Date of Award

Spring 5-7-2025

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

Unmeasured, detached and isolated explores the lingering effects of colonialism on identity, behavior, and cultural perception through the lens of my personal experience as a Venezuelan immigrant in the United States. I investigate how colonial legacies—especially those codified through manuals of etiquette like Manuel Antonio Carreño’s Manual de Urbanidad y Buenas Maneras—continue to shape self-perception and societal expectations. Through video, sculpture, miniatures, and installation, I reconstruct a visual language that resists simplification and reclaims complexity. Engaging with the symbolic weight of tropical imagery, domestic spaces, and hybrid aesthetics, my work challenges Eurocentric frameworks and examines the figure of the migrant as a socially constructed “stranger.” By foregrounding opacity, disorder, and play, the thesis text and artwork open space for alternative ways of knowing and being—seeking not to resolve identity but to hold its contradictions. The project becomes both a critique of inherited norms and a speculative proposal for cultural reimagining

Language

English

Program Chair

Tiffany Calvert

Thesis Text Advisor

Amy Hauft

Faculty Mentor

Amy Hauft

Committee Member

Monika Weiss

Committee Member

Jose Garza

Committee Member

Sage Dawson

Committee Member

Juan Chavez

Artist's Statement

My practice emerges from the tensions between cultural legacies, colonialism, and the lived experience of migration. Born and raised in Venezuela and now living in the United States, I use my work to reflect on the ways colonial norms, particularly Eurocentric ideals of decorum and identity, have been internalized and normalized through generations. At the center of my research is El Manual de Urbanidad y Buenas Maneras, a 19th-century Venezuelan etiquette manual written by Manuel Antonio Carreño, which continues to shape Latin American conceptions of civility and class. Through multimedia installations, I re-encounter this text to question the invisible rules that still govern how bodies are expected to behave, belong, and be perceived.

My work combines video, sculpture, clay, toys, miniatures, and synthetic plants to construct speculative spaces; domestic, strange, and destabilized. These environments operate as visual allegories of the intersection between my present experiences as a migrant and the now-evident colonial structures instilled in my upbringing. The use of miniatures allows me to manipulate scale and power, drawing attention to how decorum and discipline are learned, performed, and eventually broken down.

Through my installations, I explore the figure of the migrant—not as a flattened trope or stereotype—but as a complex, evolving, and often misunderstood subject. The palm tree, a recurring symbol in my work, becomes a metaphor for tropical identity: overdetermined, decorative, exoticized, and displaced.

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