Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemAboriginal contemporary dance practice: embodying our ways of being, knowing and doing through dance storying( 2020)Abstract The Master of Fine Arts project embodies a practice of journeying to identify the connection between my Lama Lama Ayapathu Gugu Yalanji identity and dance practice. This is realised in a rematriating learning paradigm that enables a distinct dance lexicon and pedagogy specific to my Aboriginality, while emphasising heterogeneity with Aboriginal Contemporary dance and Aboriginal peoples. The project employs a transdisciplinary method encompassing Aboriginal worldviews, protocols and values specific to my Lama Lama Ayapathu Gugu Yalanji identity to safely navigate and negotiate Pama|Bama ways of being, knowing and doing within the academic space. This is inclusive of practice-led learning, dance cycle, storying, life writings and old ways for new ceremonies. In the cycle I learn of the social structures and socio-cultural disruption of my cultural identity to establish a social, cultural and political standpoint in the project, together with the herstory of Indigenous contemporary dance in a chronological order, including its social and political foundation, to situate myself within the Indigenous (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) contemporary dance genealogy. With the knowledge I place my embodiment as an Aboriginal woman, mother and dancer central to the learning. In the project, I engage narrative, autoethnography and embodied writing techniques to create an immersive mapping of my embodiment of Country to contextualise Aboriginal contemporary dance within its artistic and cultural entirety. This is practiced through a body of creative work: four exhibits embodying my sense of belonging, and a written thesis in autoethnographic representation within a colonial ethos and practice. In this project, I learn my cultural knowledge comprises of both fluid and fixed consciousness, and Aboriginal contemporary dance is a means of expression for cultural revitalisation, healing and education. Therefore, in this practice Aboriginal contemporary dance performs as a medium for knowledge transmission within contemporary society. The connection between my Lama Lama Ayapathu Gugu Yalanji identity and Aboriginal contemporary dance is a manifestation of self-knowledge, elevating social, cultural and political perspectives of my Aboriginality.
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ItemWitnessing Virtual Realities: Mediating perspectives through Novel Technology( 2019)The historical techniques of journalism were orientated around an ideology of disinterest where the educated democratic subject would be informed and “hear both sides” – but today with new algorithmic techniques of affect management (virtual reality, VR) and discovery (social media), any such disinterest is clearly not central to how journalistic knowledge is transmitted, if it ever was. Therefore, what are the techniques of visual mediation that are appropriate to these new conditions? By locating my research with this question, I aim to use it as a conceptual basis for making artwork that positions the viewer outside the sphere of contemporary journalism looking in. Works that heighten and reveal the fallacy and contradiction of contemporary journalism practices through novel technologies to spark a critical dialogue of it
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ItemFoolish Painterly Conundrums( 2019)Foolish Painterly Conundrums is powered by the idea of foolishness both in its approach and as a conceptual inference within the production of paintings. This dissertation explores the notion of Foolishly Camp by fusing together historical ideas associated with that of The Fool with those of the frivolous and excessive nature of Camp. Through Foolishly Camp, this writing unpacks the allusions to playfully and willfully negotiating hierarchies of taste and structures within painting. The constraints of this medium is viewed as pigment applied to a flat substrate utilising marks, forms, colour combinations, tonal gradations and representation. Alongside the production of paintings in the studio and the examination of painting in the written dissertation, two key relationships have emerged: the relationship between materiality and image and, that of the figure and ground. The works made in the studio comprise of 75% of the project whilst this written dissertation comprises 25% of the overall research, it is the studio work which is paintings, drawings and sketches which has led this written dissertation. Through the examination of artists such as Laura Owens and Katherine Bernhardt, this writing approaches how printed reproductions on the internet, video games, and seemingly Camp films have influenced the practice of painting. The idea of artifice is explored in relation to an urban cultural context influenced by the internet, and colour. More specifically, these ideas are explored in three chapters: Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (Camp), Super Paper Mario (artifice) and, Call me by your Name (painterly conundrums). Foolish Painterly Conundrums is an exploration of painting through its mediations; scrolling images, video games, film and the experience of viewing and making paintings. This dissertation charts a trajectory of painting which is playful and speculative as this painter stumbles, wobbles and fumbles his way towards a new suite of paintings.