My arrival at graduate school immediately became a departure. I struck out in search of interior territories—psychological, creative, and intellectual—that were unknown to me; unclaimed and unintegrated. I knew that I wanted to make the leap into more abstracted work, and that I would have to relinquish some of my familiar ways of working to do that. Giving up control over viewer interpretation, learning to harness chaotic materials and methods, questioning composition, contemplating the problems of gallery presentation and archival preservation, wondering about the role of the artist as shaper of culture, thinking about the legibility and presence of my pieces: all of these factors have been areas of investment for me.
The result has been an extremely diverse, almost promiscuous exploration of material and form. Spills, birds, trash, and satellites have served as unlikely guides in the complete reorientation of my practice. It is difficult to tie all of the pieces I have made during my time at Ohio State into a tidy little bundle. Rather than try to find a suitable container in which to put them for comparison (i.e., material, subject, approach, etc.), I have organized this thesis as a series of six essays on questioning permanence. These writings examine this idea through articulating the anatomy of force; noticing nothingness and the peripheral; the bacchanalian pursuit of creative evolution; the freedom of the bird’s eye or satellite view; my struggles and conflicts with preservation, the museum, and decay; and moving beyond art alone. At the beginning of each part is a passage or poem that has guided aspects of my thinking and been instrumental to my process.
The work I am doing is simultaneously private and public. This collection of writings reflects a moment in time along a much longer path in my artistic development. It also only represents the visible part of my journey over the last two years. The other half of my growth here has been deeply psychological and world-view shifting. In this thesis, I will describe the public elements with greater specificity, and perhaps only allude to those private aspects.