Home again, home again...
It still feels odd to call CA home, but thus I suppose it is. I had an alternately grueling (for part of the family stuff) and fabulous (for time getting to visit with friends) break. For those I missed in B-ton - my apologies, but due to a familial 'splodey that wound up occupying most of break, I didn't get as much down time to make the rounds as I would have liked.
I did manage to get off my application to the Visual Criticism program in the nick of time. Thanks in a large part to carpe_jugulum's support and hospitality, I got some fabulous images to send off as part of my portfolio (and spent some quality time getting re-acquainted with shooting slides on an SLR camera - I'll try to scan and post the results). If accepted into the program, I would spend an extra year at CCA and instead of producing a thesis document to accompany my MFA show, the third year would be dedicated to writing a full master's thesis on a topic of my choice to be presented at the department's year-end symposium. It would be a good chance to go more in-depth with my research and develop something that might reasonably be recycled into a publication.
I've been doing a lot of exploring of the goth subculture (and fashion/gender/subcultural theory by extension) to try to answer all the questions about my work that have come up in reviews. One of the things that really interests me is the idea of DIY practice and the value of the handmade in constructing subcultural identity, and I wonder if things like the Evil Art Parties that were so much a part of being goth for me could be related in some way to the larger art/craft debate. It also seems to be an aspect of goth that hasn't really been explored in academic literature - the creative side. We'll see where this goes, but at the very least I think it would be a worthwhiile project to try to document the goth culture as I knew it in Bloomington to see how that compares to other groups nationally and internationally. So I may be bugging a lot of you for interviews at some point. At the moment I'm trying to figure out if I could get a travel grant to go to Convergence for the purposes of "research". ;)
I did manage to get off my application to the Visual Criticism program in the nick of time. Thanks in a large part to carpe_jugulum's support and hospitality, I got some fabulous images to send off as part of my portfolio (and spent some quality time getting re-acquainted with shooting slides on an SLR camera - I'll try to scan and post the results). If accepted into the program, I would spend an extra year at CCA and instead of producing a thesis document to accompany my MFA show, the third year would be dedicated to writing a full master's thesis on a topic of my choice to be presented at the department's year-end symposium. It would be a good chance to go more in-depth with my research and develop something that might reasonably be recycled into a publication.
I've been doing a lot of exploring of the goth subculture (and fashion/gender/subcultural theory by extension) to try to answer all the questions about my work that have come up in reviews. One of the things that really interests me is the idea of DIY practice and the value of the handmade in constructing subcultural identity, and I wonder if things like the Evil Art Parties that were so much a part of being goth for me could be related in some way to the larger art/craft debate. It also seems to be an aspect of goth that hasn't really been explored in academic literature - the creative side. We'll see where this goes, but at the very least I think it would be a worthwhiile project to try to document the goth culture as I knew it in Bloomington to see how that compares to other groups nationally and internationally. So I may be bugging a lot of you for interviews at some point. At the moment I'm trying to figure out if I could get a travel grant to go to Convergence for the purposes of "research". ;)