Real Fiction

Meretsky, Peter

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Real Fiction Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/db78td16f

Abstract

Real Fiction is an exhibition concerned with art and architectural histories, nostalgia and personal memory. The work is not about a yearning for a nostalgic retreat. Rather, it confronts and presents a loss, induced by a culture whose primary values, morals and ethical standards lie within the narrow constraints of tradition. I hope to persuade the viewer to contemplate how he or she has been affected by tradition's claustrophobic parameters through a critique of the utopian vision resurrected as idealized modernist art and architecture.

My intentions behind the constructions entitled Narrow Sites, Illuminating the Interior, Divide and Conquer and Space is at aPremium are to create situations which illustrate and engage our awareness of the modernist parameters in which socially coded structures are founded. Space is at a Premium addresses both a nostalgia through representation within canvas ovals and an immediate, physical, confrontation with modernist structure. Steel rectangles, labeled with rusty modernist insignia, the stripe, hang in Mondrian-like formation while others rest upon the floor. The ovals, which connote portraiture within the early twentieth century, contain various voyeuristic views into a past where person and structure interface. These images are scattered throughout the steel structure and are painted using a variety of perspectives which hang in accordance with the viewer's implied eye level. As the steel pieces extend from wall to floor the viewer replaces the painted ovals thus becoming the subject connected with the relic structure.

Throughout the exhibition I hope to instill an awareness of modernist structure, the ways in which the viewer has been affected by this structure's social expectations and nostalgia. The work considers how the "good ole days" have erected the fictionalized truths which have enveloped our culture.

Creator

Meretsky, Peter

Date Issued

1989

Additional Information

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Academic Affiliation