Image by Marco Chimienti, from his thesis “I Went for a Drive.”
This year’s Master Works exhibition is a collaboration between six friends – two recent graduates of the Masters program (Ala Abuhasan and Marco Chimienti) and four very close to becoming graduates (Paniz Moayeri, Victoria Ngai, Thomas Yuan, and Victor Zagabe).
Reviewing the topics of our theses, you will find an eerie whiff of trauma: Palestinian life, Midwestern United States, Iranian queer refugees, cremation, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Congolese-Belgian post-colonial relations. Still, I think the six of us would agree that even in the thesis about cremation, the lessons we learned were about life.
Image by Victor Zagabe, from his thesis “Tuning Monuments.”
We each pursued our research as jolting responses to personal baggage; I think that’s fairly obvious to detect. We all struggled with exactly where “Architecture” fit into our narratives. In our struggles, all six of us ended up closing CAD files and reached for our cameras instead.
Image by Victoria Ngai, from her thesis “90 Minutes with the Machine.”
As architecture students, we are taught to draw, to distill information into lines concisely. We diagram the relations between events and spaces over time. We zoom out. We make abstract to understand the scope of questions we seek to tackle. We find relationships. We highlight them. The aim is to zoom back in when we design, to touch the everyday. At times, however, the abstraction causes us to forget the human.
Photographs capture the quotidian. They are literal traces of light in a moment, proof for the details the abstracted maps and timelines leave behind. They make the effects of larger spatial phenomena tangible. They capture the human.
Our six theses seek to document the traces of spatial phenomena left by the everyday. They explore complex themes. Our images display the effects of politics, religions, and economics on spaces, people, and landscapes. With these photographs, we aim to translate the big data back into the architectural scale, the scale in which individuals experience their surroundings.
Image by Ala Abuhasan, from her thesis “In the Shadow of the Wall.”
At first glance, all our photographs capture mundane movement through everyday life. Yet they have embedded within them questions about the apartheid separation of the Holy Land, the inflicted wounds of infrastructure on the Great Plains, the heritage of placeless exile in Iran’s LGBTQ+ community, the pragmatic brutality of cremation, the effects of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on individuals, and the legacy of the Belgian colonization of the Congo. The pictures on display aim to capture the truth of individuals, moments, and places ignored or misunderstood.
Our photographs show the haunting truths of contested questions without judgement. They are a tool for empathy. They are evidence.
Images by Thomas Yuan, from his thesis “Syntagmatic Space.”
Please join us for the opening event of our exhibition, On Photography, at the Design at Riverside Gallery on October 22nd (before Malkit Shoshan’s lecture). Doors open at 6 PM.
As always, wine, cheese, and Melville pizza will be there to welcome you!
Conversations around our research will continue in the following months with three more events:
Traces: On Oppressive Ideologies
Idea Exchange, Design at Riverside
October 29, 2018, 6:30pm
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Traces: On Death
Idea Exchange, Design at Riverside
November 19, 2018, 6:30pm
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Traces: On Displacement
Idea Exchange, Design at Riverside
January 7, 2019, 6:30pm
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Master Works is an annual juried exhibition that provides an opportunity for recent graduates of the Master of Architecture program at the University of Waterloo to submit proposals for solo and/or group exhibitions based on their graduate theses. Master Works encourages applicants to expand their research into a new three-dimensional form and to experience developing, designing and presenting an exhibition in a professional gallery.
Image by Paniz Moayeri.
Paniz Moayeri is a 2019 graduate of the M.Arch program from the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, where she also received her Bachelor of Architectural Studies in 2015. Her graduate thesis (entitled Your Passport Doesn’t Work Here: Asylum, Space, and Iranian Queer Heritage) looks at the connection between space and queer heritage in the Iranian LGBTQ+ refugee community of Toronto.
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