Held in place
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This body of work examines socio-political confinement and immobility through visual and material experimentation in painting. These concerns are influenced by my ongoing experience of immigration and the social constructs of gender that control and limit my social and physical mobility. In my work, I take on the task of understanding space by painting and stitching inside and outside the picture plane. I reference physical and social barriers in architecture that simultaneously serve as entrances and escapes. Cut-outs, tears, frays, and threads of canvas unravel and spill outward from the fixed and bounded picture plane. There is a constant fight for motion in the stasis, impermanence in the permanence, and release from the containment. This thesis does not discuss the issues within gender and migration separately, but instead fuses them into one conversation about spatial difference to show the ways they encourage, enforce, maintain, and/or reject one another. Looking at the relationship between place, space, gender and feminism through the lens of Feminist Geography provides a framework for understanding how social systems, place, space and mobility intersect. Contexts of race and gender are discussed through the histories and processes of (Tajik) Textiles, Immigration, and the art historical contexts of the mediums of painting and fibers. These contexts are considered in the discussion of works from my MFA exhibition, "held in place". Several works are analyzed through the repeated motifs of Doors and Dresses, the looooong black braid, Transparent Curtains and Veils, and the Victorian Walls of (Tajik) Homes. The analysis of works is then expanded upon though the discussion of installation and the ways hanging speaks to the placement and mobility of works and their representations of issues of gendered mobility. It should be specified, this thesis does not offer solutions in equalizing the access of place or its experience, but rather holds space where the discussion of its inequality and the complicated experience of social movements is of the utmost importance.
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M.F.A.