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Still, they are speaking, Alison Trim MFA show


Still, They Are Speaking is an exhibition of expanded drawing practice developed in and with post-fire landscapes of the Okanagan valley.

In 2003 the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire spread across more than 250 square kilometres and consumed 239 homes on the edge of Kelowna. In land still scarred by that fire, blackened trunks dominate the skyline with a now-familiar stubble, while up close thriving ecosystems regenerate and continue despite encroaching urbanisation. Walking these hillsides, the stark beauty, richness of surface and visible traces of loss and regeneration found there, fascinate me. The thick fire-resistant bark of the Ponderosa Pine in particular, carries the marks of that past fire as charcoal that has become part of the living tree’s story, written in its skin. These marks speak of complexity and fragility, of sacrifice, resilience and renewal. They are a written language, present in the land, describing forms of knowledge that exist independently of us. Acknowledging this is an exercise in humility that requires us to imagine beyond the human.

My drawing practice demands a haptic engagement with materials and a physical immersion in place. Through touch and presence, I renegotiate my relationship to knowledge as an experiential form of understanding, beyond the bounds of language, and closer to that of the non-human. In making the drawings for this exhibition a collaborative contact of surfaces transfers charcoal marks from tree to paper, to become a record of conversations that have taken place between fire and land, footstep and ground, body and tree. This experience of drawing as an act of engagement with place, is translated into new physical encounters with drawing as object, installed within the gallery. Time and labour have been invested in repetitive and cyclical processes to develop complex, active surface. The use of paper, an inherently fragile medium, grounds the work in the temporality and physicality of the here and now. These drawings can be read, as maps, or experienced, as terrain, but they insist on presence.

I would like to extend my thanks and appreciation to the land and trees of this small part of the Okanagan valley, on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. It has been a privilege getting to know this place, working amongst this land and responding to its stories.

  1. Book of Ponderosa, 1:1, Okanagan Edition, burnt Ponderosa Pine bark on rag paper, 36” x 60”

2. Wake (Ghost Limb), burnt Ponderosa Pine and Douglas Fir bark on mulberry paper with mixed media and rice paste, dimensions variable

3. Aestas Sacrum, burnt Ponderosa Pine bark on rag paper, 36” x 180”

4. Inseparable (Pelt), hand-cut digital photographs on Enhanced Matte photopaper, hand-cut mixed media drawings, Ponderosa Pine needles, approx. 72”x 72”

5. Interface (Pelt), burnt Ponderosa Pine bark and compressed charcoal on paper, planed pine, mulberry paper and cotton tape, 96”x 150”

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