This thesis serves as an open-ended document of a young artist attempting to sift through his accumulated opinions in order to figure out what it means to accept complicity in the face of auspicious authority, rapid turnover, and paper-thin irony and nihilism, while still striving to stake a claim at something worth making and defending.

Realism, the uncanny, the figure, empathy, humanism, sculpture, feet, architecture, photography, oscillation, tin, installation, material, form, Herzog, projection, tactility, subject, haptics, sensibility, wax, portraits, space, embodied perception, rendering, duplication, thing, object, fragment, body, gaze, clay, god, man.

Alternative to meeting a calculus of quality roundness and curves are everywhere. Peaches, pinks, browns, ochres, greens. Klein Blue. --------- An experiment like a party; the hows and whys of picking bedfellows yields a list of possibilities— iterations of better, advantages in flesh volume. Inventory whittled down to give us stories, aspirations, allegiances. --------- Just to see it and touch it. Build in different ways, depending. Grow, cover, carve, cast—let for flexibility. Limbs in one direction sawed off, turned round, glued back on. If it looks like two more ways of how I want it there’s more work to be done.

This paper examines selected events from biography and how those events have influenced my philosophies about art-making as well as the work I have produced while a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University. This thesis is an attempt to give an expanded context for my work through various lenses, including the personal, the traumatic, the historical and the material.

We dream of an age that is equal to our passions is a series of soliloquies and ideas that look at the false narratives I tell myself in order to get out bed in the morning, at the depression that came after failed revolutions, at the unrealistic hopes of my politics, and of my desire to become a whole human being.

Do you know that feeling? That feeling when the music you are listening to a concert or a new record and it just seems right? When you think, that’s it! That’s what music should sound like! When the music seems to touch your soul or mirror it, or…. something. And when you feel that, nothing else seems to exist and you are purely experiencing the music. My thesis work explores the way in which we try to capture this ephemeral moment of pure experience in order to keep it with us to revisit at our leisure. This, however, is a futile endeavor. No matter how many photos you take, records you collect, or days of music on your iPod, that initial feeling, that visceral experience, cannot be replicated. In this work I use both materials that evoke this idea of the ephemeral (transparent plastic and glass) and materials are ephemeral themselves (water and wax) to convey the inability to capture music and the feelings it evokes in us. I have also chosen to add elements to the space, such as a wooden floor, stage lights, and fabric panels, to suggest a performance stage or sound studio and to further this connection to the music which the work was inspired by.

For the written component of my thesis, I am attempting to make sense of a current strain in contemporary painting which, generally speaking, tends towards reduction, humble materiality, lack of overt, didactic critique, and a scholarly interest in outmoded or overlooked art historical movements and figures. These are tendencies with which, as a painter, I feel both affinities and differences. Rather than rigidly define a “movement,” I will identify prevalent modes but also highlight individual strategies. I will begin by outlining some of the basic, underlying problems in painting today. I will then examine, as case studies, three young painters—Josephine Halvorson, Richard Aldrich, and Joe Bradley—who I feel exemplify and yet in some ways transcend this trend. I will speak about the work of each in terms of the context in which it is made. However, part of the point of this thesis is to see how individual works by these artists might be talked about apart from their “scene.” I will therefore examine a specific work by each artist in terms of the visual information it is supplies. I will go on to examine two critical reactions (and in one case a critical-fictional reaction) to this kind of work—that of Raphael Rubenstein’s “Provisional Painting” and Christopher K. Ho’s “Hirsch E.P. Rothko’s Hirsch E.P. Rothko”—in an attempt to assess how this type of work is being interpreted by the critical community. Lastly, I will provide my own explanations for why this work is being produced now, why (or if) it is relevant, and what problems it proposes for painters in the future. Although this is not a thesis that addresses my own work directly, it is my intention to use the art-critical process as a means to clarify my own concerns.

My thesis is a description of the issues encountered during the process of research and construction of the objects leading to, and consisting of, the work shown in Outside Things. The work is my attempt to gain personal insight into the complicated relationship between nature and culture. Through abstract furniture objects, floral patterns, and robots I explore the relationship between actual landscape and the constructed man-made bio-mimicry that convolutes the definition of Nature.

This Thesis presents several approaches through art making to deal with light and space and other things, and the relations that their interaction may generate

The written component of my thesis will take the form of an extended artist statement in which I discuss all six paintings included in my thesis exhibition. A major theme of my work is sexuality, specifically female sexuality. This thesis will begin by looking at the three miniature paintings that spearheaded the investigation of this theme. I will examine the generalized and personal feminist symbolism that these paintings contain. The two works that followed the miniatures are depictions of sexual interactions between my husband and myself. I will explain the significance of my depictions and relate them to the work of contemporary painters who deal with the same subject matter. The last painting in this series is a seven by eight foot landscape. I will explain how it relates to my figurative work and why nature has a constant presence in all of my paintings. Lastly, I will clarify why the lighting and composition of my paintings takes the form of traditional stage sets.