Come to nothing

Abstract

These drawings are an intense exploration of the concept, establishment, and power of the "Ideal" through the historical interventions of minimalism, utopia, perspective, printmaking, and drawing. There is an important commonality between these innovations that guides my thought process: the pursuit of idealism through concise order or law, which structures behaviors of expression, culture, social hierarchy, media, and history. The work in this thesis and exhibition seeks what Sir Thomas More always intended a utopia to be, and indeed what they always are, a critique of a current situation and a model for comparison. Combining historical utopias with the controlling perceptual legacy of linear perspective and the utopian art movement of Minimalism, I see to contemporize Minimalism by adding multiple historical referents that provide conflicting viewpoints of a single idealized situation. This combination sets up a tension with Minimalism's characteristic self-referentiality, causing Minimalism's traditional procedures of assessment, reduction, and simplification to become a system of interpretation to critique and compare the successes and failures of current, historical, and future utopias.