| Abstract | My thesis exhibition, Ghostride to Oblivion, is the product of a yearlong project that investigates reality perception and is an attempt to control that which is uncontrollable, achieve that which is unachievable. The resulting work, primarily video and sculptural installation, employs cyclical repetition, replication and replacement as a way of generating a push-pull tension between what is seen and what is imagined. This interest in perceptions of "real" and "imaginary" was first brought on by previous studies of Japanese pop cultural phenomena like anime and otaku (or people with obsessive interests). Such subcultures, which strive to actualize alternative perspectives of reality, led me to evaluate my own geographical and psychological relationships. I wanted to illuminate an "imaginary" situation broken by a violent interruption as a means of understanding, what Baudrillard asserts in his Simulacra and Simulation as, the impossibilities of reality in our present time. The exhibition recalls something like a Theater of the Absurd drama, presenting an artistic practice doomed to repeat itself for the sake of exposing its own meaninglessness. The exhibition plays out like the beating of a head against a wall, always trying to achieve the impossible, always seeking the transformative moment, all the while remaining self-aware and paradoxically humorous |
