Date of Award

Spring 5-8-2024

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

How can kickboxing uplift a community? How can Queer rage be utilized in community building and artmaking?

As a Queer artist, my work is inspired by my own experiences. Through drawing, printmaking, photography, video, performance, sculpture, and social practice, I dissect my violent upbringing and its lingering threads in my adult life. In this essay, I discuss the two most prominent features of my art practice: Fight and Community. I navigate these ideas through past works, such as a performance piece of me destroying a news article, a short film about institutional homophobia through aliens and immaculate conception, and most prominently, my ongoing social practice project, Queer Fight Club. Through this social practice piece, I investigate the questions posed above by teaching Queer participants how to kickbox.

Language

English (en)

Program Director

Lisa Bulawsky

Program Director's Department

Graduate School of Art

Thesis Advisor

Amy Hauft

Studio/Primary Advisor

Jamie Adams

Studio/Primary Advisor

Meghan Kirkwood

Committee Member

Cheryl Wassenaar

Artist's Statement

I make art about myself. As an AFAB person raised by an overtly masculine mixed martial artist, I tangle with how this violent world has been (dis)inherited as I’ve come into adulthood, and how it plays a role in the realization of my own queerness. I work at the border of disciplines utilizing drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, performance, and social practice to reflect on my life. Everything is a self-portrait; the drawings of myself as a child and adult, the video of just my hands wrapping themselves up for a fight, the five Etch-A-Sketches reiterating the insults I heard over and over from my father. Through each specific medium, my work provides meaning to the aspects of my identity that are otherwise enigmatic. Creating personal narrative work is simultaneously a political act as I invite audiences to reach into my work and identify it with themselves. Viewers who have had a life like mine can finally see themselves as protagonists in the public sphere instead of in the corner. I’m taking this into a new practice in which I invite Queer participants to join a fight club where I teach them to fight for themselves. It feels good to feel powerful and strong in a world that tells me I am the opposite, and I want to instill this in others. Using my knowledge of fighting to empower other Queer folks is an important step in the reconstruction of my own narrative, while also sharing my specialties to strengthen my community. By teaching Queer people how to kick box, I simultaneously rewrite my own bodies history with fighting and awaken a new understanding within the people I am teaching: we uplift and support one another in a new journey while we sweat and swing at each other.

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