eventually everything becomes: monumentmemorymetaphormyth
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Bauguss, Andrea. Eventually Everything Becomes: Monumentmemorymetaphormyth. 2013. https://doi.org/10.17615/h4fs-bd61APA
Bauguss, A. (2013). eventually everything becomes: monumentmemorymetaphormyth. https://doi.org/10.17615/h4fs-bd61Chicago
Bauguss, Andrea. 2013. Eventually Everything Becomes: Monumentmemorymetaphormyth. https://doi.org/10.17615/h4fs-bd61- Creator
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Bauguss, Andrea
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Art and Art History, Studio Art
- Abstract
- eventually everything becomes: monumentmemorymetaphormyth Prior to my arrival to the MFA program at UNC-, my work fit neatly into distinct categories of fine art/painting, design/built environments, historic preservation, craft, large-scale integrative installations, site specific performance projects, and set design for dance. Through each of these facets my artistic explorations fused my background as a Visual Communicator and Historic Preservationist working at the intersection of anthropological, sociological, environmental and artistic studies of what we value and what we dispose of as individuals within our communities-and over time, and how repurposing materials and ideas impacts our lives. I returned to North Carolina, to the south, enthusiastic about the rigor of creative research in the MFA program but with reservations for my recollections of growing up Queer in a conservative South.... a sense of compression and limitation and access and possibility as such. I have long equated my queer southern experience to that of the African American experience of a racialized south- an experience of gendered exile- specifically the segregation I have experienced most of my life. Granted, this is usually a self-segregation. A Queer migration to more liberal urban centers, somewhat opposite of "white flight," many queer southerners move into dilapidated urban areas- renovate and improve to create new communities. This an idea posited by bell hooks in her book - belonging- a culture of place. The continued physical self segregation for many Queers is for reasons of safety- remaining near more liberal "urban" centers... despite a longing for perhaps more agrarian settings of their childhoods. In my community of queer southerner's we have return to the south despite this sense of alienation because of a desire for connectedness (or at least the idea of connectedness) to land, family, and tradition. For many of us, the greatest sense of southern life and connectedness lay in reclaiming public and private spaces, commitment to rebuilding/building communities through food, education, and land stewardship. With that said my work and research over the past 2 years has honed in on: auto ethnographic research, streamlined into intersections of Contemporary Art, Folk Art-Craft, Design and Building, Performance and the Performative Object. I have maintained a commitment to the vernacular materials and metaphorical objects related to southern material culture and utilize nostalgia as a tool to explore and interrogate access, gender, class and body politics in and through my work. "He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him." Flannery O'Conner ,Wiseblood 1952 eventually everything becomes: monumentmemorymetaphormyth amalgamates my research and explorations into a fractured landscape of architectural environments and sculpted vernacular objects of paper, wood, metal, fabric, food and reclaimed/altered objects. I utilize a process of constructing and deconstructing both memory, materials and architecture as an engaged, critical framework for articulating assumptions, perspectives, and power dynamics within and through an installation that asks viewers to experience and occupy spaces in familiar and unfamiliar ways... asking that they orient/reorient themselves in relationship to their own memory in relationship to materials and their kinesthetic experience with in space. Exhibiting this work within the Allcott Gallery offered a unique experience in the sometimes quandary of site-specific installation. I was interested in a monumental gesture- constructing/deconstructing/moving/and reconstructing this structure articulates and experience of the flux of identity as a queer southerner returning to a place of exile and alienation after twenty years. Utilizing the glass walls of the gallery as a citrine- the structure itself acts as a monument to process and to an architecture long considered of lower class and associated with a poor black south because of scale and simplicity of design. This structure was built based on the architectural floor plan of a shotgun house. In folklore and culture of the south, it is an iconic architectural design. Myth suggests that the name shotgun derived from the ability to shoot a gun through the front door and that would fly cleanly from end to the other, actually the term derived from the African term "togun" meaning place of assembly. In returning to the wound- the physical space of the south- eventually, everything becomes- re-assembles and re-collects both material and memory- it works to reclaim and repurpose spaces- and excavates nostalgia for traditions and histories Queers have been denied historically. Through language, architectural, material, and psychological constructions it explores, identity, power of connectedness, home, tradition through an environment that can be experienced in a state only best articulated as feeling - backward. Somewhat temporal in nature, this environment is hurried and childlike- full of a sense possibility of history- compression and limitation and as such slow and fixed thick with metaphor and mythology.
- Date of publication
- 2013
- DOI
- Resource type
- Art
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Extent
- 10' x 20'
- Medium
- reclaimed lumber, architectural details, carpet, paint, sand, bed, light, vintage school desk, salt, cotton muslin, silverware, plastic, wallpaper, dried collard greens, school paper, vintage family photos, frames
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