Work Hard

LeMahieu, Jeremy

Savannah, Georgia: Savannah College of Art and Design (eLearning)

2016-08

Thesis (M.F.A.) -- Painting

Savannah College of Art and Design -- Department of Painting

Includes bibliographical references (pages 32-35).

Additional PDF is student's visual component: images from installations "Pembrooke Park", Farn Street", and "Real Gallery".

"The work and theories discussed in this paper propose failure as a fertile ground. The work explores a desire for an ideal and the simultaneous shame of personal limitations. It strives for meaninglessness but becomes ultimately productive. Nihilism and idealism conflate in both nonsensical and pragmatic encounters with and configuring of home improvement commodities. My work presents itself as a pair of failures. The first failure is the failure of its objecthood. The sculptures and installations are presented as destabilized through the return of the sculpture components - the commodities - to the store. The second failure is the failure of the digital image. The re-presentation of the object by way of an image will never fully contain the original. Using a decidedly Deleuzoguattarian approach, it is argued that the encounter with the digital image functions beyond the material and discourse in the precognitive register of affect - as an encounter between two bodies. And this, it is argued, provides productive lines of flight from the failure and produces a faith in the potency of the image through the production of new political and ethical subjectivities as a viewer repositions themselves in relationship to the commodity system."

Keywords: virtuosic labor, performative labor, commodity object, metamodernism, conceptual installation

CHAIR: Eltringham, Gregory

Brown, Michael V.

Schroeder, Todd

English

Painting

Text, images

2 PDFs : PDF-1 (thesis), 35 pages, color illustrations + PDF-2 (visual component), unpaged, color illustrations

Copyright is retained by the authors or artists of items in this collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.