Visual Inquiry - Current Issue

One of the most powerful aspects of street art is its potential to disrupt the expectations that we have about certain spaces and also how it urges us to question why those expectations existed in the first place. Street art interventions are often intended to make the viewer think about the space in which the intervention is produced, and how the identity of that space has been formed, along with the normalized behaviours that correlate with that space. This article examines recent examples of street art interventions created by Mobstr, Olafur Eliasson and Selma Selman and places them in contextual lineage with similar spatial interventions by Guy Debord, Christian Philipp Müller, Will Self and Keri Smith which attempt to disrupt the expected usages, experiences and identities of various spaces. Throughout this presentation, it is demonstrated that each of these projects should be considered political acts because they subvert the cultural regulative discourses and established societal hierarchies that exist in distinct spaces.

This article considers the ways that movement can be used as an affective experience for art museum visitors. In so doing, the correlation between art experience and cultural history is explored through the relationship between movement and language. This exploration can be utilized to cultivate important conversations regarding the role of the unwelcome body in the institutionalized museum space that has been difficult to recognize and articulate utilizing traditional Western histories, contexts, and methods of understanding and discussion. Here, the experience of moving with an art object, rather than around or in front of, increases the connection, or relation, between the user and the object despite unfamiliarity with museum spaces or art objects. Rather than asking the participant to interpret the art object verbally in a way that is understandable to others, this article argues that using movement allows the participants to interpret what they are thinking and feeling in a way that is specific to their minds, bodies and cultural contexts. Experimental movement might interrupt the inhibiting quality of many museum experiences by making space for visitors’ thoughts, feelings and experiences above all else.

This article describes a cycle of a work-in-progress action research project that aims to develop and implement a fractal pedagogy for design students. The fractal pedagogy takes on board fractal patterns, self-similar repeating natural patterns, as a lens for artmaking and teaching. Fractals have been proven to be bountiful in nature and to engender a well-being or biophilic response in people. The action research cycle describes a collaborative effort to bring three guided nature walks to the local community in Dublin, Ohio, USA. The walks reaffirm connections between the fractals in the participants’ bodies and in the natural environment while carrying out fractal and well-being-centred artmaking activities. Each of the walks, the embodied, found object and marking-making walks, were led by a different local Ohio artist. This cycle will combine with previous and future research to define a fractal pedagogy that is collaborative, interdisciplinary and connected to nature.

In the Southwestern United States, during the mid-twentieth century, Mexican Americans introduced a genre of custom cars known as lowriders. They were unique compared to other American custom cars, such as hot rods and other fast cars on American main streets; lowriders rode low and slow and only inches from the ground. In fact, lowriders became central to Chicano culture and to the lives of car owners and their families. The car owner and the rest of the family also drew part of their self-identity not only from the car itself, but also in the act of driving – or lowriding as it is known. The story herewith tells how lowriders, lowriding and car clubs emerged from the heart of Chicano culture in ways that established and supported community building, expanding eventually to worldwide popularity.

In 2021, a Cold War Veterans Memorial Commission was announced and immediately, I became interested in this concept. Who are the veterans? What are the memories? And what are the repercussions of giving permanence to this specific history during the post-Cold War era? Writing is the only form I can conceive of for such a memorial, as it allows for a post-structural analysis of memory, experience and life. Writing as a method of inquiry allows one to consider the relationship between personal narrative, materiality and research. In this article, I explore these questions through a braided narrative that weaves together family narratives, historical time periods and imaginings of myself-as-memorial. But like braiding hair, or yarn, some threads become tangled with other threads, representing an entanglement of time and experience, and of individual and collective memories. Not meant to be easily delineated, transitions between narratives are used to evoke the sudden, and sometimes abrupt, emergence of memory. Additionally, by positioning a memorial as a person, questions of the humanness of memory and the nonhumanness of memory objects arise.

This article presents reflections from a three-year journey (2020–23) of trace, layer, play (tlp), an arts-based research (ABR) collective. Formed out of the need for peer-to-peer interaction and a desire to share in-progress research through arts-based methods, tlp has become a community of graduate student members and alumni who share their in-progress research through exhibitions, workshops and conferences. In this article, eight of the current sixteen members reflect on their personal experiences in bridging theory with practice, intentional and unintentional play, and collaborative creation.