Date of Award

Spring 4-10-2012

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Art

First Advisor

Rachel Lachowicz

Second Advisor

Katie Grinnan

Third Advisor

Michael Reafsnyder

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2012 Clifford Eberly

Abstract

In the physical world I explore and gather regenerative clues that vivify the installations I build. The harshness and unforgiving power of nature’s nature, combined with the infinity of the cosmos, inspires me to cobble together sculptures that defy absorption into a finite, descriptive category. Like our beings change from second to second, I work diachronically, chugging along, shifting the purposes of supplies until they manifest like organisms that pulled themselves together from shiny and dirty matter or arrived from an extraterrestrial playground. By reusing and layering a complex blend of materials, I blur the ambiguous origins of the objects I construct to mirror humanity’s rhizomatic breeding.

Fantastic ideas diverge with what seems to be real inside the fluid state of my consciousness. By covering up and revealing essential structural limits and my desires to become, my work resists provisional lust for absolution from alterity. Difference is relative and necessary. Image repetition in the paintings leave unique or disguised imprints that reference the organic body in space and time surrounding the sculptures as a habitat.

As materials collide and repeat, a desire to act depends upon witnessing the works’ sublimation, survival, or suicidal destruction. Because, if a sculpture or entire installation inevitably falls to the ground, it’s response to gravity has given the viewer and I an opportunity to rethink our own so called failures in order to recognize the perfection of that which simply is.


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