Date of Award

5-13-2021

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Art and Design

First Advisor

Christina West

Second Advisor

Jeremy Bolen

Third Advisor

Jill Frank

Abstract

Eternal Summer invites viewers into multisensory installations and video that simulate the tourist experience and provoke questions about the passage of time, memory, and decadence. The project is rooted in my background; growing up in a tourist community, I experienced a culture built upon grotesque excesses of artificial happiness manufactured through tourism industry workers’ grueling and repetitive physical labor. I examine these practices and how they combine to create a glittering façade of synthetic pleasure for visitors but dissolve into a lonely, monotonous setting for natives. The work compresses time and space through dreamlike surreality in order to demonstrate the perceived grandeur of tourist destinations from a worker’s perspective. These illusions distort our sense of truth and reality. The installation’s sensory elements further emphasize the vacation industry’s unvarying, illusory nature.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/22612126

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