Here | not here: MFA Thesis - Printmaking

Abstract

A manifestation of two years work, Here / Not Here is an installation that exposes the darkest moments of mental illness – allowing the audience to become familiar with their own demons. Although quite personal, with journal entries and self-portraiture, the installation acts as a dialogue to the viewer from the artist. How do you capture such universal themes as sadness and loss? Furthermore, how does one react when seeing such objects? Thus, my work acts as a discourse with the viewer in which they can lose themselves and become one with the illness. Consequently, the dark installation becomes a discourse on psychoanalysis and semiotics – becoming a language of pain in which the viewer is provided with a set of tools to uncover the visual dialect (Alphen, 16). The tools of this language are delivered in the use of repetition, transparency, and distortion.