Sightlines 2019 by viscrit

Sightlines 2019

Sightlines is produced by the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. Visual and Critical Studies creates an interdisciplinary and culturally diverse framework within which to bring historical, social, and political analysis, as well as formal analysis, to bear on the interpretation of the visual world. VCS trains students to write professionally about the visual arts and visual culture. Students complete coursework followed by the production of a thesis project, leading to the Master of Arts degree. For more information on the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at CCA, please contact us: Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies, California College of the Arts 1111 Eighth Street San Francisco, CA 94107-2247 USA 415.551.9251 Jacqueline Francis, VCS Program Chair, jfrancis@cca.edu ShawnJ West, Senior Manager of Academic Programs in the Division of Humanities & Sciences, and Administrator of VCS Dual Degree Options, shawnj@cca.edu https://portal.cca.edu/learning/academic-programs/visual-critical-studies-ma/ http://viscrit.cca.edu/ ©2019 by California College of the Arts, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any matter without permission.

CONTENTS

4 Introduction 6 Here, and No Further: Material Rhetoric in Loom with Textile K IR A D OM ING U E Z H U LTG R E N

20 Hiding in Plain Sight: Mimicry of the Leak in the Work of C. Ree HOL LY M CHU G H

36 Bios 37 Acknowledgements

Introduction JACQU EL INE F R ANCIS, VC S C H A I R

In previous eras, the role of politics in our everyday lives in the United States was a discussion that could be avoided. Indeed, it has been politic—advisable and polite—to eschew talk of politics in social settings and around the proverbial water cooler at work. But in the present, politics— referring to governing activities and the relationships among governed bodies—is neither possible nor desirable. More than ever, the ways that individuals, parties, and other invested actors vie for and use power are central, public matters. There are multivalent points to debate and innumerable crises that demand our attention and commitment to satisfactory resolution. What is also true is that there is a necessarily heightened political climate not only in the U.S., but seemingly everywhere. This essay is not the occasion to prove, once and for all, the presence of politics in visual production, historical or contemporary. Instead, it contextualizes the work of the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies (VCS) at California College of the Arts as an unapologetic demonstration of interests. On its own, interest is political, and evident in our community’s pedagogy, research, presentations, and publications. The stakes around thinking, talking, and writing about diverse art and visual culture are great because while there is so much access to creative expression, there seem to be all too few opportunities to thoughtfully assess and account for its influence upon us. Within CCA’s community of object makers, VCS proudly produces discourse—that is, spoken and written ideas that emanate from close analysis, research, and care for the topics we study. Pursuing the VCS MA over two years, or the dual-degree option of the VCS MA and a terminal degree in Curatorial Practice, Fine Arts, and Writing over three years, each student writes an 8,000-word thesis and a 2,500-word Sightlines essay based on the thesis, and delivers an oral presentation on the thesis in the VCS Annual Spring Symposium. They emerge

from CCA as interdisciplinary scholars who have shared their ideas on a variety of platforms and with different kinds of audiences. This year’s graduates are Kira Dominguez Hultgren and Holly McHugh. Each earned two degrees at CCA: the MFA in Fine Arts and the MA in VCS. Both are award-winning artists with research-driven practices. In light of their backgrounds, it is quite appropriate that their master’s theses focus on the innovative representational strategies of historical and contemporary artists, and the reception to their work. Describing the weaving and quilting approaches of Juanita (Asdzáá Tł’ogi) (1845–1910) and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood (born 1949) as “textile actions,” Hultgren argues that their embodied, performative, multimodal means of making are rhetorical, not merely visual. Hultgren, informed by the methodologies and rhetoric of Indigenous Studies, finds counter-narratives in both artists’ oeuvres that push back against the silenced histories of the genocide and dehumanization of Indigenous peoples. McHugh considers the haunted aspects of work by Félix GonzálezTorres (1957–1996) and contemporary artist C. Ree. The form of the human body is frequently absent in these artists’ photographic images. Yet its presence and actions are in evidence via ghostly and indexical traces, such as the water leak stain on a ceiling tile, and pillows with indentations that suggest the human head. With these tactics, González-Torres and Ree avoid the overdetermination of the subject and the essentialization of identity. Hultgren and McHugh have benefited from the guidance of dedicated CCA faculty who comprise their thesis committees. VCS Master’s Project Director Michele Carlson oversaw their preparations for our program’s annual Spring Symposium, as well as the writing of their ambitious theses and the essays presented in this year’s Sightlines. Carlson—a writer, curator, and practicing interdisciplinary artist—is Associate Professor in VCS and Executive Director of Art Practical, an influential West Coast media organization based in San Francisco. Carlson is also a CCA alumna (class of 2007). She, like Hultgren and McHugh, pursued and completed one of our school’s dual-degree options: the MA degree in VCS and the MFA from the Graduate Fine Art Program. Carlson knows well the rigors and requirements of researched writing and engaged public presentation. So do CCA Professor Karen Fiss (Hultgren’s advisor) and Assistant Professor Viêt Lê (McHugh’s advisor), both of whom have worked as Thesis Directors to previous cohorts. We congratulate Hultgren and McHugh, and, on their behalf, express thanks to the college’s leadership for their support: Humanities and Sciences Dean Tina Takemoto, Provost Tammy Rae Carland, and President Stephen Beal.

