Visual art

“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.

Uncounted Cadences is a drawing installation in the thesis exhibition that furthers my exploration in tracing movement through psychological and physical geographies. Gestural drawings of human and animal bodies in motion are woven into local landscape imagery that is printed with powdered charcoal through a silkscreen. Using both additive and subtractive processes, the layering and erasure suggest loss, reclamation, and the nature of memory. The drawings are cut and provisionally reassembled into a cinematic sequence as if they are pieces of film being edited and spliced. This process shows an unfolding over time and involves listening to the rhythmic pacing of bodies morphing, decaying, birthing, or leaving. Time is not experienced as progress ; rather, the rearrangement of fragments allows for a continuous retelling of stories.