Date of Award

Spring 4-26-2024

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Art and Design

First Advisor

Jeremy Bolen

Second Advisor

Jill Frank

Third Advisor

Serena Perrone

Fourth Advisor

Craig Drennen

Abstract

Preemptive Mourning uses temporal, analog photographic practices to confront viewers with questions surrounding cultural funerary practices and the discomforts of death. The photograph, as a memory object, is simultaneously a reminder of the lived experience and a representation of what is no longer. I use the cemetery as my subject, a physical landscape that acts as an archive itself. The space exists, long after the material body decomposes, serving as a placeholder for a thing no longer there. Performance at the cemetery site is the crux, each subsequent work building upon each other to invite contemplation on the transformative power of decay, the interconnectedness of all living things, and the enduring legacy that permeates the very soil beneath our feet. Through returning to these in-between spaces of life and death, I grapple with my own mortality in an anticipatory catharsis.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/36974776

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