Art History Senior Presents Paper at ACC Meeting of the Minds

Undergraduate senior Kimber Chewning presented her honors research on contemporary video artist Ryan Trecartin in two venues this month, at Florida State University’s Undergraduate Research Symposium and at the 2014 ACC Meeting of the Minds Conference, which was held this year at the University of Pittsburgh, April 3-5.

Chewning was chosen to represent FSU along with five other undergraduate researchers. The title of her presented paper is “Deconstructing Space and Reconstructing (I)dentity in Ryan Trecartin’s I-BE Area.”  Her research explores a breakdown of hierarchical spatial organization in Trecartin’s film that allows for existence in multiplicity. Within this new spatial organization, meaning breaks down and the multiplied substantive body becomes uniquely abject, whose natural existence is neither subject nor object, but an “other” that addresses the boundaries of existing when an original or a “one” is erased. Trecartin’s exploration becomes a self-reflexive one, as the viewer begins to ponder whether the film is in fact a mirror, reflecting a new truth about societal relationships and identity formation.