Introduction:
Hi! My name is Olivia Olena Cichon. I transferred from Sheridan College, where I studied Visual and Creative Arts for two years, and then came to Guelph after graduation to gain more experience in the arts. I chose the Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art program to continue my learning and skills.
Reflection Question:
“Why did you decide to take this program? What do you hope it helps you do or become”
When I hit grade 9, I had an art teacher who changed my perspective on my career choices; not only did she inspire me, but she also gave me the confidence to walk the path she walked. I went to Sheridan College to gain more experience in my art and then go into my bachelor’s. My hope is to one day enrol myself in teacher’s college and hope that one day I can inspire a student or two the way I was.
The Artist Is Present
Marina Abramovic
Reflection:
When watching the documentary, my emotions were spiraling from Disturbed to confused, then feeling sad. I didn’t see how sitting in a chair completely still for 3 months straight was art. Until I saw the bigger picture.
When she started on the first day, I didn’t understand, but as more and more days went on, I felt it. The piece wasn’t about her; it was about the people who sat in front of her. It was the eyes – the expression – the furrowed eyebrows – tension that many people don’t realize we hold in our faces.
From years of putting up an invisible wall, but what Marina was doing, in my perspective. She was breaking down people’s walls; you can see their rigid posture become slack and calm. Some let out tears; some were angry, etc. It was a beautiful piece, and I believe one of her most emotional ones.
What are some of your first impressions of Marina Abramovic’s performance works, based on the documentary? Use an image/example of one or two works to describe aspects you admire and aspects you might agree are problematic.
- The work that stuck with me most was Rhythm 0, the piece where she stood still for six hours and let the audience do whatever they wanted to her using 72 objects laid out on a table, including a rose, a feather, a scalpel, and a loaded gun. Watching people go from gentle (placing a flower in her hand) to genuinely cruel (cutting her clothes, cutting her skin) over the course of a single evening was one of the more disturbing things I’ve sat through. What I admire about it is how honest it is. She didn’t design an experiment to prove a comfortable point about human nature; she designed one that could go badly, and let it. That’s a kind of bravery I don’t think I fully appreciated before.
- The Artist is Present hits me differently quieter, less violent, but somehow just as intense. Three months of sitting in a chair, silently making eye contact with strangers, one at a time. What I love about it is that the “art” is almost nothing: a chair, a table, a gaze, and yet people wept. It made me think about how much of a performance art isn’t really about the performer doing something to an audience, but about what the audience brings into the space with them.
Assignment 1KM
Reflection/Idea:
It was hard to think of what to do for an assignment that gives so much freedom, especially when that freedom is 1KM. At first, I wanted to walk Stone Rd and map out what restaurants or stores I saw on my path, but when I walked the road, I learned that everywhere my eyes trailed, I saw bars all over the place. So I decided to draw a map and pinpoint all of the bars and count them as I went.
The 1KM stopped me at the Delta Hotel & Bar Mason on Stone Rd, which counted as the 8th bar I saw, and that’s only on Stone Rd.
It shows not only that there are so many bars on one street alone, but also that a street is significantly popular with University Students walking along that road almost every day. The bars promote drinking and getting under the influence. While studies are the main priorty its hard to get on track and lock in when your friends want to go out and drink, and it’s easily accessible.
| THE MATERIALS I USED |
- Paper
- Acrylic Markers
- Black pen/Pencil
Olivia Cichon, Stroll On Stone RD. 2026
I chose to do a physical drawing of a map because when I was in Sheridan College, not only did I do something quite similar, but I loved the assignment. I wanted to represent a similar medium, but instead of painting, I used acrylic marker.
From the map, you can see all the bars so close-knit together, to the point where I was even surprised by how many there really were. I have photos of all the bars I saw; most of them I didn’t take a photo of, but I did document them on my map.
| Beer Town Public House | Montana’s BBQ & Bar | Milestones Grill and Bar |
In Conclusion:
All of these companies sell alcohol, and yet, you can find a bar within a 20 feet radias. That’s (6 meters). While doing this walk, I found that my mind drifted off while I was strolling down the road; I saw many students on campus at night in party outfits (ON A SCHOOL NIGHT). I have no clue how they do it, and yet they do, and we can guarantee they’re either going to bars on Stone Rd or downtown Guelph.
MOCA Field Trip
When going into this Field Trip, I went with a open mindset. I loved the walk from the station towards the MOCA muesuem, I noticed many art on the street of toronto that I found very interesting and beatiful, Which showed me how you can express art anywhere.
Griffeti is all over Toronto and some have a lot of meaning towards them and some are just humorous, When walking I found many artworks littering the streets that I find not only art but inspiration. It shows how people have the talent that they want to express but decide to express it through street art. When I left to walk to my friends place in Toronto, I did not stop finding artwork that I continued to take pictures of:
These artworks genuinely made me stop walking just to admire how much work and thought went into planning these pieces; especially the love of the artwork that shows through. Walking towards my friends place took me 1 hour and 15 minutes but It was worth it, I could have taken the train but decided to walk the way there and I think that was the best decision I could have made cause I got to witness this art, that someone took so much time to do and poured there heart out and it shows.
Back to the MOCA museum, when we went into the museum, I wasn’t expecting how much variety of work I was going to see. I thought of an art museum as paintings of oil, acrylic, gouache, but to see literally glass shards placed to make a cohesive sculpture on a wall made me stop in my tracks; I was fascinated, to say the least.
1st floor piece
On the second floor, I wasn’t ready to walk into the room to see what I saw. My mind couldn’t comprehend how they installed this piece in the museum, especially given its size.
