Thesis Exhibition: March 14-17, 2018

Opening Reception: March 16, 6-8pm

Rose Hobart 02

Rose Hobart 01

Artist Statement

Using my training as a cultural anthropologist, I create project-based images,

objects and installations that critically examine the artist as a consumer, fed by modern

American culture. I straddle the line between observer and participant by conducting

research into issues I encounter in my own life. I begin by accumulating imagery,

historical sources, data, and experiments to interrogate how and why I think, feel, and

behave the way that I do. I then use printmaking techniques as a primary mode of

production, in order to mimic both the aesthetics of scientific regimentation and

traditional methods for the dissemination of information.

In my Rose Hobart series, I explore ways in which screens—be they phone, film,

television or laptop—function as mirrors: albeit ones that filter and distort as much as

they reflect. Layering screen-printed silk gauze over cyanotypes on taffeta, I increase

the tangibility of the screen as it is arrested by a single image, repeated. Different

sheens of appliquéd textiles and the mis-matched edges of layers evoke horizontal

tracking glitches, and iridescent beadwork optically reflects the red, greens, and blues

of a TV screen’s pixels. My material choices accentuate the dissolution of the screened

image with deletions and distortions, in order to accelerate the breakdown of the

traditional gendered gaze. Appropriating imagery ranging from screen shots of blocked

subscription-channel late-night tv shows to surrealist and neo-noir film stills, the series

examines what is potentially lost (or revealed) when images of female bodies are

processed through the illusory depth and liminality of a backlit screen.