Contextus ad absurdum

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Using clashing fields of referents, an ornate, mystical aesthetic, printmaking, PowerPoint, and glitter, this creative research fuses Baroque and Modernist conventions. Contextus ad Absurdum is a critical celebration of the idiosyncrasies, superficiality, and instability of lines we create between things. The crux of my work is a vivisection of organizing structures and categorical systems. The logic of these organizing systems is often taken as a given because their contents blind us to the underlying beliefs and value systems woven into their form. Our actual experience of the world is a thicket of convergences and densely layered context. My audience is forced into the role of investigator, philosopher, and theorist. Like Borges, Calabrese, or Foucault, viewers must unravel the Baroque logic binding my work together. My work presents, or refers to a possible order only to emphasize that the order, no matter how beautiful and well constructed, is ultimately only a scrim through which the world is to be perceived.