MFA Thesis

This practice based MFA thesis in Public Art at the Bauhaus University in Weimar was designed to explore contemporary concepts of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ – paradoxical and imaginary constructs that continue to resonate, despite their increasing fragility in a world that continues to be marked by migration, dislocation and cultural mixture.
In Germany discussions of Heimat can be problematized by the legacies of World War II and may operate as thinly disguised forms of racism and sexism masquerading as cultural preservation. Thus, this provocative subject can serve as fertile ground from which to address the contemporary reality of international migration and women’s presence outside the domestic sphere in the hopes of questioning outdated modalities of authenticity and creating public dialogues that suggest a more inclusive, hybrid society.
These themes were explored in a series of loosely related artistic experiments, aimed at examining the construction of personal and communal beliefs around the ideas of homeland and being-at-home. Methods of experimentation included elements of photography, leveraging Internet platforms to do research and conduct surveys, personal interviews, performances and historical re-enactment and participatory artwork. This research eventually led to the development of a tangential body of work connected by a concern with the theme of finding home in the public space.
The thesis was written in two phases and has two main parts: chapters 1-4 are a formal, theoretical exploration of the theme. They lay the groundwork for chapters 5- 6, which are written informally as a personal reflection. The final chapters hold a contextual art survey of work relevant to the work produced for this thesis as well as a reflection and documentation of the execution of the experiments and final work produced as a part of this practice based thesis.
The final outcome for this thesis took the form of a participatory artwork, entitled KunstPost: Gruß aus Weimar which allowed the public to send postcard images of historical re-enactments of classical Weimar figures to homes around the world in the hopes of enlarging the scope of what is familiar and starting conversations.

Founded in 2014, SEQUITUR is a scholarly art and architectural history journal housed within the Boston University Department of History of Art & Architecture. SEQUITUR features the writing of graduate students and we solicit proposals from students at all universities.

Dan Baird-Miller 2014 MFA in Photography Graduate Thesis My family never appeared ordinary. Maybe I was just too perceptive. My mother and father were psychotherapists. Summer vacations, and winter snowmen building were normal enough, yet dinner table conversations were filled with psychiatric jargon. With a hippie and a social activist at the reins of my upbringing, I was encouraged to express myself freely. Often, I would use both hand gestures and facial expressions to communicate. The need for verbal communication seemed cumbersome, and time consuming. Speaking only when necessary, I was loud compared to my brother. Because of this I've miscommunicated with nearly everyone in my life at least once. I walk along this tightrope of clarity. As my legs buckle, I sway back

In Norway, Kindergartens are an integrated system of services for children between the age of 0-6. In order to ensure that these children receive the best service, researchers are studying the different components of the system. With upcoming new pedagogies, labour realities and demographic changes, it is helpful to obtain a system perspective of the education system. This project studies the kindergarten system of Norway under the socio-economic metabolism (SEM) framework to obtain a system perspective. A model is created that studies this system in three pillars - Demanders, Suppliers and Infrastructure. These pillars are aging similarly and can be studied as stocks. A system has been created with stocks and flows. These are analysed to understand infrastructural and labour requirements of the future kindergartens. 
This project confirms the possibility of using SEM framework to study education as a service. The model used in this project successfully maps different stakeholders and reports a projected requirement of teachers and buildings.

The Post-war era saw significant change in the way artists work with, around and within the increasingly fluid structure of the contemporary archive. Scholars like Hal Foster identify a shift from 19th century institutional approaches  to emerging methods that fundamentally de-center history, revealing information gaps (or lacunae ) of investigative importance. Newer tactics allow artists to use the once-monumental, sterile structure of the archive to deconstruct and re-contextualize masses of information and their relationship to cultural memory. Lost or displaced information becomes central to these contemporary archivist tendencies, which salvages them from institutional entombment by means of their fluid, active form of inquiry. Reconsidering the static nature of the archive allows examination of specific constellations  of information—spontaneous networks uncovered in the process of information accretion.

Sub-section of my MFA thesis research. Includes discussion of works by Renee Green, Hal Foster, Robert Smithson and excerpts from my own body of visual arts production.

This written thesis is in support of a Master's of Fine Arts degree at Western University. The thesis dossier explores themes of Mexican migration in Canada engaging with ideas of human labour and various indexes of Mexican culture, trade, and economic exchange. The thesis also consists of documentation of public exhibitions and other various creative production components including videos, photography and multi-media installations. This thesis is separated into three major sections. The first is an extended artist statement which outlines my artistic research and my creative process as an artist. The second is a portfolio of photographic documentation of artworks made during my Master of Fine Arts candidacy. The third is a case study examining the photographic series "Fragmented Cities" and "Carpoolers" by artist Alejandro Cartagena, who draws attention to social, urban, and environmental issues in Latin America.

