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The Significance That Cause And Effect Might Have, Sara Fleenor

Graduate School of Art Theses

Growing up in Dayton, Ohio in the 90’s, I witnessed the withdrawal of manufacturing giant, General Motors, and was witness to the cascading evisceration of manufacturing in the Midwest. This creation of the rust belt not only littered the landscape with the ruins of empty manufacturing facilities, but the collapsed economy also created a dearth of aspiration that gave traction to a rising heroin epidemic.

In my work, I depict middle America not with the bucolic sunlight of a mythical heartland, but with the illumination of industrial collapse.