Date of Award

12-2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Legacy Department

Printmaking

Committee Chair/Advisor

Cross, Sydney A

Committee Member

McDonald , Todd

Committee Member

Hung , Christina

Abstract

As a middle class American, I have become aware of my culture's inclination and capability to accumulate goods. Through relocations, my life in recent years has been a transient one; relying mostly on possessions to constitute a home. At the same time these
possessions begin to become a burden, weighing me down as they constantly get packed and unpacked. It is through these experiences that I've become more aware of what we surround ourselves with and which represent our lives. My prints explore the notion of
everyday household goods and how much we have amassed as a culture. My observation is that the availability of things has become more important than the quality of the items themselves, which has led to an overabundance of stuff that far surpasses the requisite of
comfortable living. My work critiques our consumerist condition by re-revealing our possessions, and displaying our cultures lack of control to acquiring goods and the apathetic regard toward them.
I fill the surface of my prints with a mixture of familiar objects, pattern, and perspectives, inviting the viewer to navigate the complex image and decipher what's new, used, and discarded. By subverting the historical traditions of still life, where possessions were displayed to indicate wealth, my prints rather reflect how our environment is filled
to the brim with too much stuff. The printed compositions are jammed packed and in a state of disarray in order to represent the cluttered mess our lives have become. A life overflowing with things we never use anymore trapping and preventing us from moving forward.

Through woodcut and lithography I create a transformative experience with dense colorful complex displays of our lives that must be navigated through in order to comprehend them. Through my own aesthetic choices and academic background in art, I
draw attention to everyday items in life, resulting in an unexpected experience of allure and elevation of the everyday. The space takes on its own characteristic's as it confronts and pushes the viewer back. The larger than life scale of some of the work creates an
alternate environment we are unable to enter because there is no more space left; rather the goods begin to spill out and invade our space. With no ground plane to anchor the viewer in most of the work, a sense of vertigo is undertaken as we become unable to
comprehend and navigate the space of the compositions.
This alternate environment, different from our own lets us see our possessions in a way we wouldn't have before. This spectacle of goods that flow out of control serve as a reminder of the obstacles we must navigate through as we lug these items around, despite the fact that they provide a sense of temporary satisfaction. As we contemplate this scenario I hope we begin to realize how much we own as a culture in order to shift the disposition of our contemporary consumer habits.

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Fine Arts Commons

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