Over the past two years, my art practice has evolved from a consideration of product and media to an examination of my processes of being and working.  Upon entering my Master's candidacy at the University of Saskatchewan, I viewed myself as a photographer, with all this label implies, and have since made the transition into using materials and forms that best suit my ideas. In the case of girl before a mirror, the formal structure of the archive takes precedence over the medium of photography. A resistance to revering the image above everything, and a need to understand how and why I collect the image, forms the crux of my artistic development.  

In this paper, I will examine my processes and the influences which have contributed to the creation of girl before a mirror. I have structured this text using the onion as a partial analogy. The onion has provided many metaphors for me over the past year, and the reader is encouraged to allow the layers of the following pages to be peeled away, one page at a time, to reach the core of my ideas. 

The works in my MFA Thesis Exhibition constitute an archive, the contents of which are presented to viewers in several ways. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is surrounded by walls covered with file cards – 1585, to be exact. The repeated pattern of the cards, made up of lines of text and small rectangular images set row upon row, are visible from a distance. On closer inspection, the viewer can define the specific contents of the cards (Diagram One). Within the exhibition space is a didactic wall panel that offers a key to understanding the cataloguing system (Diagram Two).  

In a divided part of the gallery – a sort of office space –  the viewer comes upon a computer terminal connected to a data projector. The computer contains a database: a website, which includes the information the card catalogue holds. The software allows the opportunity for online viewing of the database. Operators of the machine can call up the 1585 files and order the files in the way they wish. The office space is designed to be accessible and inviting to the gallery visitor. Through entering data into a search field, operators can call-up and project the files containing that data, thus sharing with me in becoming an archivist, collector, one who orders information, and is concerned with looking. Within this office are binders containing pages of information about the archive, daily printouts of conducted searches, and web-server logs of visits to the website. 
  
Three central ideas constitute the chapters to follow, and have aided me in understanding my processes in creating girl before a mirror: notions of self-monitoring, of self-reflexivity, and of control mechanisms at work in myself and institutional practices of surveillance.  

Chapter One provides an examination of aspects of control and worry in relation to my position as a woman who grapples with a disconcerting sense of being constantly on view. Through a look at daily ritual and self-portraiture, I explore the ways in which I have managed my own self-agency and transfigured being seen into practices of self-control and self-surveillance.  

Drawing on the writing of Martin Jay, and the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, I introduce concepts of the 'watchful eye' and a subjectivity defined by 'to-be-looked-at-ness', a phrase coined by Laura Mulvey.  

In Chapter Two, notions of self-surveillance take shape in my recognition of self-reflexivity as the basis for my processes as an artist. A disengagement from two arenas of photographic debate – one concerned with veracity and artistic merit, the other concerned with interdisciplinary theorizing – is described in relation to discovering my own sense of process. Here, information gathered from Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Victor Burgin, Jonathan Culler and Jean Grondin,  help to define these photographic debates.  

Questions concerning narcissism and self-awareness are raised within the context of my practices of collecting, ordering, and controlling, in my personal search for meaning. Important influences in the areas of hermeneutics and narcissism have been Eugene Gendlin, Jean Grondin, and David Michael Levin, who approach understanding from particularly open and inclusive perspectives. 

Chapter Two also provides insight into my first experimentations with non-photographic visual and performative artmaking. This chapter concludes with a playful and self-reflexive accounting of some of the steps taken in creating girl before a mirror. 

Finally, addressing the apparatus of the archive, Chapter Three explores issues of surveillance, knowledge and power. The works of Suren Lalvani, Allan Sekula, and John Tagg provide an excellent history of the use of photography as a primary mechanism of social discipline, beginning with its use by Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon in the aid of classifying criminals, lunatics, and various races.  

Relying heavily on Foucault's ideas of power/knowledge/pleasure, I examine the photographic archive as a mechanism of social definition, and relate it to girl before a mirror not as an art-archive, but as archive art. Included in this examination is a consideration of this work within the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, and the strategies employed to encourage the viewer's relationship with it.