Jared Dyer

Date of Award

2010

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Herzog, Richard

Keywords

Sculpture, TMT, Burial

Area of Concentration

Art

Abstract

With the Vanisher Series I interpret the fear of death as derived from its fundamentally premature nature. Like any other, the fear of death is a fear of the unknown. It is my claim that through culture we may exact a measure of control in our lives to make death appear less unpredictable. The two-fold aim of the work is to draw parallels across time between flawed fear-limiting strategies and to undergo a conceptual experiment to unearth something universal between spatial relationships in sculpture and human behavior. I align the rampant fear of the Schientod, or death-trance, in late 18th century Europe, and the provisions against premature interment, with a contemporary system of maintaining symbolic prestige through the automobile espoused by TMT. Additionally, through the extended analysis of a spatial thought problem, I attempt to objectify the hole as an archetypal space of death for the purposes of exploring spatial relations in sculpture through a process of inversion. It is my intention that if the fear of death is a human universal, then distilling essential spatial elements in the sculptural form, will necessarily lead me to that fear.

Download

Share

COinS