The paintings included in my thesis exhibit consist of three different series, which are related technically, formally, and art historically. Depictions of fruit, tabletops, and clothing, while recontextualized in a more contemporary conversation, all have their roots in the long tradition of still life painting. This tradition is something I find interesting for its exacting record of both common objects and the means by which they were recorded, as well as the lowly place that still life painting had been historically accorded. The objects in my paintings are represented as they might be seen in the dark, or an approximation or imagination of such. The reasons for this treatment are varied, and they have changed during the course of my making them. In order to explain the reasoning behind this, I will have to first describe the work I have made during my time at the University of California, San Diego.

Collapsing inner and outer vision onto canvas, Sabrina Piersol investigates the value of the fragment as it relates to Sapphic poetry through her environmental abstractions. This thesis paper explores related questions surrounding desire, memory, the natural world, and speculative provocations. Framed through reflexivity that mirrors the making process of the paintings, no grove // no sound situates itself within a contemporary painting dialogue that yearns for connections beyond the material world and a more comprehensive understanding of individual interiority.

"Crow Furnace" is a 30-minute long experimental narrative film created in the tradition of the found footage genre. It combines live action video with archival and 16mm found footage to present a historiography of the city of San Francisco as mediated through the element of fire. Two protagonists from different times, a Fireman and a Singer, become stranded in a purgatory state after the moment of their death. Realizing they share a destiny of crossed signals, they undertake a quest to solve the mystery of how they passed and how the two of them might be connected. Along the way, they encounter an itinerary of sights and objects that pertain to psychogeographic places in the city's collective memory. For as they try to solve their individual mysteries, the Fireman and the Singer also bear witness to the larger mystery of San Francisco - a force mediated and activated through the element of fire. In constructing a fictional tale to present history at a mythic level, "Crow Furnace" also aims to make a work about the Myth of San Francisco itself.

Amass investigates a movement that does not have a fixed name. The thesis exhibition, which took place on March 20-24, 2013, consisted of a series of ten oil paintings and accompanying book of writing, titled A Mass all investigating the idea of a particular kind of positive, energetic collapse. In the exhibition, the artist sought to question the viewers' perception of forms and bodies, established definitions, and methods of categorization.

The paintings included in my thesis exhibition, No Future, consist of one singular body of work, or a series, based on photographs of paper sculptures, prompted by finding a mis-filed book titled Creating with Paper by Pauline Johnson, University of Washington Press, 1958, edition from 1975. This book was found because I made holograms.

This isn’t a tribute, or a statement about the position of craft within the expanded field of art, it may be appropriation.

This is an exercise in following coincidence.

AS THE SUN WOUNDS THE SHADOWS traces the relationship between printed matter and queer memory, history, collectivity, liberation, and loss. The exhibition suggests printed matter as a facilitator, witness, and residue of gay desire. Through various methods of collage, fragmentation, repetition, and assemblage, the work ultimately blurs the juncture at which the personal and collective memory meet – but does not erase the seams. Synthesizing several parallel and intersecting bodies of work, including printmaking, photography, and performance, the exhibition ruminates on a longing for an interconnectedness to queer histories and pasts, often lingering in the shadows.  

My MFA exhibition, downside-up and parking with a view, is about cultivating vulnerability and presence through experience and form. The show contains sculptures in myriad materials, many of which I have a personal history with. Whether it’s the steel skeleton of a camper shell I used as a shelter when driving to Alaska or a jade plant I grew from a clipping I made on my first visit to California seven years ago, object ontologies intermixed with direct experiences become the locus from which each work grows out from. The sculptures are informed by research into the sublime, broken-tool being, and Claire Bishop’s theories on social sculpture.

My MFA Thesis exhibition, Scene of Shipwreck, is a synthesis of my practice as both an object and exhibition maker. Centered around the narrative described by survivors Henri Savigny and Alexandre Corréard of the raft of the French Frigate Medusé, I have constructed a number of rafts to explore context, materiality, and symbolism in a liminal space. The potentiality of both is used for revelation and concealment...or concealment through revelation...or the vice versa. This paper reveals the mask of the historical, philosophical and referential tropes to show their relationship to the emotional or poetic.

This paper explores the social and political environment surrounding rape culture and the Me Too Movement, focusing primarily on portraits of major political and social figures that have contributed to disrupting rape culture in recent years. Positive representation of sexual assault survivors and survivors of domestic violence contributes to the disruption of rape culture and functions to destigmatize the survivor experience.

The series of paintings and exhibition titled To Mind The Elephant depicts the isolated uses and suggested effects of material objects used in the environmental and psychological enrichment of elephants in zoological captivity. These simple tools of animal care are understood as analogous in function to both the artistic practice and viewership. The artworks and objects described share qualities of perception, creativity, agency and experience between humans and other animal species when their cognitive processes and responses are considered.