excerpt: Ruptures, essentially (etymologically, even) disrupt whatever is de rigueur in a system.  In an order-loving world of the phallocentric neoliberalism that dominates our current globalized culture, efforts are hastened to patch, fill, and cover up any ruptures, holes, or secret passageways.  Smooth them all over and get on with it. Interior spaces are full of holes, enclosures, and entanglements not easily navigable to the unfamiliar. They beg a relationship and thus demand time.  An interior both receives and feels footsteps of its visitors, and an imprint is made.  The soft centers of interior space mark the visitor, leave a residue on their feet.  This, for some, cannot abide.  It’s a sticky mud that slows the march of progress. Reason travels at a comfortable speed along the straight line that paves over the potholes of the inexplicable and the indeterminate.  But these patches reveal their own game face.  Just as in the attempt to cover up graffiti , the craft of its removal only highlights and signals what is hidden rather than achieving its erasure. So the cracks, crevices, and caves remain, even if covered up (perhaps even more evocative and strange), vital--something not quite right and difficult to ignore-- they find ways in their uncanniness to still catch the wandering eye and prick the mind.  It is with this in mind that I would like to propose a connection with interior spaces , their feared complexities and systematic over-simplification with the
oppression of women. These two categories are already bound together, this binding reflexively connoting the other’s (de)value. The density of meaning, innovation, and philosophical and metaphysical insight contained in feminine and feminized concepts of domestic spaces is worthy of reinvestment and renewed complexity. Using several feminist writers as my guides, we will examine and reclaim ideas of female agency in domestic spaces, while allowing for expeditions into tangential tunnels concerning art and materiality.  One goal is to shine a light into thoughts that oppose these damaging oversimplifications and pull out what shimmers. During this excavationary journey, positioning and examining the active spatial and temporal sites of my artist practice has both contributed to and benefited from this research.

MFA Thesis
(contemporary art, social theory, time and narrative theory, temporality, television theory, television studies)

‘Landscape’ is an active site of occurrence—a platform of media-influenced exchange. Reflected through televisual language, it offers a relative experience, tied to our sense of geography, time and shifting notions of history. The Cascade - Moments in the Televisual Desert engages TV-inflected landscape as a permeating condition. In this telescoping space, landscape conflates time and memory, location and topography, television and reality.

Rooted in a personal connection to Southern California, which permeates American television from the 1960s-80s, I hunt, excavate and deploy conceptual instances of the Mojave Desert and its entanglement with the real, the vividly scripted and the iconic. Mediated by television, Los Angeles County becomes mercurial, behaving as stage and script, environment and blueprint—a mythic, cultural hunting ground. This transitory televisual landscape informs our understanding of place and event, blurring fiction and fact. The Cascade arrests this instability as an interdisciplinary investigation: a hot-and-cool mosaic that asks viewers to seek, receive and connect.

Derived from a body of moments excavated from television, The Cascade suspends semi-narrative traces as elements removed from their physical location by the original filming and further removed by capturing and mutating temporal instants. The environments thus inhabit the actual, the imagined and the transient place of recollection—a collapsed space conflating personal history, geologic reality and cultural production. Using layers as an economical mode of storytelling (focused on suspension in the moment), I compress events and location into a system of surface-screens: layers provide non-linear depth and conversations between media offer different modes of viewing and consuming.


Thesis covers aspects of related social and art theory.

This dissertation discusses the theoretical frameworks and studio practice that has been undertaken in the course of study towards the degree of Master of Fine Arts at the Dunedin School of Art. Drawing specifically on the work of Arjun Appadurai, and his articulation for a Global Cultural Economy, attention is focused on the flow of material culture around the globe. This focus is explored in both micro and macro terms as I utilise an array of theoretical frameworks including critical theory and human geography. The project is concerned with both production and consumption patterns, that trace the flow of commodities across the world to the specific spaces in which their packaging is often discarded and subsequently found. Utilising a methodology of critical walking practice aligned with the concept of psychogeography, I reclaim this packaging, which then becomes the focus of my studio work. This work sits in the field of jewellery and small object making, as I seek to activate in the audience a heightened awareness and understanding for the relation between the body and urban space. Made to exist in both the conventions of the gallery and in urban spaces, these works seek to explore and represent aspects of globalisation and the global cultural economy.

The audio installation Start/Stop explores the question of how people accepted or resisted technological progression from youth to current age. Our world has always responded to technological change and over the last 100 years, the rate of change has greatly increased. Due to new technologies like social media applications and smartphones, along with possible societal pressures, individuals are forced to adapt, despite their age. Senior citizens, for example, struggle to cope with this exponential shift in technology due to many factors including: a fear of their values being challenged by a new technology; a fear of being left behind as a result of lacking necessary skill sets; and the inability to determine a meaningful purpose of digital tools in their lives. Those who are in their mid-20's and older reflect on a pre-digital youth while today's teenagers and college students become the often multitasking leaders of technological adaptation.

This thesis paper self-critiques the graduate printmaking studies and Thesis Exhibition, "Efforts of epoché and play," of Jaclyn Stephens, MFA Miami University.  For both maker and viewer, the art installation experience is created for sensory play, actively denying conclusion in order to perceptually experience the initial moments and process of creating understanding. This perceptual 'net' (Stephens' specification of epoché) is academic in explanation, but primitive and instinctual in experience. Time, body, mind, multi-media, interaction, installation, process, work, and play are metaphorical and descriptive employments of the art and work critiqued.

The origin of this thesis follows upon a speculative investigation into the formal resonances of science fiction in the language of everyday things.  Requalifying Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope through Michel Serres' concept of Turbulence, questions into the meaning of creativity, action and ethics unfold upon the DeLoraen in Back To The Future, Emmet in The LEGO Movie and the infamous Tricorder.