Thin(g/k) Power: Exhibition

McMaster Communication and New Media
CMST&MM 727
December 22 – January 22

Thin(g/k) Power is an online exhibition of artworks by MA students enrolled in the Communication and New Media program at McMaster University. 

“Thing Power” is a theoretical framework offered by political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett that speaks to the ways nonhuman or “inanimate” entities can exercise affect and agency as they intertwine with the human realm. The ways we think about power frames how we see our positionalities within our shared world. Power can encapsulate our thinking and imagination – enabling and/or denying agencies and sovereignties. 

Thin(g/k) Power explores this dynamic through themes of material autonomy, toxic interdependence, environmental activism, and impermanence. The exhibit showcases media artworks including animation, sound collage, photography and the moving image.

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The exhibition will be available on our website from December 22nd to January 22nd, 2024.

Exhibiting Artists

Abigail Atmadja, Ariana Fig, Cyril Chen, Kiyaan Chavoshi, Mélina Nzeza

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Abigail Atmadja
Intertwined Strings of Resilience

Intertwined Strings of Resilience is a short looping film that showcases the delicate dance between humanity and the environment. Drawing inspiration from Nina Katchadourian’s “The Mended Spiderwebs Series” (1998), this film features the mending of harm inflicted on nature using a rubber loom band, literally and symbolically weaving through the human/nature interaction. 

The project underscores the idea of agency as an enactment, moving across the human actor in this film (myself), through the material rubber loom band, and to/from nature symbolized in the cat’s cradle game. 

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Ariana Fig
GreenBelt Graveyard 

GreenBelt Graveyard is a sound and video collage that aims to critique the provincial government of Ontario’s environmental politics, specifically addressing Doug Ford’s connection to the Greenbelt. 

This collage utilizes field recordings, vocal textures, modulated synthesis, audio sampling, photo sampling, and videography. Inspired by Jane Bennett’s notion of “Thing Power”, the project explores the question of what “Thing Power” might sound like during moments of environmental racism. 

The sound collage puts into question what it sounds like when power is challenged, eradicated, or most importantly, when it is utilized by the wrong “thing”.

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Cyril Chen
Our Lives in the Toxic Blume (olittb)

Set in fictional Hamilton, Our Lives in the Toxic Blume (olittb) is an animation and soundscape project that explores our new normals surrounding emergent toxic phenomena. 

During a mid-August sunrise, a toxic blume cloud emerges and seems to never leave, chronically wrecking illness and anxiety onto its land and peoples. The work depicts the city lives of those living within and around the industrial sector and how indicator species like frogs and toads and mutated “algae grass” exhibit signs of dis-ease, while humans cope in personal and socio-political ways.

What is truly impure? As a queer and disabled artist, I feel I work within similar tendrils to Alexis Shotwell’s queer disability justice praxis, which considers our responsibilities for the toxic present.

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Kiyaan Chavoshi
Permanent Impermanence

Permanent Impermanence is a series of photographic collages featuring imagery from Westdale Village, and the Westinghouse Factory in Hamilton.

Through the collages, I hope to evoke depictions of the industrialization and gentrification of previously indigenous lands. Zoe Todd’s perspectives on gentrification in “Indigenizing the Anthropocene” inform this project. 

Feelings like decay, despair, potentially overstimulation and artificiality are meant to be recognized in these collages. The end goal of this work is to call attention to the wasted land we so easily forget and expectantly call to a more considerable society. 

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Mélina Nzeza
Wheel o’ cene

The Wheel o’ cene represents humans’ interdependencies with the Earth and the interdependency of those not acknowledged in the making of the contemporary world. The Wheel o’ cene represents things that make our contemporary world go round: money, time and the Earth itself. 

This collage-within-a-collage is made of scans of a human, scans of capitalism, and scans of nature – stylized to highlight the interdependencies between each element. The representation of the side of the globe that shows Africa and the Americas represents the artist’s roots and the places from which humans were removed from their land, transported unto stolen land, and made into material of labour to produce more material. 

While many may see the earth as their property, the Wheel o’ cene seeks to show that humans are on the same level as all beings on Earth, which includes the Earth itself.

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CMSTMM 727 (Cultural Production and the Environment) explores threads of historical and contemporary discourse around the environment, ecology, materiality, and human/non-human interrelationships, culminating in the making of artwork informed by the theoretical component. 

For more information about the Communication and New Media program at McMaster University, visit the Communication Studies and Media Arts department site.

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This exhibition is proudly presented in partnership with McMaster University