“Meiguo '' is an installation consisting of sculptures and textiles based on memories from my grandmother’s archive. Attempts to grasp the past becomes a departure for new sensibilities of (be)longing. My conceptual framing is informed by racial melancholia theory, craft methods, Asian American literature and poetry. By blurring relationships between inside and outside, I hope to frame the in-between spaces that I occupy within culture, time, and place. Fabrics soaked with pomegranates, onion skins, lemon juice, and rice are joined through long durational sewing methods. Building up the textile with repetition and pattern engages with practices of writing, erasure, and remembering. I question how joining threads locates what cannot be easily translated in words yet acutely felt in the body.

The multifaceted project, Come Back to Me, critiques the current state of image commodification to pose questions about subjectivity constituted through an ever-expanding ecosystem of fashion. As fashion theorist Anne Hollander claims, clothes “share in the perpetually idealizing vision of art,” and therefore merit the same meticulous analysis as painting. The work in Come Back to Me examines the relationship of fashion to the canon of female portraiture. I claim that the bodies of women depicted in painting throughout the ages are perpetually portrayed as doll-like objects rather than powerful, autonomous subjects. It is clothes that form these subjectivities, and the sartorial shaping of the body directly affects the somatic, and indeed, the body-image itself. “Sumptuary Laws” instated during the Renaissance dictated dress codes that policed dividing lines between Aristocracy and a rising middle class by forbidding sartorial extravagance and excess. Today, sumptuary laws have been inverted- the Capitalist machine now demands the gluttonous consumption of products by everyone, with the fashion industry as a driving engine. Come Back to Me constructs a metaphorical narrative of the cycle of becoming human, thing and image sustained through the fashion system.

Come Back to Me collects four bodies of work: a performance, a fashion film, a series of photographs, two sculptures and a sculptural gown. The works were shown in an exhibition with an accompanying catalogue and written thesis paper. As time-based media, the performance and the fashion film explore the plastic nature of the actions between bodies in relationship to clothes, and the exhibition of material objects freezes these actions into a liminal state between possibility and artifact.

How The West Was Fun is a large-scale, participatory installation developed in response to the disappearing American tradition of rattlesnake roundups. The sculptures, video, images, and performances, which comprise the installation, respond to material collected during research trips to the Apache Rattlesnake Festival in Apache, Oklahoma. The exhibition represents a meditation on the American west, notions of masculinity, cultural malaise, leisure activity and humor.

The Wet Chaparral: Poetry at Home (Out There) is an MFA thesis exhibition of new sculptures by Audrey Hope. The thesis paper describes the exhibition, discusses the artist’s personal and artistic motivations, and analyzes writings relevant to the work.

ABSTRACT OF THESIS

If the Ocean Was Whiskey

By

Brianna Dawn Rigg

Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts

University of California, San Diego, 2012

Professor Anya Gallacio, Chair

My work investigates the histories, power relations, and psychological motivations that lead to the production of cultural artifacts. If the Ocean was Whiskey, is an immersive environment composed of artifacts that are reminiscent of the Old West, maritime culture, elementary school classrooms, and Southern Californian architecture. These artifacts, both collected and made by me, are arranged to create a mash up of vernaculars used to express my imagined understandings of the historical narratives to which they refer. The handmade objects in the installation represent things that hold a monumental presence in my memory such as: The Little Mermaid, The Guinness Book of World Records, and Taco Bell. By adding found objects to these handmade forms, I am questioning the assumptions that lie behind my memories; I am attempting to disrupt these assumptions by challenging the monumental with contingencies, and by placing the personal within a context that is historical.

False Positive is an installation of four distinct sculptures with overlapping relationships created by arrangement, materials, process and content in a dimly lit gallery. The work reflects elements of modern and figurative sculpture, tree houses and deer blinds, a dining room and terminal illness. The show references my interest in building structures, altering existing objects, notions of masculinity, ritual labor and craft, metaphorical expression and ways in which we approach and relate to forms in our space. These interests are utilized to begin conversations about the body, its psychological projections, its physical contortions and spaces it longs to inhabit or escape from. Imbedded in each form is a sense of contrast that either upends or distorts what is usually expected of it; the strong is made weak, the playful turns threatening, the grotesque becomes loveable.

ABSTRACT OF THESIS

Can’t Tell / Won’t Tell

by

Joshua Jon Miller

Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts

University of California, San Diego, 2015

Professor Anya Gallaccio, Chair

The body of work presented in Can’t Tell / Won’t Tell consists of nineteen wallmounted

sculptures, three floor based sculptures, four body-size painting, and twenty-six

foot long panoramic painting (fig. 1). All of the works are figurative, with imagery

primarily sourced from thrift and antique store objects. They present a range of

questions about material culture, sexual and racial identity, and culturally embedded

languages of abstraction. The thesis essay and interview examine the artist’s approach to this range of subject matter, his processes of formulating the work, and biographical

anecdotes informing these processes.

​Through the physical act of combining of wood and rope to make assemblages, I explore questions surrounding memory, historical trauma, growth, perseverance, and integration. I examine memories from my childhood to understand how my initial relationship to wood and rope, as materials, has warped over time as I learned about slavery and how these same materials were historically used to harm or instill fear. The assemblages use this historical trauma as a contact point for the two materials, addressing the violence and fear many people of color feel on a daily basis, but also showing the possibility of growth and creating a new relationship between myself and these charged materials, that is more like that of when I was a child.

My thesis exhibition, “O World, I cannot hold thee close enough,“ at the University of California, San Diego, is the culmination of artistic work that explores material-based process that abstract the body. My work refers to the idea of a body less contained by examining the structures that define and protect bodies, using materials to represent a continuous line that binds myself to the Other. By the Other I mean the world outside of myself as an individual. Exploring connectedness through material illustrates Chris Tilley’s idea that, people make things, and things make people. The process of connecting materially is a way to understand the present moment. I use dead hair, animal tissue, paper waste, salt, burlap and iconic myths to describe the continuity that binds past and present. I want to create a language without words, the stories and movements that are transmitted through the body over time. Generations of humans reenact a corporeal and visceral connectedness to one another, and in my work, I seek to give these stories form.

In this paper I will describe my relationship to my materials and the tools with which I create my work. I will discuss artists whose way of working describes my own, and various mythologies that contribute to my thinking about art practice. Specifically, I will give insight into the ways that storytelling and materials weave together in my projects, including “Compression” and “Hold My Bones” works.

I am exhausted

This bit of text will bring language up as close as possible and nearly touch its destination before it drops off and dematerializes. I will attempt to describe an in betweenness that exists in and around all things and their relationships; animal, vegetable, and mineral. What good does expanding the middle do? What is there to decode, unearth, and unpackage?

Please bear with me.