Senior Honors Thesis Exhibition: Timothy Joseph Anderson

On Permeable Zones
Performance: March 5
Reception: March 7, 5:30-7:30

Artist Statement

In my practice, I use minimal sculptural interventions, videos, and performances to explore image circulation, the formal elements of digital hardware, and the relationship between online and offline reality. I appropriate abject, transgressive, and erotic imagery from the internet or generate it with artificial intelligence programs. Digital networks, discussion forums, and social media applications are approached as archives from which I source material, using scrolling as research. I use these networks to view images, videos, and text in their natural habitat, tactilely engaging
with them. I later intervene in their algorithmically determined circulation path by hijacking and recontextualizing them in the physical world. My work plays with the situation of digital images by either sculpturally incorporating the devices on which they are typically presented like televisions and smartphones or rejecting them by printing these images in ink and other analog media.

Much of my work uses abject rather than aesthetically appealing subject matter because its transgressive qualities activate screens and other media technologies. This imagery transforms screens from passive barriers to active and potentially dangerous entities and breaks through them, spilling out into the physical world. I chose this content for use in my work due to its ability to destabilize the screen’s role as a shield that imparts a sense of detached safety to viewers. A transgressive image, rather than placing a focus on just its content, also works to curb immersion through repulsion, thereby exposing the image’s status as an image that exists and is transported through specific mechanisms.

Through my work, I interrogate the boundaries between physical and digital reality. By making screens active agents of provocation rather than passive shields of image dissemination, I strain the boundaries that separate the physical and the virtual and expose how the two modes of living are already reciprocally intertwined. I choose to recontextualize and adapt images and other digital artifacts to expose the
entanglements they have with offline reality, and forge new relationships predicated on unorthodox modes of viewership.

The Senior Thesis Honors Program in Studio Art is designed to enable senior studio art majors to pursue serious and substantial work that may qualify them to graduate “with honors” or “with highest honors.” Students who pursue this program may work in any variety of media but must produce a coherent body of work by the end of the two-semester sequence. This work constitutes the Honors Thesis and is presented in an exhibition with a written statement concerning the work.

Admission: Free
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday, 8 am-5 pm

A weeknight or daytime permit is now required after 5:00 pm on weekdays. There is no permit needed from 5:00 pm Friday through 7:30 am Monday. A $1.00 one-night pass is available in selected lots. More information can be found at Weeknight Parking.

Image: Untitled (Assume the Position)