Date of Award
Spring 6-2-2018
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Graphic Design
First Advisor
James Goggin
Second Advisor
Douglass Scott
Third Advisor
Andrew Sloat
Abstract
Folks, the Truth is hard to know—if can be known at all.¹ Conventional Western wisdom tells us: stick to the facts. (I’m looking at you, Enlightenment.) We privilege the written word as an objective and reliable vehicle for communication. Useful, yes, but we over-rely. I counter with this: bodily performativity and purposeful inaccuracy that produces, paradoxically, narrative accuracy. These methods roil in our gut or tug at our heartstrings—instead of recoiling, we should embrace them.
I like to unpack “the stories we tell ourselves,”² our personal and societal mythologies, with a particular eye to how the past plays a role in these constructions. Telling things slant³—diving into the uncanny—disrupts our visual complacency with both delight and disorientation. By employing temporal and spatial anachronisms in a performative motion-based practice, I aim not to obscure truth, but to promote inquiry.
1. Riffing on the New York Times’ The Truth is Hard campaign.
2. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.
3. A nod to Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”
Recommended Citation
Evans, Carson, "Anachropomorphism!" (2018). Masters Theses. 222.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/222
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