Date of Award

Spring 5-23-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Art & Art History

First Advisor

Chitra Ganesh

Second Advisor

Carrie Moyer

Academic Program Adviser

Carrie Moyer

Abstract

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets of Chinese and Korean landscape painting, I explore ideas about intersubjectivity between vision and immersion in the world while using Lorraine O'Grady's "both/and" conceptual framework. Referencing “fetishized” objects from the regions of Central, South and East Asia as well as North Africa as depicted in Dutch Still Life, pictorial languages of power in art historiography and the social are brought to light. Braiding a reimagined narrative of abstraction where the inside and outside are confused, my practice breaks down hierarchical distinctions between fine art and “world arts” (a.k.a. craft).

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