The Heart of the Park works to expose, preserve, and interpret the many layers of social history, fact, and fiction within Iowa City's City Park. This exhibition is a result of archival research, interviews, and on-site investigation. As a guide, I followed the path of Enoch Emery, a park-haunting voyeur featured in Flannery O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood, which she wrote after graduating from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Details of O'Connor's fictional version of City Park, in Chapter 5 of Wise Blood, as well as Enoch's relationship with the park, led to further discoveries regarding the park's history, and ultimately, a reinterpretation of these seemingly disparate layers of fact and fiction. While the contemporary archive claims depoliticized and anonymous reasons and methods for preservation, my hybrid practice creates a role for the subjective, idiosyncratic archivist, who suffuses factual research with myth-making. The Heart of the Park is one glimpse into an ongoing collection of interpreted sites, in which I attempt to prevent the loss of local histories, and enact the inevitable chain of reinterpretations of site.

Digesting Dystopia There is a discrepancy between where our food comes from and where we believe it comes from. Our understanding of the origins of our consumable food is often distorted. The relationship between consumers and the ingredients keeping us alive is characterized by an overwhelming amount of contradictory information. The decisions that we make regarding these products have a profound effect on every facet of our existence. I use the contentious climate of the food industry as the background for making surreal images that open up conversations about the politics of eating. These compositions are fabricated representations of our relationship with food and the industry that surrounds it. The images exaggerate the realities that exist within our culture and illuminate our desensitization and disconnect to the consequences of what we chose to consume. What does our food culture look like, and what will it lead to in the near future?

In the field of alternative journalism, my work seeks to build empathy and combat inequalities of representation within a specified community of viewer-participants. Through MA thesis work, I built flexible, minimalist design systems that succeeded by receding—by eliminating expressive elements and pushing contributor content (visual and literary work in a variety of styles) to the foreground. In response to the highly technological, reductive mindset that had come to dominate my creative life, I engaged in exploratory exercises that were antithetical to this prior work. Through expressive engagement with analog materials, I isolated the skill of making and responding to a range of personal marks that were free of the constraints associated with developing marketing materials or periodicals for a general audience. Slowed into a more contemplative mindset, I explored abstraction, symbolism and personal history in works that engaged on different levels, and became more open to discovering images through the process. I found that at the heart of my work—from clean, legible layouts for books and magazines to the most abstract, personal or expressive wall-hanging pieces—is a desire to connect, to bring about preferred (clearer, deeper) states of information transfer by fusing content, form, and viewer participation into moments of contemplative engagement. Whether in pictures, objects, publications, or the user interfaces and platforms of the future that are yet unknown, this understanding will help me respond to changing media environments with work that connects and resonates.

Sankofa, a proverb from the Akan language of Ghana, is one attribute of Ghanaian culture that lives on in Black America. Sankofa, symbolically depicted as a bird reaching backwards to scoop an egg, translates into English as "reach back and get it." As an autobiographical artist, I continue to "reach back" into black history. I research the biographies and autobiographies of other Black Americans--the stories that chronicle the lives of those who came before me. I research urban cultures and contemporary expressions of identity and courage. Through the creation of installation and performance art, I have learned to incorporate this research into my own expressions my visions of hope, discontent, healing and beauty.

No description available.

The thesis is composed of two major parts: part one includes a statement, images and a reflection on a body of work entitled "The Ocean Is What I Meant By." These works are constructed of layers of cut tulle mounted in painted wooden frames, in which words cut out of the fabric interact to create abstract pictorial spaces. The second part of the thesis examines of the historical role of theory in the conceptualization and production of art. I argue that theory has historically occupied itself with art in categories properly connected to action, considering the end, virtues and vices associated with works of art. I consider the end of contemplation as it is advanced by Paulinus of Nola and evidenced in a sixth-century Roman mosaic, the vice of seduction as identified by Bernard of Clairvaux (against Abbot Suger of St.-Dénis), the virtue of reserve as present in Michelangelo Merisis da Caravaggio's canvases containing self-portraits. With these concepts in view, I proceed to consider the paintings of John Sloan in ethical categories--the categories most appropriate to considerations of action. I conclude by examining a disagreement between Robert Storr and Benjamin Buchloh over the interpretation of Gerhard Richter's "October 18, 1977," suggesting that the role of theory in art is returning to the more time-worn categories I associate with early Western writing about art.

Since the digital revolution, there has been a significant impact on how we live, work and play. For designers, it has transformed design practices and created new opportunities. However, this can bring about new problems and challenges. How can we communicate effectively in the digital age with different media and technologies advancing so rapidly? With the overload of information from tablets, smartphones, computers and television, we often start to overlook information. From research I will argue techniques that can help with us understand information in the digital realm and prove the importance of expression within visual communication.

My art practice as means to craft moments and to engineer experiences that will hopefully instigate some sort of heightened self-awareness, brief reminders of body, place, and existence.

I am a utilitarian. Art is part of my necessity. My sink's plumbing is disconnected to remind Simone and I of water, of use. I empty the bucket to flush. The task of grey water collection system is on the "to do" list for the next house. `Real time' laundry awaits a hanging. I'll not let the paper pulp ferment for I practice elsewhere everyday. I follow the suns. Always a painter doing the dishes rooted in this moment deep with homemaking, child rearing. Parenting, Puppetry, Poetry and Papermaking, all quiet revolt. Documentation of the subjected female experience is imbedded in my work's pace, material and nature. The drawing, the movement of my hand, binding, wrapping, arranging represents the containment of the resilient gliding spirit. I operate in opposition to the capitalist, militaristic age. I respond through the expanded painter's tradition. The landscape genre is among the origins of my formal training and now expands to include a land ethic. I interpret the history, economics and contemporary patterns of human migration as I move between my public and private spaces.

I will be presenting my work in two parts. The first section is dedicated to recent paintings that comprise my M.F.A. thesis exhibition: Practical Joy. The second section will investigate Practical Joy as an installation. I will raise questions regarding the relationship between my paintings and the exhibition space in order to situate my work into a contemporary discourse.