Abstract

Moving from Arizona two years ago meant editing down my possessions to fit in the back of a pickup truck that my best friend, two cats, and I shared for three days. I have been moving on average about once a year since I was fourteen. This nomadic lifestyle meant constantly having to get rid of things that felt unimportant and insignificant. Certain things, however, have survived the moves. Throughout my nomadic lifestyle, the bedroom became a curated space for possessions put on display, showcasing the importing things I own. In my travels, landscape and house became equally important in defining what “home” means to me.

My thesis work explores memories through the lenses of the bedroom, landscape and material possessions. In my work, memory, immersion, and installation are one, where the viewer is enveloped. Viewers enter a bedroom space with objects on the walls, piles of clothes scattered about the floor, onto which a video of saguaro cactus blooms overlaying the streets and mountains I always passed by around the Phoenix Valley is projected. The piles are my old clothes that have been stowed away in garbage bags waiting to be thrown out. Now they are cast in iron, permanent and transformed, their shadows becoming mountains looming over my vision of home. The viewer’s body supplements and change the shadows; the installation in a constant state of fluctuation. Personal possessions cast in bronze sit atop bleached oak shelves, becoming moments of clarity amidst the installation as individual memories within those objects. Together, these objects are permanent impermanence, my bedroom always moving, my possessions locked in iron and bronze. The installation of everyday objects that have been transformed into more precious and permanent copies, set in an ephemeral and cerebral bedroom, creates a transitory space that embodies the ever changing state of the mind and the memories swimming within.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Metal sculpture--Themes, motives; Installations (Art)--Themes, motives; Laundry in art; Memory in art

Publication Date

5-13-2016

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Fine Arts Studio (MFA)

Department, Program, or Center

School of Art (CIAS)

Advisor

Elizabeth Kronfield

Advisor/Committee Member

Clifford Wun

Advisor/Committee Member

Denton Crawford

Comments

Physical copy available from RIT's Wallace Library at NB1220 .W55 2016

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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