Sightlines 2019

Here, and No Further: Material Rhetoric in Loom with Textile KIR A D O MIN GUEZ HULTG REN

Kira Dominguez Hultgren

In Loom with Textile, Juanita (Asdzáá Tł’ogi, Navajo, 1845–1910) pledges her protest to the flag (fig. 1).1, 2, 3, 4 Woven with the loom bars and yarn bundles still in place, this U.S. flag is in the midst of construction. Yet it is also a finished flag unnecessarily under construction; the upper half of the weaving features thirteen red and white alternating stripes with a completed canton. By leaving the flag on the loom, Juanita exposes how the symbol of the U.S. nation is more than an image. As a loom, the flag becomes a construction tied to a machine that operates to bury the nations and people with whom it comes in contact. Yet in Loom with Textile, Juanita is its operator. Weaving in the midst of the signing of the Bosque Redondo treaty in 1868, and a newly created Navajo reservation, Juanita (de)constructs the U.S. flag and her role as a Navajo weaver. Is she complicit in or compelled to move through this construction of U.S. nation building and colonialism? A pair of horizontal sticks, cleaving the unwoven warp below the flag, act to visually divide this work (fig. 2). As tools used to weave Loom with Textile, they show Juanita’s movement through the machine of the weaving. Termed a shed rod and heddle rod, these tools reveal how the warp strands opened and closed, how Juanita chose to weave, and when she chose to stop. Leaving loose yarn bundles embedded in the warp below these rods, Juanita arrests the motion of weaving in the midst of weaving. Through these tools that transform the U.S. flag into a loom, Juanita operates the sign and machine of nation building, even as she refuses them; “I weave here and no further.” In this essay, I read Juanita’s operation of the loom as a material rhetorical strategy that ruptures paradigms of ongoing U.S.

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Figure 1: Juanita (Asdzáá Tł’ogi), Diné (Navajo), Loom with Textile, 1874. Wool yarn, wooden rods, 35.5 × 17.8 in. Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, E16494-0.

Woven with the loom bars on either end, the heddle and shed rods in the middle, and yarn bundles still in place, this U.S. flag is in the midst of construction.

Kira Dominguez Hultgren

Figure 2: Juanita (Asdzáá Tł’ogi), Diné (Navajo), Loom with Textile (detail), 1874. Wool yarn, wooden rods, 35.5 × 17.8 in. Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, E16494-0.

The heddle and shed rods cleave through the loose warp. From their orientation, we know this side faced away from Juanita as she wove.

colonialism and racism. I begin with an explanation of material rhetoric and my methodology. Next, I analyze an 1875 photograph of Juanita and Loom with Textile in order to set up an argument that, through this work, Juanita not only operationalizes the U.S. flag, but also her performance of a Navajo weaver. Finally, I turn to Loom with Textile to read in Juanita’s actions at the loom a narrative of and counter-narrative to U.S. colonialism. This methodology for analyzing textiles—which sees Juanita’s action of weaving, and her body’s movement through the loom, as material rhetorical strategies that disrupt the visual image woven on the surface of the textile—is one that I term material rhetorical analysis, a process theoretically grounded in textility. Coined by textile scholar and researcher Victoria Mitchell, textility investigates the ways in which textiles work within and move against visually 1

Juanita is also known as Asdzáá Tł’ogi, meaning “Lady Weaver.” Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 5. I take my direction from Denetdale and use the name Juanita rather than Asdzáá Tł’ogi. I title Juanita’s work in the Smithsonian’s terms, since Juanita’s work is a response to constructed narratives. “Loom with Textile,” National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian, last modified July 31, 2018, https://www. si.edu/object/nmnhanthropology_8345504. My visual analysis is conducted through photographic documentation from the Smithsonian’s online archive as well as a condition report: “Condition report, E16494-0,” Smithso-

nian National Museum of Natural History, Department of Anthropology: Anthropology Conservation Laboratory, July 14, 2017. “Navajo,” in lieu of “Diné,” is still the identity construction used by an English-speaking audience. My use of “Navajo” both positions me as external to the tribe and aligns me with the audience whom Juanita addressed in Loom with Textile. Loom with Textile recently rose again to national attention, thanks to the work of Indigenous studies scholar Jennifer Nez Denetdale. In February 2018, it was installed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.

