Lynsee Sardell MFA Visual Studies Thesis 2018

On Target

On Target prompts the audience to ask how our understandings of what we are seeing are constructed. Influenced by William James and Michel Foucault, I think of ideas as spheres that contain the germ, the hull, the similar and the inverse. In the case of a singular target, I imagine how a single focal point can multiply into many, and conversely how the many converge to make one.

Utilizing the natural phenomena of emergence, I discuss how elemental components converge to generate systems, structures, and responses that are infinitely more sophisticated than any individual unit. Artists Jasper Johns, Tom Knechtel, and Lucy McKenzie inform my use of symbols, both hidden and revealed, and a sense of play in the form of riddles, games, and puzzles embedded in both their work and my own.

On Target is a series of four, 4-foot by 4 foot oil paintings, utilizing four, self imposed conventions: A square substrate, an internal, concentric circle, decorative patterns and repetitive stylizations, and representationally depicted pragmatic elements.

Painting, for me, is an intimate act of my thoughts moving through my hand in a meditative cadence that allows me to speak in a language without words. On Target is a personal challenge to see if I can conflate the borders between historical painting traditions, propaganda, the singularity of time and the multiple possibilities of the future.

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MFA in Visual Studies Thesis Works