Drawing From the Museum's Ruins

This thesis project is based on an examination and critique of the cultural history museum's exhibition space, working outside of its traditional rules, functions and typologies. The imaginative process and potential of drawing is re-­activated by a final installation based work in the physical exhibit space. Implicating the viewer within a possible future for the museum, this thesis project deconstructs assumptions of how we view and interpret the past in a normative and embodied museum experience. Located within my interrelated practices as an exhibit designer and artist, this thesis project focuses on my art practice, with the concept of the ruin resonating as an aesthetic trope for re-­imagining the museum exhibition space. My research functions within a related temporal and theoretical spiral, building the foundations for my thesis project from such diverse drawing and installation based art practices as Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), and Pablo Bronstein (1977). I am redrawing fragments of established discourses and exhibit archetypes within the politicized and contested history that frames our habituated expectations of the museum as a cultural experience. Through the potentiality of ideas and propositions, my final drawing and installation based work use the blank space to re-­imagine our blank relationship with the blank museum. Both my thesis and art practice are an idiosyncratic response to the physical and ideological thresholds of the museum, rupturing a pictorial space within the conceptual ruin of the museological frame.