SENIOR EXHIBITION PROPOSAL: SOPHIA DiMARZIO

Part One: Conceptual Framework & Influence

Visual artists provoke viewers to respond to their work’s content through various formal strategies that relate to the conceptual concerns. But, in order for the artist to effectively convey their ideas, they must start from a coherent and authentic foundation. Establishing this primary framework is a fundamental first step. Sometimes this process begins with a series of questions. What/who is my work in conversation with? Why do I do what I do? What am I repeatedly drawn to? What/how might my work contribute to the local or global community?

PROMPT A Keeping in mind that you will be engaging with your content for a prolonged period, what ideas will sustain your engaged, enthusiastic interest for a long-term project, culminating in a coherent body of work? As an artist, what ideas/approaches are you interested in? What do you want to communicate to your viewers through your work?

As an artist, I am drawn to the ineffability of nature, and how this corresponds to my relationship to religion. These two themes have been present in most of my college-level artwork thus far. I have always felt relatively removed from conventional religion; the closest I have ever felt to a religious experience was when I was in the middle of nature, but not because I felt the presence of God there. Instead, I felt more connected with the Earth, myself, and the universe. This experience inspired me to want to explore a transcendentalist critical framework for this long-term project; specifically, the idea of transcendentalism removed from its religious contexts. I intend to combine ideas of naturalism, the sublime, and transcendentalism to explore the implications of nature being divine as nature alone, instead of the transcendentalist thought of nature being divine because of its connection to God. Through this, I want to communicate a sense of spirituality in a non-divine way to viewers of my work. Additionally, I am interested in the philosophical aspects of a non-religious transcendentalism, mostly existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism. This natural nihilism is especially relevant now due to the sense of impending doom and hopelessness that stems from climate change. In the past year alone, we have seen a drastic increase in wildfires, dangerous storms, and extreme temperatures. These global weather changes can leave people feeling particularly helpless and scared, and uncertain of the future ahead of them. The juxtaposition of the fear of natures raw power, and the awe of its eternal beauty is something that I believe will not only sustain my interest throughout the process but will culminate in an intriguing final project, both aesthetically and conceptually. My art has nearly always involved each of these ideas (religion, nature, philosophy) separately, so combining them in one final project will reflect those earlier works and therefore be a reflection of my practice overall.

(Slides 1-4): Include 2 slides that reference these ideas (research materials, artwork, misc. imagery, etc.), and 2 slides that demonstrate your own engagement with these ideas in past works produced.

PROMPT B Discuss the influence of the work of at least three contemporary artists on your practice (those working from 1965-present). Describe how the concept and/or process employed by each artist interests you, and explain how it might impact your emerging practice. In addition to the three visual artists, your written response may also make note of artists working in earlier periods, writers, activists, philosophers and other individuals or works that are strong influences, if relevant and necessary (artist working in earlier periods can be included in PowerPoint if particularly relevant to your work.)

Three contemporary artists that interest me are Joan Fontcuberta, Mary Anne Kluth, and Catherine Nelson. Joan Fontcuberta’s series Landscapes Without Memory is a unique body of work, in which Fontcuberta uses software that takes cartographical data and transforms it directly into a 3D rendering of what that landscape looks like. However, instead of entering data from maps, he inputs famous works of art. This creates interesting and unique landscape “paintings,” that are entirely “without memory,” as the title says. The themes and ideas that Fontcuberta interacts with in this series are inspiring, and I hope to engage with similar ones throughout my capstone. Mary Anne Kluth is an American born artist who claims that her upbringing alongside her geologist father sparked her interest in landscapes. Her art influences me greatly; her pieces are large, dream-like, and captivating, and they combine archived images in grand-scale collages. She writes that she has been influenced by early transcendentalist landscape paintings, and that the “places they depict also emphasize greatness and magnificence, as if a national ‘will to power’ could be embodied in the land, something I’m uncomfortable with and want to subtly make fun of.” Last, Catherine Nelson is an Australian digital artist who has a background in digital effects in the film industry. Her most recent series titled Future Memories (2020) really interests me, due to her unique take on the traditional landscape form. She said herself that when she “embraced the medium of photography, I felt that taking a picture that represented only what was within the frame of the lens wasn’t expressing my personal and inner experience of the world around me.” I have often felt this way when trying to capture the greatness of nature in my works, and I can relate to Nelson as an artist. Her works depict that sense of spirituality found within nature that I am looking to capture as well. As for pre-contemporary artists, it goes without saying that transcendentalist artists such as Cole, Church, Durand, Turner, and Moran have greatly influenced my art and have paved the way for the conceptual framework that inspires me.

