space

Technology is not just the latest screen or pharmaceutical cure. Technology is also religion, biology, government, memory, quantum physics, emotions, and language. In short it is culture and nature. All the things that create a system where input differs from output. Technology is change, and change only becomes apparent by separation through time. The past, present and future are locations that allow characteristics to differ and make change possible. Time is the lynch pin: without time change ceases to occur. The illusion of separation appears when time is eliminated. Post-completion addendum: People should not travel beyond the Earth's atmosphere. Human space exploration and colonization is irresponsible and used to exploit well meaning intentions. Project Space Exposé exists to end the exploitation of space and counter the propaganda that insists humans are destined to leave Earth.

My research explores and embodies queerness and comfort as a way to discuss how we as queers navigate and shape spaces. By using discomfort as a way to position my work, I hope to make connections with people by sharing my interpretations and contribution to queerness. My visual thesis titled Fields addresses orientation, associations, impermanence and queerness. The concept of having multiple ways of approaching work is very interesting to me, because it moves away from a linear path. The non-linearity is a way to address queerness in that both process and queerness are fluid and open, not necessarily concrete. To me a space can be physical, but also imaginative, and it is through the way that we interact with objects that a relationship is created between an object and the viewer. In this paper I discuss my research around queerness, comfort, discomfort and orientation as a supplement for the visual work. The paper is a framework and considers queer artists and authors that address similar ideas to support how I interpret queerness.

This thesis attempts to recreate a memory landscape through the reconstruction of specific moments in my past. It is focused on the reformation of the Dawson Timbers, a pivotal landmark of my youth. The goal of the work is to create a physical, all encompassing environment for the viewer to enter and interact with. This space provides an opportunity for the viewer to engage in experiencing the maker's point of view, while simultaneously building narrative from personal history. The installation starts with a two-dimensional hanging wall piece, which is connected by a crocheted trail, leading the viewer into the basement. Once in the basement, the viewer enters a room, which is the three dimensional rendering of the painting upstairs. In essence, a flat snapshot of a landscape transforms into a tangible woodland territory; navigable and present.

This thesis suggests a template for the artist-in-community as described by African American novelist Toni Morrison; presents an approach to space/place in light of both white Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan's assertions about the effects of media on human experience and African American social theorist Patricia Hill Collin's description of safe-spaces as used by Black women in the United States; places my work in conversation with the work of established contemporary artists whose claimed identities, similar to my own, place them at the margins of American society to, as Latino artist Félix González Torres said, "(open) up the terms of the argument, and (re-address) the issue of quality and who dictates and defines 'quality'"; and posits that, given their missions, relationships with their communities, and my personal experiences with them, libraries and library-like spaces are metaphors and appropriate places for my work to enter into the community-based conversations that drive my practice.

My thesis fully utilizes the exhibition space, synthesizing several different manifestations of typographic form into a coherent environment¬¬¬¬, a typographic playground, which integrates and balances the cohesive forms of the abstract and the concrete, the three-dimensional and two-dimensional, monochrome and polychrome, physical object and digital object. Elements of the overall composition are reflected and repeated in order to inspire engagement with both the site and the viewer.