Cutler, Randy Lee

This paper is the theoretical component that accompanies Sidi Chen’s Master of Fine Arts project, Tidal Relations, at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Tidal Relations is a practice-based relational inquiry from the diasporic perspective of a queer Chinese person. Based on the artist's positionality, Chen concludes two key characteristics of Tidal Relations that are entanglement and trans-corporeality. While entanglement informs an interdisciplinary research methodology, trans-corporeality addresses intersubjectivity as a result of the kinesthetic empathy of bodies in Tidal Relations that are more than human. And to further orient and navigate the complexity of Tidal Relations, Chen interprets and utilizes the Chinese traditional philosophy, 留白, translated as to dwell in the blankness, as a relational principle and aesthetic strategy. Based on this principle, Chen explores the embodiment of Tidal Relations in three projects from their MFA studies: Where I Am When I Land Between the Waves, a contemporary experiment of traditional Chinese painting as a map of navigation; Pondering (Until It's Water on Both Sides), a site-specific performance drawn on locational scores and bodily fables as a way of knowing; and Mirage Raft (The dream talking Oyster), a multimedia performance installation that explores media as extensions of the body and measurement of diasporic distance.

This thesis is a reflection on my artistic practice before and after the MFA program. While I initially thought it was about nothing, I later came to realize it was actually about "nothingness". I explored anamnesis, involuntary memory and the female body through an experiential approach using materials such as concrete, textiles and beeswax. Each work I created, raised new questions leading me to recognize alternative motives that were initially hidden but present in my body. It is a meditation on my artistic research and the richness that comes from embracing the unknown, uncertainty and wonder through my specific perspective as a female from Mexico.

This thesis document outlines several bodies of work that exist along a continuum of ongoing material process. In thinking through different sets of work, I seek to find through lines and consider past ways of making and thinking. In so doing, I hope to reaffirm to the reader, and to myself, the importance of patience, of attending and responding to one’s surroundings while knowing that the movement of process will be towards ever more resonant forms of making.

This thesis project researches the ethology of grey squirrels and their links to human systems to speculate possible futures in hybrid human development through artistic practice. Humans living in urban spaces interact daily with nonhumans as cities spread out into the natural world and technology reshapes our existence. I began creating art and thinking with grey squirrels after an interspecies boundary was crossed when I held an injured squirrel in my hands. The intimacy of the encounter touched me and evoked a desire to document my alliance to the squirrel through artwork—thus, Squirrealism was born. Squirrealism developed into a method of art-making that channels conceptual and material connections between species to think and make, as feminist philosopher Donna Haraway says, “sympoetically.”