Painting as SFX

Author

• Callie CocciaFollow

Date of Award

Spring 5-22-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Painting

First Advisor

Yasi Alipour

Second Advisor

Dana DeGiulio

Third Advisor

Meena Hasan

Abstract

Almost all of the subject matter I have been preoccupied with these past two years (and my adult life) has originated from a place of dissonance. There’s a narrative experience that things like wax figures, midcentury film, and theme parks insist upon. That narrative insistence contrasts with an observed reality. Epcot does not have a slice of Italy housed within the park, Bette Davis does not have an evil twin (A Stolen Life [1946], Dead Ringer [1964]), a wax figure of Alfred Hitchcock is not Alfred Hitchcock. Yet these narratives are so overbearingly convincing or coercive that their sweaty alternate realities feel like a necessary parallel to the gasping last breaths of a neoliberal vision of America. Contemporary existence to me is dissonant, being a privileged citizen of the United States requests a level of intentional disassociation that is irreconcilable with a compassionate human outlook. The unbridgeable gap of commodity culture and humanity feels like a misfiring synapse. You are supposed to be able to be happy while others suffer as a direct fallout of that happiness—how? Anything that speaks to that squirming effect is an efficient tool to address and undress a postmodern material, political, and emotional reality. I am delighted and disgusted, laughing in pleasure and discomfort. It is both and neither. I am punching the wall and crying.

The most important painting from my perspective is the work that uses the singularly flat-volumetric-compositional history of the medium as a tool to address meaning and narrative. The painted illusion is dissonant with reality (you are not in the room with Napoleon, just an optical illusion intended to translate the awe one should feel at seeing the emperor, or Christ himself, or the vast romantic beauty of natural wonders). Painting has the opportunity to exist ambiguously. It rests (un)comfortably between the realm of fiction and reality, constructing truth on its own terms in a way that is similarly effective in cinema. Cinema has the potential to utilize the false sense of “objective” photographic image in order to create uniquely effective  narratives. Painting’s long history of authority on mimesis grants it a level of suspended disbelief that can be addressed or inverted to similarly great effect. Guston describes the hypocritical or conflicted premise of painting in the same interview where he speaks to the frustration of waxworks.

The point about the late Rembrandt is not that it’s satisfying but on the contrary, that it is disturbing and frustrating. Because really what he’s done is to eliminate any plane, anything between that image and you. The Van Dyck hasn’t. It says: “I’m a painting.” The Rembrandt says: “I am not a painting, I am a real man.” But he is not a real man either. What is it, then, that you’re looking at?

There is a dissonant experience in optical special effects efforts utilized by cinema, Disneyworld, Tussaud and Rembrandt. By using the term "dissonance," I am attempting to address a slippage between ideology and material condition. Dissonance here describes an effectively convincing narrative, which is so effortfully coercive as to inspire alienation within the viewer from their surroundings. This experience is characteristic of a postmodern political and class-based social order. The de- and re-construction of information introduced by exponential mass media creates a simultaneously erosive and recursive sense of reality for the subjects of global capitalism. A shared or common narrative in contemporary public consciousness is elusive. Frederic Jameson describes such disorder in “Postmodernism and Consumerist Society,”first delivered as a lecture in 1982, and subsequently edited by Hal Foster and published as part of The Anti-Aesthetic in 1983.

I believe that the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism. I believe also that its formal features in many ways express the deeper logic of that particular social system. [...] The disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve. [...] One is tempted to say that the very function of the news media is to relegate such recent historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the past.

The most important painting from my perspective is the work that uses the singularly flat-volumetric-compositional history of the medium as a tool to address meaning and narrative. The painted illusion is dissonant with reality (you are not in the room with Napoleon, just an optical illusion intended to translate the awe one should feel at seeing the emperor, or Christ himself, or the vast romantic beauty of natural wonders). Painting has the opportunity to exist ambiguously. It rests (un)comfortably between the realm of fiction and reality, constructing truth on its own terms in a way that is similarly effective in cinema. Cinema has the potential to utilize the false sense of “objective” photographic image in order to create uniquely effective  narratives. Painting’s long history of authority on mimesis grants it a level of suspended disbelief that can be addressed or inverted to similarly great effect. Guston describes the hypocritical or conflicted premise of painting in the same interview where he speaks to the frustration of waxworks.

The point about the late Rembrandt is not that it’s satisfying but on the contrary, that it is disturbing and frustrating. Because really what he’s done is to eliminate any plane, anything between that image and you. The Van Dyck hasn’t. It says: “I’m a painting.” The Rembrandt says: “I am not a painting, I am a real man.” But he is not a real man either. What is it, then, that you’re looking at?

There is a dissonant experience in optical special effects efforts utilized by cinema, Disneyworld, Tussaud and Rembrandt. By using the term "dissonance," I am attempting to address a slippage between ideology and material condition. Dissonance here describes an effectively convincing narrative, which is so effortfully coercive as to inspire alienation within the viewer from their surroundings. This experience is characteristic of a postmodern political

Recommended Citation

Coccia, Callie, "Painting as SFX" (2026). Masters Theses. 1605.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1605

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.