Date of Award
Spring 5-2-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Art
First Advisor
A.K. Burns
Academic Program Adviser
A.K. Burns
Abstract
Ontological Exhaustion and Metabolic Affect explores the artistic practice of Katelyn Reece Farstad through the logic, physiology, and spiritual symbolism of the housefly. This body of work draws from personal experience with neurological trauma, mapping how perception fractures, reorients, and reforms in the wake of psychic rupture. The housefly—erratic, hyper-attuned, maligned—becomes both method and metaphor. Its larval state mirrors the latency of neuroplastic healing; its compound vision reflects perceptual multiplicity; its obsessive return to sites of decay parallels the recursive nature of memory and loss.
Working across sculpture and painting, I metabolize found objects and sensory residues into forms that vibrate between coherence and collapse. Materials are not chosen for symbolic value but for their capacity to speak—to press back, decay, or leak. My process is non-linear, intuitive, and deeply embodied, shaped by the brain’s own rerouting after neurological trauma.
Framed by Object-Oriented Ontology, affect theory, and neuroaesthetics, the thesis proposes abstraction not as escape but as a survival strategy: a metabolic, spiritual practice where broken perception becomes form. Guts, Fog, Gloom, and Ooze are not metaphors but material states—conditions through which experience is not merely depicted but transfigured. The fly guides this transformation, surviving not despite breakdown, but through it.
Recommended Citation
Farstad, Katelyn Reece, "Ontological Exhaustion and Metabolic Affect" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/1359
