Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, History of Art

In a 1960 article entitled “Younger American Painters,” William Rubin accused Rauschenberg's Combines of rendering the “inherently biographical style of Abstract Expressionism… even more personal, more particular, and sometimes almost embarrassingly private.” Rubin's choice of the word “embarrassingly” is telling; the Combines are not just private, but embarrassingly so; that is, the problem the Combines present is that they are not private when good sense/taste tells us they should be. This spilling over of the supposed-to-be-private into the embarrassingly deviant public has been read as an insistence on the work of art as both in its environment and in communication with it, as a valorization of the femininity associated with the interior/personal and relatedly, as a refusal of heteronormative subjectivity as dictated in the Cold War era. This paper suggests another reading—not as an alternative, but as a supplement to these: a reading of Rauschenberg's Combines through the lens of disability theory. If Rauschenberg's Combines are debased (and there seems to be some agreement that they are), and if one's experience of them is bodily (and this experience seems if not universal, then nearly so), then their association with the debased/abject body demands inquiry. Made up of disparate parts that insist upon their discrete, adjunctive identities and former lives, the Combines might be best understood as Frankensteins—disabled bodies that refuse to comply and in so doing inscribe new ways of being (corporeally) in the world.

Committee: Lisa Florman (Advisor); Erica Levin (Committee Member); J.T. Richardson Eisenhauer (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Art History; Ethics; Fine Arts; Minority and Ethnic Groups

MFA, Kent State University, 2021, College of the Arts / School of Art

This paper has been drafted as a written report following the installation of my thesis exhibit, the Romantic Caribbean. Both this paper and thesis exhibit focus on the topics of tourism and trade. The research conducted through the paper and the exhibit is strongly influenced by my cultural background as a Caribbean native who grew up watching the influences of tourism and trade on my home island, Grand Cayman. With the research, I am exploring the origin of commonplace representations of a Caribbean tourist destination. These representations include the use of black or mixed-race people as performers and entertainers, and the representation of promiscuous behaviour (often provoked by males) within tropical beach resorts. I will also explore the use of found objects as a way to illustrate the circulation of international trade, and I will see if found objects from various locations can be assembled together to create keepsake items that can represent a fantasized Caribbean tourist destination. This paper will outline and analyze various components from the installation of my thesis exhibit and share the specifics of the conceptual framework of the artworks and images made for the project. The artworks are assemblage sculptures, wall-based graphics, an audio track and digital media in the form of prints and video projection. The conclusion reached in this paper shares how my thesis exhibit can be seen as an attempt to revise the problematic representations of a Caribbean tourist destination. This attempt is necessary for the continued development of Caribbean cultural identity through the ownership and hybridization of western influences from the tourist industry and international trade.

Committee: Eli Kessler MFA (Advisor); Isabel Farnsworth MFA (Committee Member); Davin Ebanks MFA (Committee Member); Joseph Underwood PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, Art Education

This dissertation examines the idea that the identity of Indian artist educators and consequently Indian art education is an assemblage of socio-cultural and ideological experience and influence, and of disciplinary transgressions into pedagogical borderlands. The primary source for the concept of assemblage as employed in this study is the writing of Deleuze and Guattari. I identify and analyze three assemblages of identity, namely: a) postcolonial self-consciousness, b) disciplinary organization, and c) social organization, to consider how art education might be approached ‘other'wise in theory and practice. This analysis is based on narratives of learning, teaching and ideology that emerge in engaging composite voices of urban Indian art educators on their practice, with articulations of policy and curriculum voices. I employ a conceptual framework of ontological hybridity that folds Indian Vedanta philosophy onto concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, such as assemblage, rhizome, and space. I do so in context of developments in curriculum and pedagogy in art education on disciplinary and social levels. I place my dissertation within the discourse of postcolonial globalization theory, exploring the concept of ambivalence in relation to identity. I employ a methodology located in the borderlands of narrative inquiry and grounded theory.

Committee: Kevin Tavin PhD (Advisor); Sydney Walker PhD (Committee Member); Christine Ballengee-Morris PhD (Committee Member); Deborah Smith-Shank PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education; Education Philosophy; Multicultural Education; Pedagogy; South Asian Studies; Teacher Education

MFA, Kent State University, 2015, College of the Arts / School of Art

Skeleton Woman: Embracing the Unknown Allows for Surprises was a temporary installation that explored a chaotic, whimsical and intuitive visual language. The theme Skeleton Woman, refers to an allegory about the Life/Death/Life cycle and the transformation of fear into love. I used assemblage, mural painting and drawing to explore issues of beauty and non beauty as well as the presence and acceptance of dysfunction. The chaotic display of objects, drawings, lines and textures gave way to an underlying, rhythmic order. I intended to express personal struggle and transcendence through my own visual and material sensibilities and I allowed the viewer to completely immersed in that process.

Committee: Gianna Committo (Advisor); Darice Polo (Committee Member); Martin Ball (Committee Member); Janice Lessman-Moss (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2012, Art

Over the past few years my practice has been focused on and informed by images from warzones throughout the world. As an American civilian, I have come of age with an awareness of my tacit participation in warfare that I never witness first hand. Rather than as an event, war operates on the periphery, a vague affect diffused into the everyday. I wish to implicate myself as a participant as well as a spectator, an artist engaged in violence. The following paper is broken into to main sections. The first examines the experience of viewing the images of the dead on the battlefield, and the relationship between the viewer and the image referent that develops from that encounter. The second half examines a selection of my own artworks. A close examination of these works serves as a way to expand and reexamine the concepts contained in the first half. In conclusion I summarize my practice as an effort in “turning towards” the war victim.

Committee: Laura Lisbon (Advisor); Michael Mercil (Committee Member); George Rush (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, Art Education

In an expanding technological ecology, the spaces of learning in art education require a new appraisal of the role that visual technologies serve to learners. Through intersections of actor-network theory and theories of visuality from visual culture studies, this research focuses on developing a social ontology to investigate the role that the visual technology Photoshop plays in collaborating with users within a human-technological hybrid. In a role reversal, for this research I become the instrument of research and Photoshop becomes the focus of a non-human ethnographic inquiry that utilizes an ontological framework to consider how technology performs with us and not on us. This symmetry between human and non-humans in a social ontology generates the complexity of Photoshop in a heterogeneous network formation of agencies, through more than its instrumentality, by seeing it working with me in the production of digital visual culture.

Committee: Kevin Tavin (Committee Chair); Sydney Walker (Committee Member); Jennifer Eisenhauer (Committee Member); Robert Sweeny (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education

MFA, Kent State University, 2009, College of the Arts / School of Art

Accumulation is a series of arrangements or assembled installations and mixed-media drawings that expose the anxieties, uncertainties, absurdities and overall fragility of our world. The installations are constructed of found materials compulsively collected and saved, including but not limited to post-consumer waste, salvaged wood, and natural material. These materials become transformed and arranged in a delicate temporal manner as I contemplate their wasteful accumulation within our culture. The arrangement of forms and structures throughout the work is determined by playfulness, discovery, and experimentation. Some pieces in the installations are pre-made in my studio, while other parts are site-specific. Utilizing and manipulating post-consumer waste in my work enables me to maneuver through the anxiety stemming from my environmental concerns. This process is at time meditative and can provide a release for my unease. My tendency for cuteness and prettiness as a transformative element is evident throughout the work. Although the work in the end may appear to be naively constructed arrangements, they require a closer contemplative understanding of the relationship between the materials and oneself.

Committee: Darice Polo (Advisor); Gianna Commito (Committee Member); Martin Ball (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts