Graduation Year

2020

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Art

Reader 1

Professor Melanie Nakaue

Reader 2

Professor Tran

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© 2019 Victoria Smith

Abstract

In an era obsessed with images, bombarded by billboards advertising plastic surgery, and inundated by ads for detox teas that claim to help you “shed twenty pounds in a week”, our thoughts and feelings about our bodies are no longer informed by internal senses. Rather than feeling strong in my own body as an athlete, I looked down upon my body in shame. I was too soft, too big, and I did not fit the vision I had created for myself. This vision was based on the images I saw everyday, where there seemed to be only one type of person who was deemed beautiful. I am twenty-one years old, and the first time I appreciate my breasts was in 2018, after I got the results from a chest x-ray looking for deformities in my heart. Instead of concerning myself with my own morality, I could only look at my body through the lens of the thin ideal. Finally, a part of me fit in with what I had seen in the world around me.

Abstracted to a single animated outline of the figures, which defines curves, rolls, angles and more, these aestheticized and engaging portraits will allow the audience to appreciate diverse attributes therein finding the beauty in the artwork, and returning that appreciation to themselves, rather than relying on the photoshopped and “perfected” bodies to set the standard.

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