Date of Award
Spring 5-30-2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Photography
First Advisor
Eva Sutton
Second Advisor
Anne West
Third Advisor
Douglas Nickel
Abstract
Objects, places and events that occur in separate times and places can coexist psychologically. My work supposes that this coexistence can be reconciled with photographs, which, although normally fixed to particular times, locationsand stories, are nevertheless able to travel, in boxes, or as mind images on overlapping currents.
I return to places of imaginative influence in my life: to my grandmother's house in the Russian countryside where I spent my summers as a child, and to my parents' home in Germany. Through this journey of return, I am transported in time, as if opening a time capsule. Here I discover layers of image fragments captured in stories, old objects, images in albums and magazines. Using still life techniques, I construct pictures that include objects found on location with photographs that I bring with me. To represent the non-linear experience of time and place to which these setups refer, I arrange them with multiple perspectives within a single image.
This work considers the fictional and non fictional, fused by the perspectival image that renders all elements equally onto a picture plane. It is a journey into the past as a metaphorical stepping back, in search of an Archimedean point from which to comprehend images through photographs.
Recommended Citation
Bailey, Svetlana, "Once there was there wasn't" (2016). Masters Theses. 29.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/29
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.