Date of Award
Spring 5-18-2017
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Art
Degree Type
Thesis
Abstract
This thesis explores my practice as an artist and my work’s cultural, theoretical and social contexts, such carnival theory, feminist studies and film studies, as well as references to mythology and my own biography. I discuss forms of representation of gendered identities through my work in drawing, performance, animation, video and installation.
The masks we wear become as real as our bare face. Through the act of doubling the representation, my thesis work BECOMING/a fine line situates the mask as the mediator between reflections, mirroring the identity and the notion of performativity. Embracing a certain incompleteness and embodying the theoretical idea of becoming, my work relies on the ill-defined and immediate drawing quality to reflect the perpetually unrealized performance of a stable and fixed identity.
Language
English (en)
Program Director
Patricia Olynyk
Program Director's Department
Graduate School of Art
Thesis Advisor
Monika Weiss
Committee Member
Buzz Spector
Committee Member
Buzz Spector
Committee Member
William Paul
Committee Member
Patricia Olynyk
Recommended Citation
Shelton, Melissa, "Creatures of Play" (2017). Graduate School of Art Theses. ETD 92. https://doi.org/10.7936/K70R9MVW.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/samfox_art_etds/92
Included in
American Studies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Feminist Philosophy Commons, Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons, Visual Studies Commons
Artist's Statement
In my practice as an artist, I draw literal and metaphorical connections between humanity and monstrosity. Working two-dimensionally, in animation and in installation I have found room to play with the time and space between still and moving imagery. Through negotiating boundaries between oppositions, like static and dynamic, human and other, illusion and actual, notions of identity, narratives and representations are complicated. And in collapsing artifice and authenticity by drawing attention to the construction of fictions and of binaries, I hope to provide alternate realities and possible truths.
My work does not attempt to provide an illusion of a perfect representation. Embracing this incompleteness and embodying the theoretical idea of becoming, the immediacy and ill-defined quality of the drawing reflects the perpetual incomplete performance of a stable and fixed identity. My own identity and lived experience has been a source, both explicit and implicit of the unresolved, ill-defined, collision between the self and its reflection.
Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.7936/K70R9MVW