- Title: Subtitle
- The spirit of the thing itself
- Creators
- Jager Palad
- Contributors
- Terry Conrad (Advisor)Isabel Barbuzza (Committee Member)Heather Parrish (Committee Member)Anita Jung (Committee Member)Thomas Christison (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Thesis
- Degree Awarded
- Master of Fine Arts (MFA), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- Art
- Date degree season
- Spring 2022
- DOI
- 10.17077/etd.006381
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- iii, 32 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2022 Jager Palad
- Language
- English
- Description illustrations
- illustrations (chiefly color)
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (page 32).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
- My work is a reaction to humankind’s legacy of waste. Having worked as a department store technician and a construction worker, I was given a proximity to materials that I salvaged and then used for my creative work. These manual labor jobs granted me access and permission to forage for other bodies of trash and my art imbued them with new life potential. Current projects are focused on the materiality of fabric derived from salvaged clothing. This material is hardened to emphasize the consequence of its original function being rendered obsolete. Thus, reincarnating these once functional but discarded objects not only with new life but an opposite one, as an object of art. This upscaling and sanctification acts as a disguise that draws the viewer in with the use of hypnotic and abject combinations of color, texture and form. Inevitably the material’s past life unfolds and confronts the viewer, its fibers embedded with all the problems complicit in the process from the origins of manufacturing to the inevitable destination of the landfill. In its new life, these once soft- sheltered coverings become a scaly, rock-like object that will never be worn by another human again, they are now a sloughed off skin of something left behind. Their gesture and violent transformation allude to their capacity of doing something somewhere else that we can’t see, having some purpose we no longer govern. Perhaps in some way, this represents a recycling process that offers efficiency, or at very least a cathartic sense of creation out of a destructive narrative with hope of some redemption.
- Academic Unit
- School of Art, Art History, and Design
- Record Identifier
- 9984271254302771
Thesis
The spirit of the thing itself
University of Iowa
Master of Fine Arts (MFA), University of Iowa
Spring 2022
DOI: 10.17077/etd.006381
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