Date of Award
May 2021
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Visual Arts
Committee Member
Kathleen Thum
Committee Member
Andrea Feeser
Committee Member
Todd McDonald
Abstract
Rearranging past moments to reveal a nearly concealed shared heart, the work finds people who quickly pass through the gaze of the camera and translates the moment into a pigment referred to here as pastel’d dirt to draw out evidence of an awareness of ourselves in another.
As a salve to separation, the drawings are composed through amalgamated archival footage into a wavering pastiche of historical and contemporary art. This salve is applied via materials that are resolute and vulnerable (pastels both grip and dissolve, travel and saturate), and is thereby used to draw into our inevitable severance from one another: a severance that longingly hunts for its magnet and when found produces something fleeting, invisible, vital and known.
The drawings then, also, become the vehicle––the space giver, the time traveler, the dance composed around a look–– for the bygone that lures us to our future (our own ultimate dissolving) to return our gaze.
Recommended Citation
Johnson, Lori Brook, "The Self Outside: A Nearly Concealed Shared Heart" (2021). All Theses. 3494.
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/3494