Date of Award

Fall 11-8-2011

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Art

First Advisor

David Amico

Second Advisor

Rachel Lachowicz

Third Advisor

Anne Bray

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2011 Concepcion M. Sanford

Abstract

My work embodies my response to the American Dream. Big houses, flashy cars and glamorous lifestyles are what many of us work for. Coming from a military family, I grew up moving often without an idealized connection to a single structure. In response to this, I use artwork to create translucent, ephemeral sculptures of these items, revealing them as tangible, hollow shells of their former selves. Clear plastic and packing tape sculptures leave a ghostlike reflection of what was. These shells of inanimate objects are personified through their creation, a process similar to what I compare to mummification or embalming. The semi-transparent, milky appearance of these sculptures is meant to give audiences a chill as one reflects on the life, death, and the plastic shell of objects’ remains. Some days I feel like a creator, other days I feel like a mortician.

It is a circumcised epitaph of glimmering glorious sanctimonious art, repulsed, re-examined, all knowing yet unknown, an engineered re-fabrication of an already existing entity, basking in the glory of its former self. The fortuitous juncture of unlikely materials in an entirely new setting confers new meaning upon the object. I become a shaman, endowing new status, functionality and beauty upon an unlikely marriage of objects and images.

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