Date of Award
Spring 5-20-2022
Degree Name
Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA)
Restricted/Unrestricted
Restricted
Abstract
The Thing, an artwork derived from its creator’s lived experience or memory, occupies a unique position between confessional truth and performative fib. By investing a physical manifestation of one’s identity with as many aspirational fallacies and half-baked stereotypes as physically-verifiable truths, the construction of identity and the process of recollection are exposed as conscious efforts to categorize amorphous experiences. Queerness and Childhood, two playgrounds of fluidity and disidentification, provide useful lenses for investigating Desire as a location of dual occupancy, where pain, pleasure, play, and repression coexist simultaneously. The Thing sprouts from the artist's therapeutic practice of exclamation—the expulsion of memory into a physical space or object so that it can be witnessed and verified by unbiased bystanders. This process is a selfish one, ultimately being driven by the artist’s attempt at self-preservation and emotional closure.
Recommended Citation
Schmit, Bo, "The Thing Speaks! A Few Interpretations of Queerness, Childhood, and Desire" (2022). Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers. 92.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/bfa/92