School of Art - Theses
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ItemYou and me: models of self-representation in participatory culture( 2014)This research project examines personal identity and its relationship to social media. The new genre of mass self-portraiture - the ‘Selfie’ – is a particular focus and how social media platforms encourage an increasingly standardised model of self-representation. The thesis also examines how participants in digital consumer culture become both the subject and object of the production cycle. The thesis proposes that ideologies served to consumers through traditional and social media, empowered by advancing technologies and driven by market forces, become referents for new models of self-representation. Computer logic imposed on the participants of social media interfaces informs their behaviour, while the awareness of persistent observation also induces an ever-performing self. Artists such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Barbara Krueger and Gustave Courbet - and their approach to identity, representation, and the interrelatedness of subject and object - are examined in the context of today’s participatory culture. The thesis observes identity’s new status as commodity in the data-driven information economy as participants engage in their cultural production. The Typecast works presented in the exhibition examine the phenomenon of the ‘Selfie’ image, and how mediated ideologies and technological limitations inform a mirroring of the ‘real’ and the ideal on the shared online stage of social media. The series of small-scale, square format, black and white digital prints mounted onto timber backing boards, each with a mirror mounted in the back, is installed (predominantly in profile) to the gallery wall. The text-based works describe, using the language of the screenplay, new emerging conventions of poses and gestures common to many ‘Selfie’ images. Alongside these works is a neon sign mounted to the wall, which reads ‘YOU AND ME AND YOU AND ME.’ Its medium is listed as ‘Neon, an indeterminate number of viewers,’ indicating that the artwork is not complete until observed by one or more viewers. The work refers to the increasingly interdependent and ambiguous roles of consumer/producer, subject/object, performer/ audience that are emerging in participatory culture.
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ItemA Vyrcanian story: materialising alternate histories and geographies( 2014)The works produced along with this dissertation and presented as the result of my MFA consist of a narrative video, set in a fictional land, tracing the downfall of a secret society. This is presented alongside a looped photorealistic moving image of genderless, angelic figures blinking, smiling, and intoning a hymn-like monotonous chorus. These two videos are projected on two large screens in a dark room in which there is bench seating which has been decorated in the style of the fictional land to which the work belongs. These video works and the furnishing exist as outcrops of a larger whole. As they function as punctual materialisations of a set of geographies and histories—the Vyrcanian Federation—that I had been devising occasionally and randomly since childhood in my head, on scribbled bits of paper and on my computer; but the bulk of which has been developed during this MFA as fully realised artworks. As the result of this research, I also will install “behind the scenes” videos, maps and images relating to the construction of the Vyrcanian Federation, located behind the projection screens. In the following dissertation I structure and expound the history of the Vyrcanian Federation, including the language in which the videos have been made; and I have composed this research following an encyclopaedic format. I include autobiographical details indicating the personal needs and proclivities that incited and guided to their creation, and discuss the cultural background inspiring them as well as the political questions they raise. For the latter I examine the works' roots in cartography, archaeology and the history of esotericism; and their relationship to the aesthetics of spirituality and of totalitarianism; and the films and artworks that have provided inspiration.
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ItemHalf - Living between two worlds( 2014)Half – Living between two worlds is a practice-led inquiry into the term ‘half-caste’. Through an investigation of personal and intergenerational lived experiences the research aspires to interrogate the authorship of stereotypical perceptions of Aboriginality. Connecting to dance, song and community the research seeks to emphasise the diversity of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples in the 21st century.
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Itemben'Ography( 2011)Contemporary Australian Aboriginal art is multi-layered art practice that utilises compelling politics. Aboriginal Art that addresses the urban Aboriginal condition reflects upon a rich socio-cultural history that is inter-connected with identity, place and the environment. Art remains critical as a tool for further reconciliatory acts. ben'Ography is a body of artworks that examines the disjunctions of Aboriginal people living between cultures. The project explores from a personal perspective, questions of Indigeneity, sexuality, placement, loss and discovery in 21st century Australia.
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ItemFeeding( 2009)In this research paper I examine the role of the Vampire, the space and culture of the share house and the interview as forms of social contract and control that both highlight and complicate notions of self, identity, other and persona. In Vampire lore, the Vampire requires an invitation to enter a person's home. Like the Vampire, in this project Feeding, I have sought permission or manipulated an invitation to enter a variety of people's intimate living spaces. Once inside, via an agreed interview, I begin an interrogation (and consumption) of my victims about their personal habits. In this way, I will argue I have conducted myself as a contemporary Vampire. It is in this guise that I extract information, adopting the interview as a research strategy in my art practice to generate raw material. This is then abstracted and deployed as installations, comprised of a few key components: projected video footage, sound, steel, the physical space of the gallery and the body of the viewer.
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ItemI thought you were her sister...I thought you were your sister( 2010)'I thought you were her sister…I thought you were your sister' is an art-based research investigation into my biological identity as a twin. I undertook this method of examination to explore twin idiosyncrasies, shared thoughts and experiences, blurred memories and uncertainties relative to the twinned appearance of sameness that ultimately produces difference. Creative strategies of mechanical twinning and observations of biological twinning were applied as techniques of re-editing and manipulating found family footage, of my twin and I, to conceptualise twin identity as abstract visual forms that are then spatially installed to construct an environment relative to the viewer’s experience of twins.
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ItemDouble bind: splitting identity and the body as an object( 2009)Double Bind: Splitting identity and the body as an object is a research project consisting of studio-based practice presented mainly in video installation format. This work looks at hysterical symptoms as a performance of a body’s split identity. The project draws on the Lacanian theory of Mirror Stage which proposes that the self experienced by the subject, and the image of that self (represented in a mirror-like reflection, or an image) are different to each other, and the development of self-awareness as misrecognition of one’s self. As a conspicuous example of split body, Chapter One describes how the hysterical body, in clinical and artistic representation, is dissociated into multiple selves. In Chapter Two, I discuss some examples of contemporary performance artists who use themselves as subjects, but whose bodies become objects that do not portray the self. In the final chapter I explain how, in my video work, I objectify my own body and how I assess whether this is a mode of self-portraiture. During the course of this research, I studied a wide range of medical resources and psychoanalytical literature, much of which employed visual illustration and documentation. For example, I have drawn inspiration from Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographic documents of female hysterics whom he treated as patients at the French hospital of La Salpêtrière in the late 19th century; in particular the figure of his most famous patient, known as Augustine. My research also involved studio-based investigation, such as experimentations with the performance of my own body in video format, and the contextual study of artistic and critical texts relating to contemporary media art. The aim of this research is to demonstrate the ways in which my video performances split the body, creating an Other within one body that can be compared with the hysterical body of a patient, like Augustine, performing for her doctor. In this condition, I perform as the subject and the object of the gaze at the same time. My self-portrait is split in this way: it creates a body double, which I misrecognise as myself. But in doing so, I am both the director and the performer of the image. This is the double bind that my video work puts me into.