Date of Award

Fall 11-1-2011

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Art

First Advisor

David Amico

Second Advisor

Rachel Lachowitz

Third Advisor

Michael Reafsnyder

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2011 Nicolas S. Shake

Abstract

My work is pastoral and post-apocalyptic with one foot firmly planted in historical painting and the other in traditional still-life, so it is entropic and sanguine, gleeful, despondent, and matter of fact. It comes at a point in time when the fiction of Nature as a refuge is no longer viable, persuasive or convincing. But rather than rehash this fact, my work celebrates the pastoral’s everyday ordinariness, the capacity for the viewer to experience something wondrous amidst decline. I focus on the cast-off household and utilitarian items that show up in the desert on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The items I engage with could easily be categorized as rhopography, but it is this insignificance that gives them the ability to be reassigned a new aesthetic value, transforming the rubbish into something unexpected by capturing and conveying its uncanny power and peculiar beauty.

In my work I engage in the act of gleaning; I arrive after the initial act has already transpired and take from that the fragments what has been left behind. The items are allowed to continue on in a life that was never intended or anticipated. Returning to the same spot in the desert time and time again, I watch new items accumulate while others decay. My work captures the history of impermanence, and emphasizes the ever-changing value of objects.

show_list.doc (26 kB)
Flotsam & Jetsam image list

mfa_card.pdf (203 kB)
show card

Included in

Art Practice Commons

Share

COinS