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Thesis Defence: And Scene…
September 24, 2025 at 10:00 am - 2:00 pm
Negar Baghlani, supervised by Professor Tania Willard, will defend their thesis titled “And Scene…” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts.
An abstract for Negar Baghlani’s thesis is included below.
Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Please email tania.willard@ubc.ca to receive the Zoom link for this defence.
Abstract
Whenever I’ve been asked about my abstract paintings, I’ve always found myself beginning with the process rather than the work itself. It is within the process—its tangibility, its motion—that the best clues emerge. Now I wonder: if these clues help others connect, could they also help me? Are they pieces of a larger puzzle I’m still solving? Am I chasing the painting—or the painter? My aim in this thesis is not to simply show my personal feelings, but to share feelings that are shared broadly between human nature and histories. This is not about me. This is about us. My paintings are not about Negar and what she has experienced as an individual, rather the work is about being a human carrying shared experiences. I use multidisciplinary practice to explore memory, displacement, and the layered process of healing. This body of work explores recurring themes related to fragmentations of the body, emotion, experience of trauma and healing and relates these to material expressions in painting, printmaking and assemblage that draws on ideas of destruction, through fire, tearing, decay, burning, fragility and fragmentation as traces of collapse amidst the process of construction. Together within a narrative of poetic documentation of studio process or of ‘prose-cess’ an overall feeling takes shape, characters are created and a scene is formed. And Scene…
