Date of Graduation

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts in Art (MFA)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Art

Advisor/Mentor

Lyon, Calista

Committee Member

Schmitt, Jean

Second Committee Member

Thompson, Jody

Third Committee Member

Plakas, Justin

Fourth Committee Member

Drolen, Rebecca

Keywords

American Western; Archive; Black Hills; Collage; Photography; Queer ecology

Abstract

The writing in this document is a dovetailing of fragments ranging from critical inquiry, analysis, scripts, and other observations that relate to the body of work in “No place but here”. It is an accompanying document attempting to enrich the visual work rather than a direct illustration. The installation of “No place but here” at the Rogers Creamery is an investigation utilizing collage, text, and other constructed photographs, images, and objects to play with and against familial and broader narratives of power, control, and ambiguity associated with the American West. Underpinned and intersected by interior questions revolving around artifice, connection, ecology, illusion, legibility, and queerness, my inquiry is focused on sites now known as the Colorado Desert in California, and the Black Hills that span South Dakota and Wyoming. These lands possess complex histories of mining and my working process is influenced by a similar visual language colored by extraction. Beneath the surface of how western lands are looked at and used, the work intersects with my relationship (or lack of one) to my family, using photography as an extended hand back in time to make sense of cycles of inheritance and foreclosed histories. Sifting through archives for materials to reproduce, cut, interlayer, prop up, and redact, I create ephemeral collages and tableaux stage sets fixed through the intervention of a camera. While I am unable to resurrect relationships or histories, the camera allows me to open a generative and critical space in service of an alternative. The collages, montages, photographs, performances, and sculptures that arise from this inquiry are assembled from the strata of images and act as vessels for the absurdity and contradictions left behind after collapse.

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