UBC Theses and Dissertations

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UBC Theses and Dissertations

The keeper and the zoo Feist, Brenda Lynn

Abstract

I am a collector of text, both beautifully constructed and nonsensical sentences, and images that promise to mean something for me. I don’t know what they mean, only that I feel compelled to be with them awhile, so I KEEP, ARTICULATE AND ARRANGE them until I understand. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data. The Keeper and the Zoo is composed of interdependent ideologies and voices, pieced together with quotation, meditation, narrative, memory, and poems that question the general prohibition against perceptual experience. It is the support paper for my MFA graduate exhibition of the same name. I read once that if you put some molecules in a box, once in a while they’ll bump up against each other and you can study the collisions. If you put more molecules in the box, more collisions. But if you put a billion molecules in a box, they become sound waves. There was nothing in the behavior of the few that suggested what the many could do. The body is that box. While watching for collisions, I use zoos, circuses, animal husbandry and experimentation, and the fashion/beauty complex to think about the domestication of the human psyche and language as an immersion environment.. As the writer David Shields says, [it’s] a record and an embodiment of a process of knowing. It’s about the making of knowledge, which is a much larger and more unstable thing than the marshaling of facts. The animal in my work is the wild mind; pure awareness.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada