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Relational Viewing: Affect, Trauma And The Viewer In Contemporary Autobiographical Art, Matthew Ryan Smith Aug 2012

Relational Viewing: Affect, Trauma And The Viewer In Contemporary Autobiographical Art, Matthew Ryan Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the communicative relationship between contemporary autobiographical art and the viewer. By analyzing the work of six artists, Richard Billingham, Jaret Belliveau, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Lisa Steele and Bas Jan Ader, I maintain that lived experience and personal history condition the way viewers respond to autobiographical art. I turn to literary theory as a critical methodology to argue that autobiographical art operates as a catalyst for identification, memory and self-discovery. I use affect and trauma theory to demonstrate how artwork produces meaning and discourse through the viewer’s feelings, emotions and bodily sensations. Consequently, I survey the importance …


Evocation Of Memory And Place, Colleen Pendry May 2012

Evocation Of Memory And Place, Colleen Pendry

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

My work investigates the inseparability of memory and emotion. Guided by what remain of my mother’s tattered memoirs, I have investigated a place from her past that suggests an intense search which filters through her writings and in tandem with my own visual remembrance. Through the manipulation of materials, technique and space, my work reveals a simple yet complex connectedness to memory and place.


Piecing, Ginger Metzger Apr 2012

Piecing, Ginger Metzger

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis is part story telling, part exploration of research and part narrative of my experience in graduate school that culminated with my thesis work Piecing. My work explores how memory and history are connected to objects and the role they play in our ability to feel ‘at home’ at a moment when that is challenged in many ways. I extensively explore recent literature on the topic of nostalgia that is described as a reaction to the fragmentation and dislocation of our current moment, nostalgia as mal du siecle.