(Slides 5-7): Include 3 slides of distinct works by contemporary artists (PLEASE NOTE: The artists you include should have significant, professional exhibition records at highly regarded venues - major museums or well-known contemporary art spaces).

Part Two: Media and Imagery

As you begin to explore your ideas in the studio, consider which materials and processes might best communicate the ideas you’ve outlined above. Be particularly mindful of media and materials with which you have some level of familiarity. In other words, this is not the best moment to begin figuring out how to work with an entirely new medium or process.

PROMPT C Spend time thinking about pieces you created during the last three years that you were really pleased with or which gained attention from your peers or your professors. What was it about those works that made them successful? Are these works that may give you an idea of what direction you’d like to take during your capstone year? Why?

One of the first pieces that comes to mind is a study I completed for the institutional critique project in Contemporary Art & Theory in 2019 called Untitled (Empty Frame). This piece functioned exactly as it sounds: a wooden canvas frame that had been stripped of its canvas and painted gold. The intention of this was for the viewer to take the piece outside and hold it up to the scenes of nature around them. The thought that the viewer could hold up the frame to a beautiful scene, but not be able to actually capture or contain that image was one that really interested me. The power of nature can overwhelm the viewer in that moment and create the exact “spirituality removed from divinity” feeling that I am looking to explore in my capstone project. It also implied that anything, once the frame was held up to it, could become a “work of art” so to speak, and it therefore brought the transcendentalist framework out of its ideal standards. Another piece that I created for Contemporary Art & Theory was titled Hallelujah Money, and featured that title phrase written on the wall in plants. With this piece, I wanted to engage with ideas of transcendentalism removed from its classical traditions of the picturesque. While this piece also incorporated ideas of capitalism and environmentalism, the core idea was that of spirituality and nature. I believe this work was successful because of its combination of a strong message, a simple design, and a thought-out execution. I hope to bring those elements with me on my senior capstone journey. An untitled video I created for the same course is another piece strongly influenced by these ideas. The video shows blurry footage of leaves, then cuts to a black screen with white text that reads “i am here,” with a slow heartbeat playing in the background. Then, it cuts back to the silent blurry footage, and back again to the black screen, this time with a quicker heartbeat and a simple “. . .” onscreen. It returns to the blurry footage one last time, and then back to the black screen with a fast heartbeat and text that reads “am i not?” and then it loops for the duration of the video. This video was one that at first I was very unhappy with. However, after finishing it and writing about it for the class, it quickly became one of my favorite pieces. It incorporates all the ideas I am interested in, including the “scary” aspects of the sublime and nature. It also features existentialism, which blends nicely with the other ideas that I am exploring.

(Slides 8-10): Include 3 slides demonstrating your strongest work produced over the last 3 years. SENIOR EXHIBITION PROPOSAL (Continued)

PROMPT D Your written response should reflect upon the following: Considering your strongest works and the conceptual framework you’ve developed, think about what materials you are likely to employ in your capstone project. Will you engage in painting, printmaking, mixed media, sculpture, photography, video, drawing or some combination of these? Your response should include a rationale for your intended use of particular media/approaches.

Considering how my strongest works, listed above, each employ a different medium, it is hard to choose one to utilize. I believe that in order to fully explore and incorporate all the ideas that I am interested in, and to get the full effect of those ideas, I will be using a combination of multiple media. Specifically, I am interested in painting, sculpture, and digital media. My journey as an artist started, as it does for most artists, with drawing and painting. I feel very comfortable in that medium, I and know that if I wanted to incorporate painted aspects into my capstone, I could do so without complications. As for sculpture, I recently took the courses 3D Foundations and Sculpture 1, and because of these classes I feel equipped to work with sculpture in this project as well. Last, before taking the Digital Media course I was very unfamiliar with digital media, specifically video art and collage. After, I felt inspired to create more digital art, and now I feel very prepared to use those media if needed. Additionally, at this point I have used each of these media in a variety of different pieces and therefore feel not only familiar with each media, but also confident. I also feel that using a combination of these in one installation could help me achieve that overwhelming, daunting sense that I feel when I am in nature, which would be harder to achieve while using only one medium.

(Slides 11-12): Include 2 slides demonstrating your competency in particular media you plan to incorporate into your capstone.

Part Three: Current Work

PROMPT E Select two images of your strongest current work and describe how these works connect with your conceptual framework and detail their strengths in communicating those ideas, as well as aspects you intend to further develop. How might you extend this work?

