Abstract

Crave Nothing More Fervently is an expressionistic journey that struggles with my fear of time’s ceaseless advance towards death. Through the establishment of a personal visual style I call psychedelic perception, I look for a future that struggles against my personal fears of loss and death. This strategy aestheticizes the world as a strategy of pursuing a creative life that stands against fatality.  In Crave Nothing More Fervently my concept of psychedelic perception is a framework that extrapolates from the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s manuscript Acid Communism defined as a political ethic of adaptive creativity. Besides simply revealing the inadequacy of this reality, the psychedelic can also illuminate a path for change. When seeing the world through an altered psychedelic perception, the awareness of life’s current inadequacies is heightened. My visual strategies challenge a normal perception of the world by distorting color and space, as well as extending temporal experience through ideas of ecstatic time through long exposure achieve a subjective removal from ordinary experiences of time. Throughout the creation of this work, I revisit the desires that disrupted me so intensely by reshaping nostalgic longing into a productive drive. Through psychedelic perception I begin to see that the future does not need to look like the past. My personal embrace of profound difference requires stepping outside of what is comfortable into the intensities of the strange. When I perceive the world as strange, I open possibilities against the authority of the past, the dreadful promises of the future, and the internal tumult that so often paralyzes me.

Publication Date

4-28-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Photography and Related Media (MFA)

Department, Program, or Center

Photographic Arts and Sciences, School of

College

College of Art and Design

Advisor

Joshua Thorson

Advisor/Committee Member

Ahndraya Parlato

Advisor/Committee Member

Juan Orrantia

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

Download

Share

COinS