Dumais, Douglas (2019) Making Up Lost Time: Fiction in Carol Sawyer’s The Natalie Brettschneider Archive and the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
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Abstract
This thesis examines Vancouver-based contemporary artist Carol Sawyer’s The Natalie Brettschneider Archive as well as the Concordia-based Canadian Women Artists History Initiative (CWAHI) through the lens of fiction, feminist theory, and counter-archival practices. Sawyer’s Archive is a series of documents that recount the biography of fictional Surrealist and Dada performance artist Natalie Brettschneider (1896-1986?). CWAHI is a Concordia-based documentation centre that maintains artist files, programming, and publication initiatives. This thesis argues that fiction is an effective tool to address historiographical erasures in women’s history. Though both projects emerge from the polarities of fictional art and historical documentation practices, CWAHI and the Archive are invested in the plausibilities for feminist interventions veiled within the unknowability of the past. Chapter one explores how the Archive renders sensible and actionable a cross-historical dialogue with historical women’s art, one that argues for an expanded notion of intertemporal feminist collaboration. Similarly, CWAHI’s collaborators craft frameworks that forge communities of participation that generate affective resonances between artists of the past and historians in the present. Chapter two complicates this collapse between historical and contemporary, arguing that Sawyer’s Archive and CWAHI sustain tensions at the heart of feminist scholarship between historical women artists and the historians who study them. Both projects recognize that the historian and their subjects of study are entangled across differing contexts. The result are two projects that speak to the variety of experiences across divides of fact and fiction, past and present, as well as life and death, divides that Sawyer’s project argues can be partially, but never fully, breached.
| Divisions: | Concordia University > Faculty of Fine Arts > Art History |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
| Authors: | Dumais, Douglas |
| Institution: | Concordia University |
| Degree Name: | M.A. |
| Program: | Art History |
| Date: | 13 August 2019 |
| Thesis Supervisor(s): | Hammond, Cynthia I. |
| Keywords: | fiction, photography, feminist art history, Carol Sawyer, Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, fiction in art, fiction in photography |
| ID Code: | 985669 |
| Deposited By: | Douglas Dumais |
| Deposited On: | 14 Nov 2019 15:23 |
| Last Modified: | 14 Nov 2019 15:23 |
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