One of my more recent works titled Existential Vertigo (2020) stretched the limits of transcendentalism as I knew it; it incorporated feelings of existentialism, and the idea of the “unknown” in relation to nature. This idea of the unknown is something I have always been interested in, and I have been trying to find ways to capture that feeling in my recent works. It is similar to the sublime, which aims to show the great and horrific power of nature, but instead conveys the great and horrific mystery, ineffability, and helplessness than can be felt in nature. The phrase “in the middle of nowhere” comes to mind when considering the unknown. In this collage, I wanted to express that feeling in the simplest terms possible. As for the existentialism present in the piece, that is something that I want to explore further in my capstone project. Philosophy has always inspired my art, and I feel that existentialism goes hand in hand with the other themes I wish to explore. In contrast, my piece Foreverscape (2021) expresses this in the opposite way, through a purposefully busy and complicated image. Also using collage, I wanted to take the idea of spirituality in nature without divinity and express that as best I could, along with the other ideas of transcendentalism, the unknown, and the sublime. To do this, I took 10 photos from various National Parks I have visited and cut/pasted them into a surreal pseudo-landscape that feels eerie and imposing. The image has multiple middle, back, and foregrounds, as well as multiple skies and mountain ranges. This is my attempt to capture the greatness and vastness of nature, as well as convey the inexplicable spirituality of it. At first, the viewer might think from afar that this is a regular landscape. Upon further inspection, they begin to realize that while the individual components of the image make sense, overall, they have no idea what they are looking at. However, they understand it is both natural and unnatural, man-made and organic.

(Slides 13-15): Include 2 slides of current work in keeping with the conceptual framework defined above.

Part Four : Research

Research for a visual artist can take many forms, and serves as a means of locating material to help your ideas develop. A good start for researching is to make a list of keywords for yourself that you can use to search on-line contemporary arts journals and databases, etc. Your research might also necessitate engaging with content from other disciplines such as the sciences or the humanities in order to gain a fuller comprehension of information that is particularly technical, conceptual, cultural, political, etc. This mode of research may necessitate more pointed keywords and could begin with a basic Internet search, followed by a more thorough look at library databases.

PROMPT F Please begin to define your research agenda, and indicate how each area/item might contribute to your work. Before you begin this process of building a new body of work, consider which disciplines and ideas you need to research. Your written response should detail resources you intend to engage with in your research (and why), whereas the slides need only include brief, bibliographic data and/or a listing of intended research areas.

I intend to research the history of the transcendentalist movement more, to further understand the historical and artistic context of the period, especially through the literary works of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. I understand that there was more to the transcendentalist movement than just artworks, and I intend to immerse myself into the period through literature and poetry as well. Additionally, I want to explore the sublime further, and read more theoretical texts that discuss the sublime in relation to art. For this, I will search the Rollins database for scholarly articles that relate to this topic and research both historic and contemporary art exhibitions and texts devoted to the sublime as both aesthetic and idea. Learning more about these topics will better prepare me for producing works in conversation with these ideas. I also plan to delve more deeply into existentialism by reading and re-reading some existentialist texts in my library. These texts include The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, and Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre.

(Slides 16-18) Include 2-3 slides indicating initial resources you might consider (a list of citations, screenshots of misc. items such as websites, etc.).

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ss oo pp hh ii aa dd ii MM aa rr zz ii oo Thomas Cole, The Oxbow, oil on canvas, 51.5 × 76 in, 1835-1836 Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, oil on canvas, 37 x 29 in, 1818 It Was Not Our Father, marker on paper, 6.75 x 10.5 in & 5 x 10.5 in, 2019 digital media, dimensions variable, 2019 Joan Fontcuberta, Orogenisis: Derain, digital media, dimensions variable, 2002 Mary Anne Kluth, Crystal Falls [front view (left) and back view (right)], acrylic, hand cut fiberboard, lumber, hardware, 11 x 7 x 7 ft, 2019 Catherine Nelson, Yatama, digital media, dimensions variable, 2020 acrylic on wood, 12 x 9 in, 2019 Hallelujah Money, plants on drywall, 3 x 7 ft, 2019 digital media, dimensions variable, 2019 Vine-yl, [front view (top), detail view (bottom)], mixed media, 18 x 18 in, 2019 I Can’t Breathe, digital media, dimensions variable, 2020 Existential Vertigo, digital media, dimensions variable, 2020 Foreverscape, digital media, dimensions variable, 2021

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