Beyond the Frame

This thesis essay describes a body of work developed for the Low Residency Masters of Applied Arts program, which is presented in the form of three video installation environments: Ripple Effects (2012), Veiled Effects (2012), and Shoreline (2013). Video images of outdoor scenes are projected onto sculptural forms that set up points of indeterminacy to address our mediated and constructed relationship with the environment. The research focuses on a phenomenological connection to the environment supported by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “chiasmic embrace”, a relationship that acknowledges a two-way communication between our bodies and the environment. There is also a consideration of Timothy Morton's “dark ecology” that looks at the underbelly of environmental critique. The art works developed for the thesis examine how the aestheticization of nature turns it into abstract and ideological space, ignoring it as a complex and interconnected ecosystem. The work that emerged from the process of research and experimentation engages a vision of nature as an altered, synthetic, and hybrid environment. My practice is contextualized in part by examining what I find productive and generative in the work of Dan Graham, Bill Viola, Diana Thater, Ann Hamilton, and Char Davies, artists whose practices focus on an embodied awareness of the environment. In addition to Merleau-Ponty, and Timothy Morton, the ideas of thinkers and theorists such as Susan Stewart, Terry Smith, and Marshall McLuhan, add perspective to a discussion that addresses the relationship between aesthetics and environmental ethics.