Date of Award
5-2013
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Legacy Department
Visual Arts
Committee Chair/Advisor
Wrangle, Anderson
Committee Member
Feeser, Andrea
Committee Member
Lauritis, Beth
Committee Member
McDonald, Todd
Abstract
Meandering through the seemingly endless spectrum that makes up contemporary Visual Arts, it is clear that many are taking stock of the past and wondering where we go from here. Looking back, documenting, accounting, excavating. Looking forward, wondering, daring to hope. My artwork embraces both the backward glance and the lean forward by considering the present moment and what constructs it. Within three interrelated series of photographic and video works, I consider and present for rumination our individual and shared human experience of the world and one another.
This body of work draws attention through a juxtaposition of the elevated and the everyday, holds suspended consideration by presenting a meditative slowing of time, and dwells upon the role of positionality. In these series of still and moving images, people travel individually and together through natural and built spaces, from the epic landscapes of nature to glass and metallic train cars to hewn-stone holy sites. In each set of images and videos, this work presents people and their settings through a varying lens of perception, exploring how we as human beings view one another through a kaleidoscope of perspectives and meanings. Offering quiet, prolonged views, the installations display the construction of viewpoints over series of works, provoking questioning about our perceptions of the people pictured, their separation and interrelation, and what meanings these hold for the viewer. Playing upon the conventions of documentary to reveal human fictions, this body of work synchronizes an excavation of individual realities while simultaneously integrating a re-imagining of what is - the small moments that make up our experience, the constructed nature of our selves and perspectives, and the possibility of momentary communities of human beings.
Recommended Citation
Pegelow kaplan, Ann, "Middle Ground: Being Human, Reality & the Imaginary" (2013). All Theses. 1685.
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/1685