master's thesis1
the water we call home & reframing the iron chink: a piece of cannery history
2024
writing, website
through the development of an exhibition scrapbook and digital artefact, my thesis aims to explore the ways reframing2—between locations and within contexts—and re-presencing3 can support decolonial museum practices in canada.
expanding on nuno porto's concept of reframing an exhibit as it moves across locations, i developed reframing-in-context, the act of re-introducing an object to more wholely embody its institutional context and history. i explore this concept through a digital counter-tour that reframes the "iron chink", a salmon butchering machine used in canneries, to include the histories of chinese shore workers in british columbia.
my thesis is available for your reading pleasure, as are the two artefacts that i created during my master's.
1. i could not have achieved this without the community of support and love that was cheering me on whilst i wrote draft after draft. ty bryant, geri lee, marc castro, william gibson, jace attard, lucia vo, shen gao—i thank you all for listening to me complain over many cups of coffee and matcha over the years. and to my lifelong partner, daniel park, your unwavering belief that i can achieve anything i put my mind to was the largest motivator when i hit writer's block. i love you with all my heart.
2. Porto, Nuno. “From Exhibiting to Installing Ethnography Experiments at the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Coimbra, Portugal, 1999–2005.” In Exhibition Experiments, edited by Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu, 1st ed., 175–96. Wiley, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470696118.ch8.
3. Georgeson, Rosemary, and Jessica Wynne Hallenbeck. “We Have Stories: Five Generations of Indigenous Women in Water.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 7, no. 1 (2018): 20–38.