I'LL BELIEVE IN ANYTHING

This thesis is an extended artist statement that focuses on a body of work created within the Master of Fine Arts program at The George Washington University. My recent photographs are appropriated from U.S. government documents regarding UFOs from the mid-twentieth century, the only time in American history that the government officially studied the phenomenon. I specifically use photographs that have been degraded by mechanical reproduction and are now no longer recognizable as documentary photographs. Because of their abstract quality, I discuss the photographs in terms of visual languages that were prevalent at the time of their creation, particularly Abstract Expressionism, as well as recent developments in the discourse surrounding non-representational contemporary photography. The archival images I have selected have been slightly manipulated, emphasizing and exaggerating the visual association I have created so as to suggest a history in which American abstract art and the UFO phenomenon are figuratively intertwined.

Author

• Hume, Evan

Language

• en

Date created

• 2011

Type of Work

• Master's Thesis

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Fine Arts

Degree

• M.F.A.

Advisor

• Rigg, Siobhan
• Kessmann, Dean

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/t435gd043