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Graduation Term
2016
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
School of Art
Committee Chair
Melissa Oresky
Abstract
My recent paintings use semi-representational environments as a means of stimulating viewers to think about the identification of relationships among painted spaces/objects and how this activity relates to the complexity and multiplicity of internal states of being and internal experience. At their core, my paintings are a way for me to learn about the inner nature of myself and others: how consciousness collapses myriad possibilities into a single reality, and how it also has the ability to change our initial impressions (what had become for a time, our reality). In my paintings, I posit that inanimate subjects can open an awareness of such questions concerning consciousness. These ideas manifest in my exploration of the visual relationships that form between disparate areas of paint on canvas. How are we affected when external forces (such as the weather, seasons, climate, even our societies as a whole) change? How does our view of those things change when circumstances within us are different? My work has been influenced by research into phenomenology, the human perceptual system, Absurdism, and Buddhism. In order to express these concepts through paintings, I have turned to artists and both past and present including Dexter Dalwood, Peter Doig, Verne Dawson, Angela Dufresne, Dana Schutz, Joan MirÃ, Giorgio de Chirico, and Henri Matisse, among others. In addition, I let ideas, preoccupations, memories, imagination, and personal experiences inform the paintings I make. These fragmentary elements composed and are reflected in the collage-like arrangement of my paintings. How the fragments work together or oppose each other in the mind of the viewer contributes to how the environment they inhabit is understood.
Access Type
Thesis-ISU Access Only
Recommended Citation
Farber, Emma, "Seeing Not Things: Awareness, Internal Experience, and the Formation and Dissolution of Visual Relationships" (2016). Theses and Dissertations. 498.
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/etd/498
DOI
http://doi.org/10.30707/ETD2016.Farber.E