Abstract

Repeatedly what I see around me are places and messages that generate manufactured experiences, manipulated by someone with an agenda to promote. My thesis work, entitled "Sweet Reassurance," is a personal approach to re-invention; a conceptually driven body of work that explores my obsession with irony, a need to vent frustration with public policy, complacency, and misguided priorities. The work springs from a notion to create proposals for architectural projects that are rather absurd and could never really be realized. They are my brand of visionary architecture, existing somewhere between the Utopian and the Dystopian. I have developed a vocabulary of elements-representations of the tools of war, of ways of "sugar-coating" the truth, of advertising-style graphic elements with which to sell the message. I resist the notion that I or anyone else should be so easily manipulated by pretty pictures that cover horrific truths. I am drawn to the "how" and the "why" behind the creation of places where nothing existed before. Layout, hierarchy, and placement of objects in the work address the nature of power. My interest has been in molding, combining, and transforming real objects into something other, to create an idiosyncratic visual language.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Architecture in art; Glass art--Themes, motives; Glass art--Technique; Glass sculpture--Themes, motives; Glass sculpture--Technique; Politics in art; Irony in art; Material culture in art

Publication Date

2008

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Glass (MFA)

Department, Program, or Center

School for American Crafts (CIAS)

Advisor

Michael Rogers

Advisor/Committee Member

Robin Cass

Advisor/Committee Member

Clarence Sheffield

Comments

Physical copy available from RIT's Wallace Library at NK5104 .R89 2008

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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