Department of Visual Arts and Art History

Dirt, Rust, and Non-Girl Stuff explores identity, mental health, and tradition. Considering the customs of my Cuban heritage, I choose materials and processes that reflect conventions related to gender identity, expression, and craft. These subjects are represented via assemblages that exist as stand-alone sculptures and installations. Each piece is composed of materials and objects chosen based on their physical characteristics and associations to craft or notions of traditional gender norms. The work hints to the viewer through metaphors created by material choice, found object associations, and the placement of each element. Each fragment of material represents a part of my identity. The porcelain acts as a metaphor for my body, often breaking, cracking, and shattering. Its fragility requires mending, stitching, and repair to become something or someone else. The crochet elements reference the women's gender roles and femininity that my parents yearned for me to exhibit. The metal tools and rusted objects are representative of the more masculine roles I took on to fulfill my father's need for a son. The work often exhibits the precarity, the needed repairs, or additions of femininity to the otherwise masculine materials to turn a too masculine body into a more feminine one. The arrangements are not motivated by order or beauty but by the tension caused by the divide between who I am and whom I am expected to be.

Yesterday We Were Girls is a body of work which includes photographs selected from family albums and current images I create based in and around my childhood and adolescent memories. The photographs are accompanied by porcelain recreations of precious girlhood treasures, handwritten poetic prose, and an installation which also includes found furniture and a large open book form. Focused on my lived experience of the tension between intimacy and distance, acceptance and rejection, as well as the hidden and that which is laid bare, this body of work is an exploration of identity, female life cycles, family history, and mother – daughter relationships.

Deconstructed Cartography is comprised of two related and complementary sections that use mapping structures to explore the temporality of location through the lens of personal experience within places. This body of work uses both collage and a light-shadow installation to develop a narrative of place and time. My artwork focuses on deconstructing classical modes of representation through the lens of cartography and places an emphasis on personal experiences, narratives, and storytelling of place or locale. I am interested in road maps, water bodies, topography, shadows, and the various ways humans attempt to navigate or make sense of the natural world through lines and different mapping structures.

As a reaction to the demand for women’s suffrage and equal rights in the late-1800s, American antifeminism emerged. In the article by Janet Saltzman Chafetz and Anthony Gary Dworkin, “In the Face of Threat: Organized Antifeminism in Comparative Perspective,” the authors concluded that the growth of a countermovement is contingent upon the success and size of the movement it opposes.1 This conclusion is applied to the actions, counter-actions and subsequent growth of both antifeminism and feminism. However, as feminism succeeds with small advancements in equality, antifeminism escalates its oppositional strength by creating accusations against women, using labels based on gender stereotypes and initiatives that incite divisive discourse in the pursuit of equal rights for all human beings.
Graphic design is a catalyst for both antifeminism and feminism visual language. To find inspiration for my exhibition, I examined one-hundred years of design used by both movements. Based by my research, the exhibition, “5th Wave: The Fault of Women,” navigates through the growth and history of antifeminism and visually examines antifeminist labels and initiatives and the culmination of these techniques used during the fifth wave of antifeminism. The exhibition, “5th Wave: The Fault of Women,” exposes and challenges the efforts of the fifth wave of antifeminism in an effort to evoke an understanding of the importance of feminism’s fight for equality and the betterment of all human beings. Using research and design to expose antifeminism’s growing labels and initiative, feminism can combat the techniques used to punish those who challenge patriarchy and heteronormativity.

“Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s Day” is a manic line of dialogue spoken by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I have chosen that line as the title of my thesis and exhibition. Much of my graduate work has emanated from scenes in Shakespeare’s plays. I make dimensional paintings, prints, and sculptures that leverage a wide variety of media, material, and processes. I have chosen the intense drama of Ophelia’s final appearance on stage to inspire this body of work. The drama and imagery of Shakespeare’s plays has been a profound source of ideas for me. They motivate me to connect with all available resources in an energetic way to create visually captivating pieces of art. My objective is not to illustrate any given scene but to leverage the text for a personal artistic experience. The result is an abstraction that captures the energy of a dramatic moment. The art I produce is an expressive record of my relationship with the literature.

The world’s path to climate change is inevitable. Activists and legislators, all around the world, are actively working to slow down this process or stop changes. Technology is moving toward a sustainable future of renewable energy and resources to lighten the impact that the human population has on the climate. Whether or not these efforts will slow down the changing climate is unknown, but the world’s scientists, engineers, and designers are preparing for any scenario that comes our way.
This thesis uses graphic design to visualize the future of humanity adapting to climate change. Topics that are explored include controlled-environment agriculture, vertical farming, sustainable food production, advancements in the medical industry, advancements in transportation, and sustainable energy production. These elements will come together, in my projects, to visualize one possible future of living in Arizona, where living conditions have become inhospitable for life as we know today.

Temporal Displacement is an investigation of loss and the recollection of memories translated through tangible objects and their placement in relationship to one another. The objects are primarily slip-cast terracotta ceramic dog-like heads with fabric bodies crafted as puppet-like forms, which are both stationary and suspended. Additional elements include a Mechanical Dog that the viewer activates with a hand-held crank; muslin fabric printed with hand-made ceramic stamps, and a curtain. The ceramic stamps are incised with a version of the puppets playing the game of jacks. The installation is within a three-walled room that invites viewers into a liminal time-space and experience, then leads them out again.

On June 3rd, 2010, I certainly was not aware of what was about to take place. I was in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and at this point in time my unit and I had been in country for five out of the twelve months of our deployment. An ear-splitting boom woke me up, and the smell of iron and blood was so strong it seemed to override my ability to focus on what was really happening. The sounds I heard were lowered and muffled and mostly pain-filled and anguished. Mine was often a voice that joined them. Those cries could also change the course of a life. They are cries that, once heard, can never be erased from memory. I knew my comrades were down in the depths with me. I will never take anything for granted again.
Honor and Chaos works across media to transform space and transport viewers. The exhibition incorporates sculptural forms of wire and scrap metal, dark ink drawings interrupted by spray paint, and salvaged plastics to immerse viewers in another place and time.

Whispers from the Ghost House is the concrete manifestation of the mutable nature of childhood memory held within the nebulous forms of home. In all of its many incarnations home exists as a construction out of time and space that absorbs the accumulation of life performed around and within its walls. Home is idealized and sought after, both sanctuary and snare. The iterations of home I created are primarily constructed from repurposed materials with inherent histories; unstable and malleable. Cardboard and paper holds the plastic veneer of various mediums to shape, color, and mar surfaces. The home develops an identity as it absorbs each action and material, gradually becoming an entity as well as a receptacle, to both display and obfuscate the nostalgic and the unattainable. Each hardened home becomes a haunted being in which memories interlace and fade away as they transform into the wild twisted houses of reverie.

Reckoning is a body of sculptural work that explores the emotional resonance contained within memory through a combination of personal ephemera and handcrafted objects. The physical presence of this work underscores the importance of its materiality, in both the handmade and collected objects, in emphasizing their ability to conjure a memory. Reckoning evokes the intangible emotions and overwhelming sensations that accompany the act of remembering, and an inability to forget.