Date of Award
Spring 6-4-2022
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Sculpture
Abstract
I find myself navigating life from the perspective of both a civilian and military service member. Everyday, I am between domestic, civilian spaces and military memories as my military service has impacted every aspect of my adult life. Serving in the United States Air Force allowed me to travel the globe while working alongside people from every class and race, on missions focused on tasks greater than ourselves.
My artistic practice explores how my time in the military has affected my transition back into civilian life by using sculpture and installation to express a variety of emotions. I hope my work sheds light on a culture, former military reentering civilian society, that society often misunderstands and is increasingly disconnected from.
A 2015 Gallup poll found that 72% of respondents expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military. Compare this to a mere 8% who expressed confidence in the United States Congress. Despite this apparent level of relative confidence, I have noticed a lack of understanding from the civilian populace about what the military does, how it does it, and why. I tap into the thought process of attention to detail combined with a sense of urgency to express aspects of military life into my sculptures. I learned these ways of working from my time in the service. I combine these aspects with appropriate visual signifiers from military aesthetics to speak to this dissonance of social perception on a deeper, more personal level. I explore a nuanced conversation around these issues that are normally oversimplified and propagandized. Through initiating conversations between those who have served and those who have not, greater understanding can emerge from both the civilian and veteran community of each other’s position in our collective society.
“America doesn’t lose wars, it loses interest.” - Hasain Haqqani, 2013
Recommended Citation
Storck, Andrew, "Military, art & the inbetween" (2022). Masters Theses. 965.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/965
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Comments
View exhibition online: Andrew Storck, Military, Art & the Inbetween