Sightlines 2019 based knowledge systems (e.g., image and text). 5 Beginning with the Latin root textere (to weave), Mitchell investigates how texts are constructed through the motions associated with textile production, such as the weaving, joining, and stitching of available words or conceptual materials. Reading a text or a textile, therefore, necessitates looking through the visible sign (the words on the page, the image on the textile’s surface) to the motions used to create the sign. However, through Indigenous studies, with work being done by scholars Malea Powell, Kimberly Wieser, and Qwo-Li Driskill, among others, I read these motions of textile production as rhetoric. I follow Juanita’s motions of weaving in Loom with Textile through my own embodied knowledge of weaving, kinesthetically passed to me through Mapuche-Argentine weaver Mary Coronado (as well as many other practitioners of material knowledge with whom I have had a relationship over the years). In other words, I am familiar in my body with the motion of weaving and use this familiarity to anticipate and trace Juanita’s movement.6 In Indigenous studies, performed embodied knowledges can be understood as material rhetoric, as a communication through the body moving with material. This kind of rhetoric is not neutral. Indigenous studies scholar Qwo-Li Driskill argues in their writing that narratives produced through embodied material practice disrupt oppressive systems.7 In Driskill’s analysis of the making of doubleweave Cherokee baskets, knowledge is both gained and passed through the body. To engage rhetorically with another is to value another’s body and the knowledge their body holds. To speak materially, then, is to address a body with value and affirm one’s own material knowledge as valuable. 8 It is also to speak against

8 9

Victoria Mitchell, “Textiles, Text, and Techne,” The Textile Reader, ed. Jessica Hemmings (New York: Berg Publishers, 2012), 5–13. Textile curator and historian Jean-Paul LeClercq claims that textiles reveal themselves in the traces of their construction. Jean-Paul Leclercq and Rémi Labrusse, “Interview with Jean-Paul Leclercq by Rémi Labrusse,” Perspective, 1 (June 2016): 61–74. Online version accessed: http://journals.openedition.org/perspective/6674; DOI: 10.4000/perspective.6674. Qwo-Li Driskill, “Decolonial Skillshares: Indigenous Rhetorics as Radical Practice,” Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics, eds. Lisa King, Rose Gubele, and Joyce Rain Anderson (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2014), 76. Ibid, 74–75. Qwo-Li Driskill, Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and

Two-Spirit Memory (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016), 5. 10 Jennifer Nez Denetdale, “Remembering Our Grandmothers: Navajo Women and the Power of Oral Tradition,” Indigenous Peoples’ Wisdom and Power: Affirming Our Knowledge through Narratives, eds. Julian E. Kunnie and Nomalungelo I. Goduka (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 78–94. 11 Arny is described as the worst Indian Agent the Navajo encountered. Denetdale, Reclaiming Diné History, 95. 12 Manderfield and Tucker, “An Invoice for the Centennial Exhibition,” The Daily New Mexican, November 18, 1874, 1. From this newspaper article, it appears that Loom with Textile was a commissioned work for the centennial exhibition. Arny donated it to the Smithsonian when the delegation arrived in DC. Accession date: January 12, 1875. Smithsonian, “Loom with Textile.”

Kira Dominguez Hultgren

Figure 3: Photo attributed to Charles M. Bell. Portrait of Juanita in Native Dress; Blankets, Weaving Implements and Governor Arny Nearby 1874. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. NAA INV 06396900.

Juanita, pictured left, performs the role of Navajo weaver. Loom with Textile appears to her left.

epistemologies that would assign value only by what is visibly signified. 9 Through a material rhetorical analysis, Loom with Textile is read as an address to a U.S. audience, in which Juanita both enacts and counters visual constructions of representation (the U.S. flag and her role as a Navajo weaver). Serving as an English translator for the Navajo delegation, which includes her husband, Navajo leader Manuelito, Juanita goes to Washington, DC, in 1874 to affirm Navajo land rights.10 Yet, from photographs, her role as translator is ambiguous. Rather, she is pictured performing the role of Navajo weaver set for her by federal government official W.F.M. Arny (fig. 3). Arny sought to inscribe the Navajo not as warriors to be feared, but as weavers of rugs and blankets, and as an economic boon of the American territories.11 As such, the Department of the Interior organized a touring exhibition for the 1876 centennial celebrations, in which both Juanita and Loom with Textile were used to construct a narrative of patriotism.12

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12 Figure 4: Juanita (Asdzáá Tł’ogi), Diné (Navajo), Loom with Textile (detail), 1874. Wool yarn, wooden rods, 35.5 × 17.8 in. Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, E16494-0.

