The Self, the Grid and the Rhetoric

This thesis outlines the various approaches, processes, and works that I used throughout an ongoing negotiation between my professional routine as an employee with the Government of British Columbia and my work as an artist. The process of negotiation is actualized within what scholar Michel de Certeau has termed ‘grids of control’ and makes use of tactics (as opposed to strategies) that are negotiated through a practiced based on walking, interactive installations, and text that aim to collate, destabilize and amplify everyday repetition and patterns. Within an artistic discourse where the context ―social, political or otherwise― is of primary concern, my practice neighbours that of artists including as Francis Alÿs, Barbara Kruger, Cathy Busby, and Jenny Holzer, who each deploy a variety of methods and tactics that disrupt social spaces and text- based rhetoric. Detailed in a series of chapters, the works Thread (2013), Walking & Writing (2014), Doppelgänger (2013-14), Stalemate (2014), and You Just Never Quite Know (2015) are outlined as important exploratory steps towards the use of various tactics to create an idealized opposition, and a way to subvert control from the ‘disciplinary powers’ embedded in the patterns of everyday routine, and Speech from the Throne (2014) and (2015) as the cumulative works of this process and my graduate research.