Award Winning Art Thesis
Traces of Trees
The Swarthmore Art Department awarded me the Soloman Art Prize for my piece, Tree No. 1, in my senior thesis exhibition. The prize is only awarded when the department faculty deem a work worthy of purchase into the College's permanent collection.
Based on the Crum Woods surrounding Swarthmore College, my senior thesis was one of the most challenging projects I have ever embarked on. It involved countless hours in the woods, in the river, printing, cutting mats, cutting glass, building frames, and curating the order of pieces in the gallery. As described below in the abstract, I investigate distorted reflections framed by trees and the real world in the context of the philosophical concepts of Michel Foucault’s heterotopias and Immanuel Kant’s sublime. During my exhibition, I purposefully displayed the pieces without mention of these reflections in the gallery to challenge the viewer to decipher what they saw in the photos.
Abstract:
My work is entirely comprised of reflections that occur naturally in the Crum Woods. I investigate the distorted reflections framed by the real world in the context of the philosophical concepts of Michel Foucault’s heterotopias and Immanuel Kant’s sublime. Each philosophical term has an essence of what I look for in a landscape. Each term also has an element of comfort intertwined with either unease, fear, or otherness. This connection and dichotomy between comfort and otherness help describe how I view the new worlds I peer into when I have my camera. I attempt to instill a sense of bewilderment or discomfort in my images which are generally familiar nature still/photos/images.
