Daily Rituals

This thesis takes seriously the banal moments of daily routines of home and career, which for me includes a commute between two rural towns in West Texas—Muleshoe, where I live, and Canyon, where I am a graduate student—but also a shift between the two worlds of domesticity and professional life. Back and forth, again and again, I feel like I have one foot always in each world, but never fully in either. Part of my routine is a drive that is exactly ninety minutes long—too long to be brief and too short to really count as long. Again, this amount of time feels divided between two things but never either one fully. The repetition of this activity, of this to and from across space and time, has given me an opportunity to look at the world and think about making art. My thesis explores how art is a balancing act of short and long, of living life and creating work. I investigate how art, especially the kind of stylized art I do, is always built on the observation and experience of the world but then it is always also a translation of the world into something else, something aesthetic.