COLLECTION NAME:
Graduate Thesis Collection
Record
Title:
Melancholia and Memory in Works by Jonathan Field and Paul Baker Prindle
Creator:
Butler, Jared A.
Subject:
Thesis (M.A.) -- Art History
Subject:
Savannah College of Art and Design -- Department of Art History
Rights:
Copyright is retained by the authors or artists of items in this collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
Abstract:
For a decade, Jonathan Field has recreated media images in a body of work entitled Maxwell's Demon. Making massive, spectral copies by inserting steel pins into black velvet or neoprene rubber grounds, Field has developed a critique of media saturation, interventionist military policy, and economic inequality in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. Since 2008, Paul Baker Prindle has produced the large-format color photographs of Mementi Mori, documenting sites where gay and transgendered people were horrifically maimed and murdered. Combining images of banal locations with striking descriptive captions, his work solemnly reflects on death and commemoration as it gives compelling visual form to prejudicial violence. Both sets of images address loss: the former registers decaying vehicles of representation and the latter memorializes victims of unthinkable terror. Their makers work with ruined remnants to give material form to the experience of loss, engaging viewers in the labor of melancholic reflection. Associated with loss since Freud's seminal 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” melancholy has a millennia-long history of theorization, and has received considerable attention across academic disciplines, particularly in the last three decades. Conceived of as foundational of the imagination, as an integral component of interior life, and as a mode of deep introspection, melancholia’s constructive aspects, as recent scholarship has attested, exceed understandings of the condition as a disorder that calls for pharmaceutical intervention. This examination, the most comprehensive study of either series to date, utilizes melancholia as an interpretive tool to investigate the mechanisms of Maxwell’s Demon and Mementi Mori that compel extended contemplation in social, political, and economic contexts that administer instantaneous practices of perception and memory.
Publisher:
Savannah, Georgia : Savannah College of Art and Design
Date:
2013-05
Format:
PDF : 102 p. : ill