Date of Graduation

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Fine Arts

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Art

Advisor/Mentor

Marc Mitchell

Committee Member

Jody Thompson

Second Committee Member

Henry Gepfer

Third Committee Member

Helene Siebrits

Abstract

This paper positions my painting practice as a form of resistance to historical constructions of gender, identity, and visibility, shaped by my experience as a queer, nonbinary person navigating womanhood in the American South. Drawing on Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I argue that Western figurative painting has long disciplined the feminine body, exploiting it and commodifying it into an easily consumable object.

In response, I appropriate and distort these visual conventions. My figures refuse to behave: they stretch, slouch, and linger in ambiguity, resisting fixed interpretation. Placed in spaces of visibility and surveillance, they negotiate how bodies are read, judged, and performed, grappling with their own physicality. Through the slow materiality of paint and saturated consumer-coded color, I explore identity as unstable, constructed, and dynamically fluid.

Painting for me becomes both a personal and political practice: a way to grapple with the social choreography of the South while exploring identity with nuance and curiosity. My use of saturated colors and punk-inspired aesthetics resists passivity, asserts presence, and defies the expectations of conventional representation. Ultimately, painting allows me to confront inherited images of the body and create space for agency, contradiction, and nonconformity.

Keywords

Painting; Contemporary Art; Self-fashioning; Figure Painting

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