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<\/a>D\u2019Onofrio received her bachelor\u2019s of Fine Arts from York University and master\u2019s of fine arts from the University of British Columbia. Her friendships with other art students and her interactions with the art community were influential on how she approaches the craft. In her process, the sense of community and the relationships that were more particular to feminist art practice play a key role.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do you make a new world when there is not an example of how to make that?\u201d says D\u2019Onofrio. \u201cI make work more interested in the complications of new thinking; I\u2019m using the detail of feminism because that\u2019s something I know.\u201d<\/p>\n
D\u2019Onofrio\u2019s priorities as a contemporary artist lie in creating artwork that makes people question what they know and where that knowledge comes from. As an artist interested in activism, she says making people feel some sort of commotion from a situation they are encountering works better than just telling them to recheck their assumptions. She believes art can do that, and she tackles these concepts in her art while juggling a job as an art teacher at UBC.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen your job entails that you go into all these other mindsets, it\u2019s tough to ignore them all when you are trying to create your own work,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a big challenge. The space of the summer is when I can start to find my own headspace again.\u201d<\/p>\n
When D\u2019Onofrio is in that headspace, research dominates her art process. Research is not always a solitary activity, though. There are other artists to converse with and artwork to see and think\u2014and talk\u2014about.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes it\u2019s quite clear why I want to make a piece, so I use that negotiation to create the work; there are different levels I want to play with it,\u201d she says. \u201cOther times, it\u2019s a lot of trial and error, trying different ways of attacking the subject, or even different materials and media.\u201d<\/p>\n
And yet, at the end of all this, if a work of art is not resolved in the way she wants it to be, she doesn\u2019t hurry it. She differentiates her practice from a production model, and evidence of this can be seen in Real Tears<\/i>.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to play with this idea of something not being real,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was only [when] I uncovered the ways I can execute and render that that the piece started to make sense. But it took me a very long time to make that piece [in Real Tears<\/i>] because I didn\u2019t really know how I was going to put it together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Real Tears<\/i> is D\u2019Onofrio\u2019s response to feminism\u2019s failures and potentials. The rendered handkerchiefs shown in the exhibit belong to her, her mother, and grandmother, who cried in them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel that my grandmother and mother had hoped for an idea of feminism to bring a newfound freedom to the next generation,\u201d she says. \u201cBut it\u2019s a difficult road\u2014there are a lot of failures, there are a lot of new issues, as well as a prevalence of old issues.\u201d<\/p>\n