Object-Oriented Ontology

This summer I had the honor of receiving a SISTAR grant through Saint Mary's College to create a photographic series on the hot topic in art theory: Object-Oriented Ontology. The fabulous Professor Krista Hoefle and I met weekly for philosophical discussions on our readings on the subject and to give each other feedback on our complimenting projects.

What is Object-Oriented Ontology? Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-Oriented Ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this inquiry of existence. OOO rejects the modern philosophical concept that human perception of objects is the cornerstone of their substances or "thingness." Object-oriented ontologists consider everything's existence equally whether objects are big or small, living or inanimate. (Pioneers of the field include Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant, and Timothy Morton.)

This photographic series aims to embody OOO principles by removing humans from everyday scenes, thereby imagining an existence of objects independent from human interaction. Therefore, viewers are prompted to ponder the inherent properties of objects rather than human innovation of them. The result of this photographic speculation manifests in objects floating in scenes, apparently autonomous, revealing the interactions and interdependence between a democracy of objects that shape everyday life.

A special thanks to Professor Aaron Moe of the English department for introducing me to OOO and suggesting fascinating readings. Many thanks to Gwen O'Brien of the SMC Courier Magazine for her kind words, support, and publicity. 

Myriads of Words: Charcoal Dictionary Drawings

Last summer I bought an old dictionary from a thrift shop for 99 cents (cue Macklemore music).

Inspired by the Walt Whitman quote:
"Were you thinking that those were the words—those delicious sounds out of your friends’ mouths? No, the real words are more delicious than they.
Human bodies are words, myriads of words;
In the best poems re-appears the body"
I set a goal to do one drawing of a human body per letter in the alphabet of the dictionary to illustrate the relationship between physicality and language as outlined in Whitman's poetry.

I didn't complete the project before going back to school, but I hope to resume it during Christmas break. Stay tuned!

Ugly Sweater Project: Donald Trump

Many fantastic classes hide in the depths of the art building at Saint Mary's College. "Sculptural Knit and Crochet" is one of the gems. In this class, we explored the medium of yarn in different historic and political contexts such as "subversive knitting" movements and "yarn bombing," Our final assignment was to knit an interpretation of the cultural phenomenon of "the bad sweater." Rather than an ugly Christmas sweater, the worst thing I thought of knitting was Donald Trump. I then came to the chilling question: what's worse than Donald Trump on a sweater? Donald Trump as president.

Eliot Unbound

As both a literature and art enthusiast, I heartily enjoy mixing the two disciples together and drawing connections. This mixed-media assemblage triptych, “Eliot Unbound” aims to translate T.S. Eliot’s unconventional approaches to writing poetry into a paradigm for creating visual art. In T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land,” he references unrelated historic and cultural anecdotes preceding World War I, assembling each reference into a disjointed but unified poem. The poem is very difficult to read due to its fragmented and incoherent nature. It is most widely interpreted as a reaction to how war breaks apart society and culture. Thus, the experience of reading the poem is like sifting through a diasporic dump, attempting to put things back together the way they used to be, but never entirely making sense of it. Eliot’s approach to writing this poem can be summarized in Eliot’s line: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

For this assemblage, I ripped, crumpled, coffee-stained, and tattered fragments of Eliot’s poem, creating waste out of “The Waste Land.” Then following Eliot’s approach to poetic composition, I “shored” together the fragments of his poem into a cohesive whole by crocheting it together in three different ways with yarn. Crocheting is congruous with poetic composition, for the crafter composes, lines, spaces, loops, and breaks in stitches the same way poets structure their poems with words. To further reference the historic context of Eliot’s work, I sewed the poems onto the canvases using surgical thread found in my attic from World War I. Staining the pages with coffee is a subtle tribute to T.S. Eliot’s line “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons” from “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock." Displayed vertically, the resulting triptych flows together with a sense of chaotic unity by aligning the dissimilar elements in each block with the next. Through these pieces, I hope to elucidate the connections between poetic art and visual art by applying the methods and contexts of T.S. Eliot’s poetry to assemblage.

Bleeding Borders

Bleeding Borders" watercolor and pen on canvas. 24x36 in. Commissioned by Rev. Chip Rousch for the First Unitarian Church of South Bend.

This piece was my first attempt at painting a large scale abstract image. The heart of this piece is invariably political and humanitarian. I started this painting over the summer in the midst of heated debates on immigration policy. I began to ponder how countries on maps are divided rarely by geographical indicators such as mountains, rivers, and seas. On the contrary, they are separated merely by lines drawn by a human hand on a piece of paper. So I set out to do the same thing with my own imaginary map. In this painting I started out with organic, unconstrained blobs and drizzles of watercolor which bleed naturally into each other, creating subtle and unpredictable color gradations. I then outlined each gradation with a pen, arbitrarily deciding which sections should be separate from each other. Even after being contained by pen, the groupings of color cannot be separated from each other completely. You can still see where one color bleeds into the next. You can still see the drizzles I attempted to contain with pen still cross the border of another mass of color than where it initially came from. Basically what I mean by this piece is to illustrate the superficiality of human constructed borders which attempt to isolate individual pieces from a collective whole.