Date of Award

Spring 5-17-2019

Author's School

Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Author Department/Program

Graduate School of Art

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Art

Degree Type

Thesis

Abstract

My thesis paper will explore my artistic practice by analyzing my thesis video project,Her Anticipation. I will accomplish this by examining three main topics: The essential elements of the video, the video’s relationship to my earlier work, and a discussion of the video and its structure with representative examples.

The first essential element of the video springs from my relationship with my husband, especially the aspect of the relationship that is tied up with our nearly forty-year age difference. The second element is my personal experience filtered through a deep reading of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The third element that I discuss is the thinking behind my cultivation of a personal voice in the medium of video.

The thesis’ second main topic recounts my earlier work and its connection to my current video project. I began my artistic career with analog photography. Photography gave me training in composition and camera work. My early video work prepared me for composing moving images, camera motion, and editing. Most importantly, my shorter videos allowed me to experiment with creating nontraditional, uncoerced narratives.

In the third section of my thesis I guide the reader through each of the four chapters of my video. For each chapter, I summarize the relevant passage in The Faerie Queene and then unpack that chapter of video. For each chapter, I discuss individual shots, sequence of shots, composition, and content. More importantly, I elaborate on the underlying emotional structure of the video (which the musical selections and literary excerpts help to articulate).

I conclude my thesis by outlining a few of the implications that this project has for my work as an artist. My own artistic personality has been greatly clarified by working on Her Anticipation. Furthermore, the project has helped me imagine the trajectory of my future production. I will continue to create video works in this pattern, and they will be much advanced because of the experience that I have had creating this video.

Language

English (en)

Program Director

Patricia Olynyk

Program Director's Department

Graduate School of Art

Thesis Advisor

Buzz Spector

Studio/Primary Advisor

Zlatko Cosic

Studio/Primary Advisor

Richard Krueger

Committee Member

Colin Burnett

Committee Member

Colin Burnett

Artist's Statement

“A poet — as distinct from other, perhaps more persuasive, kinds of writers — can only unstitch the weave of tangled threads. Poems are meant to complicate our sense of things, not pamper them.”

J.D. McClatchy

A principal goal of my camera-based work is to create, lyrical, poetic visual art.

I have long been drawn to artworks concerned with our romantic destiny, our decay, our brutal take on love’s office.

Video has the advantage of unravelling in “real-time”, creating the ebb and flow of a private reverie. It can simulate the anxious anticipation of an action yet to happen or imagine the consequences and alterations of an occurrence actual or fantasied. The visual wandering and parade of places and events in my work stirs what is remembered or imagined, when things occurred, if at all, whether they are envisioned, prophesized and so on. Finding, discovering the imagery by doing creates stumbling blocks and opportunities. Obstacles can be dead ends or opportunities formerly hidden from direct purview.

My video dramas are funereal.

I set out with my camera looking to get lost in process. I have a discerning eye for visual abstraction. I have an aptitude for interpretation. I have an astute grasp of emotional motive. These abilities pilot my expressive map. Yet the map’s function is to steer towards the edge of one’s world of understanding; even at the risk of losing one’s mooring. The function of process, creating imagery is to weigh anchor to discover a new sense of things, without pampering.

Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.7936/apxv-1e17

Download

Share

COinS