| Description |
This Final Project Paper is concerned with my art project Prime Property. The final exhibition of the project opened on August 24, 2007 and ran through September 14, 2007 in the Alvin Gittins Gallery of the University of Utah. In this paper, I'm attempting to shed light on my rational and intentions for creating the body of work presented here. My art is concerned with the life-governing patterns that create the world in which we live. More specifically, my art is concerned with the patterns of urban sprawl, the wave of ever-new housing developments that is washing over the American landscape. It has become so pervasive a sight that the American landscape, as most people living in America today know it, is to a large degree dominated by the dynamic sprawl of housing developments. Familiarity so often translates into a feeling of rightness or at least a feeling of safety. The phenomenon of suburbia, then, with its concomitant lifestyle has acquired a status of familiarity precluding general questioning because it is part of the post World War II wave of technological and economic progress, which has become the status quo. For the last 60 years, our lives have generally become faster, easier, and more comfortable. The phenomenal gains, however, inherently carry within them losses of corresponding magnitude, which have become just as commonplace and therefore invisible as their positive counterparts. As I see it, we have grown blind to the loss of landscape and the collapse of community based living to the degree that consumer culture has overwhelmed us with an overabundance of material goods and conveniences. This state of affairs makes it difficult to assess the situation critically. The aim, then, of my art lies in provoking a sense of curiosity regarding the familiar that escapes our attention because it is so common. My art-making constitutes my meditation of the common patterns of contemporary life and extends an invitation to my audience to join in this meditation. I surrender to the simple, repetitive, even mundane in my process of image-making, while simultaneously undermining its primary tenet. What at first glance looks like mass-production, reveals itself, under scrutiny, as having grown out of singular attention to every element in my paintings. This shift from the first impression of the apparently machine-made to the realization of individual attention hopefully will awaken the viewer's curiosity not only in the images, but also in the issues connected to those images. In this way, I hope that the viewer will reevaluate her own relationship to the issues of urban sprawl with interest, curiosity and attention. |
