Date of Award

Spring 5-19-2022

Author's School

Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Author's Department

Graduate School of Art

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Art

Degree Type

Thesis

Abstract

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By contrast, my sculptures reference three sites where unplanned but established communities of color were displaced by travel infrastructures, which in some cases were never built. Ultimately, I look to material processes of reconstruction to map and respond to these erasures and the spatial imaginaries that led to them.

Language

English

Program Chair

Lisa Bulawsky

Thesis Text Advisor

Lisa Bulawsky

Thesis Text Advisor

Monika Weiss

Faculty Mentor

Lisa Bulawsky

Committee Member

Amy Hauft

Committee Member

Michael Byron

Share

COinS