Delcy Morelos
“Rooted in her relationship to the land in her native Colombia. Delcy Morelo’s art is concerned with the earth’s nourishing, regenerative strength and the violence of dispossesion. This work follows the contours of a womb and is woven from long strands of sisal rope treated with local soil and corn roots harvested in Toronto. Pulling inspiration from the ingenuity of the spider, Morelos has spun and woven a sensory web that binds, catches, shelters, and nurses” (MOCA 2026)
Bharti Kher
Bharti Kher is acclaimed for her masterful approach to assemblage, combining ready-made and nature materials with cast object into spellbinding artworks. Kher’s process involves breaking and remaking things. Kher’s project at MOCA, which spans two floors, objects tilt, rise, swirl, and hover, creating a universe of tension. Hybrid figures, part animal and human, part deity and earthling exist among geometric elements.
Turning the Gestures of Everyday Life Into Art (Reading)
By Zoey Poll. Photographs and Video by Melissa Schriek
This article is about Katja Heitmann, a German Choreographer based in Tilburg, the Netherlands, who has spent years collecting people’s tiny physical habits: How they walk, fidget, kiss, sleep, and stand. Volunteers “donate” their gestures, and the collection now holds the movements of more than a thousand people. The project is called Motus Mori, which means “movement that is dying out.”
My mind keeps coming back to the interview process. A dancer shadows each volunteer for an hour, chatting about everyday things like commuting or work while quietly mirroring their posture. People start out trying to sit up straighter and be their “best” selves, but the dancers coax them into relaxing, and apparently people open up fast, even sharing insecurities and trauma.
Then the dancer performs your movements back to you, slowed way down and stretched into something almost painfully deliberate. Some donors found it unsettling. One man realized he moves less elegantly than he’d pictured. Another, a spoken-word artist, said his nervous knuckle-cracking felt like his own after seeing it performed.
Heitmann says we’re trying to capture humanity in data and losing something along the way. That’s a big claim, but the project made it feel true; we record everything now, and a gesture that’s only ever lived in one person’s body is a strangely fragile thing to try to keep. The ending is what really got me. After a young woman died, her mother and boyfriend donated her movements, and her family came to performances as a way of remembering together.
Heitmann also donated some of her late father’s gestures, since all he left behind officially was tax paperwork. She said the gestures weren’t important, but neither were the tax filings, and that this was a “more human memory”.
There’s also a small, eerie detail about a dancer waking up one morning curled in a sleeping position that belonged to someone she’d interviewed a year earlier. The movements seep into the people carrying them.
Assignment 2
One Feat, Three Ways
Descripton:
For our project, my partner and I chose one of the most routine things you might do on holiday, wrapping a Christmas present, and took it a step further by wrapping a real person.
From the start, we decided the video should be silly and a little absurd, but not pointless; we wanted it to convey a message. Christmas is supposed to be about spending time with the people we love, but it’s easy to get caught up in shopping for gifts, finding the perfect wrapping paper, and making everything look flawless. In the process, I believe we lose sight of what the season is actually for.
Our approach was to wrap a person, not a box. The people in our lives are worth far more than any item we could buy in a shop; yet there’s a twist: the more paper we add, the more our ‘gift’ begins to look like a thing, and the less like a person. I find this change most interesting, since it shows the strange discrepancy between the importance we attach to material things and the importance we ought to attach to one another.
Another area we wanted to explore was the challenge itself. It is easy to wrap a box because its flat sides and sharp corners take most of the work off; a human body is the opposite, curved, flexible, and always in motion. We wanted to find out how far we could push a simple, ordinary task and what would occur when we attempted it.
In the end, what we wanted was to take something that is common knowledge, turn it into something unusual, and perhaps encourage people to reconsider what it really means to give a gift.
“More Than a Gift”
ONE SHOT
SEQUENCE
ANIMATION
Audio Studio Assignment 3
Beauty and The Beast | Evermore/The Mob Song (MIX)
Description:
Somewhere along the way, I noticed a pattern in Disney movies: so many of them have a song about a prince yearning for the heroine. Belle and the Beast. Aurora and Prince Philip. Jasmine and Aladdin. Different stories, same ache.
When I started thinking about writing something that captured that feeling, I knew I wanted to bring together two songs from Beauty and the Beast. My first pairing was “Evermore” and “How Does a Moment Last Forever.” Both are tender and a little bittersweet, about love that outlasts the moment. But the more I sat with them, the more I realized they didn’t say everything I was trying to say. I wanted to dig deeper into what I actually wanted to portray.
So I kept searching, and I landed somewhere I didn’t expect: “The Mob Song.” On the surface, it’s Gaston rallying the village to hunt down the Beast. But listen closely, and you’ll hear that it was never really about the Beast at all. Gaston wanted him gone to impress Belle and to claim her as his own. Underneath all the shouting is jealousy and obsession, a man who could never imagine letting her go.
The Beast has every reason to hold on. He’s been cursed, and Belle is his only hope of breaking the spell. If she leaves, he stays a beast forever, and with his enchanted rose wilting, he knows he’ll die. And still, he opens the door. He lets her go. That’s the heart of it for me. Gaston loves the idea of having Belle. The Beast loves Belle, enough to want her free even if it costs him everything.
There’s a saying that captures it: you don’t truly love someone until you let them go; if it’s meant to be, they will come back. And Belle does come back, not because she was trapped, but because she chose to. I think that’s why these two songs belong together in my mind. One is love as possession, and the other is love as a gift. I know which one I’d want.