In the row of woven stars closest to the upper loom bar, Juanita transforms stars into crosses. Three white crosses and one blue cross sit outside of the canton.

This photograph continues to be reprinted today in histories and exhibitions about Navajo weaving and Navajo-woven U.S. flags.13 Consequently, Juanita became and is still used metonymically for the Navajo weaver broadly. In front of a cloudy sky, Juanita and Arny sit angled toward one another, surrounded by fake boulders, grass, straw, and Navajo rugs. Juanita wears a biil, a Navajo dress that she is credited as having woven, while Arny wears a three-piece suit.14 Their bodies frame Loom with Textile, which appears just behind them. Juanita is posed with a weaving implement, ironically called a sword, that rests across her lap. Everything about this photograph is staged; the constructed narrative casts doubt on what is real and what is imagined. Like the fake boulders or landscape backdrop, Juanita is also made into a representation or sign of “Indian.”15 She enacts the Navajo warrior with sword in hand, now turned into a weaver.16 Yet it is through this performance of weaver that Juanita subverts the constructed narrative. It is her weaving, after all, that is the focal point of the photograph. Through Loom with Textile, Juanita is given the stage to tell the story

Kira Dominguez Hultgren of what is taking place—not just on the set of the photograph, but on the stage of U.S. westward colonialism. Because of its display, stretched taut vertically, Loom with Textile does not act like other textiles in the photograph. Juanita wears her biil; Arny wears his suit; the rugs hang heavy, draped next to and below Arny and Juanita. In short, every other textile in the photograph is animated through its encounter with the human body. Loom with Textile stands on its own, independent of any need for the human. So while the camera may be focused on it, and Juanita and Arny are focused on each other, Loom with Textile addresses itself to us. This is Juanita’s voice, a rhetorical strategy spoken in wool to be heard. Faced with Arny and the Department of the Interior’s desire to turn her into a conquered weaver, Juanita gave them a weaving with the appearance of acquiescence, while at the same time weaving a counter-narrative into it. In the upper half of Loom with Textile, Juanita transforms the stars of the U.S. flag into crosses (fig. 4). Not only is this a refusal of one of the key symbols of the U.S. flag and nation, one that disrupts the constructed patriotism imposed on her, but through the image of the cross, Juanita also visualizes weaving as a construction made from crosses, or intersections of warp and weft. She directs her audience to see other points of intersection—how the image of the U.S. flag is built on top of an intersecting, colorful, and yet buried warp. Loom with Textile is an example of Navajo tapestry weaving, which is a weft-faced weave that conceals the warp. Because of this concealment, most mid-19th century Navajo weaving was done on a natural, undyed wool warp. But Juanita draws attention to what tapestry weaving hides. According to anthropologist Ann Hedlund, there are few Navajo weavings on record with a color warp, and none 13 Richard A. Pohrt, The American Indian: The American Flag (Flint: MI: Flint Institute of Arts, 1975), 133; Tyrone D. Campbell and Joel and Kate Kopp, Navajo Pictorial Weaving, 1880-1950: Folk Art Images of Native Americans (New York: Dutton Studio Books, 1991), 76; Toby Herbst and Joel Kopp, The Flag in American Indian Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press; Cooperstown: New York State Historical Association, 1993), 107; Kate Peck Kent, Navajo Weaving: Three Centuries of Change (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2002, c1985), 60; Suzan Shown Harjo, ed., Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States & American Indian Nations (Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian in association with Smithsonian Books, 2014), 129.

14 Denetdale, Reclaiming Diné History, 3; Anthropologist Ann Hedlund, email correspondence, February 25, 2018. Hedlund questions if it can be substantiated that Juanita actually wove Loom with Textile and her biil. 15 Manderfield and Tucker, “An Invoice for the Centennial Exhibition,” 1. 16 The Navajo weaver is closely aligned with masculine symbols in representations of the American West and the Indian. Thomas Patin and Jennifer McLerran, “Navajo Weavings in John Ford Westerns: The Visual Rhetoric of Presenting Savagery and Civilization,” International Journal of Semiotics and Visual Rhetoric, vol. 2, no. 1 (January–June 2018): 73–90.

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14 Figure 5: Juanita (Asdzáá Tł’ogi), Diné (Navajo), Loom with Textile (detail), 1874. Wool yarn, wooden rods, 35.5 × 17.8 in. Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, E16494-0.

The woven vertical zigzag columns mirror the loose warp in both shape and color. In the midst of the green warp block, a red warp strand is visible.

Figure 6: Juanita (Asdzáá Tł’ogi), Diné (Navajo), Loom with Textile (detail), 1874. Wool yarn, wooden rods, 35.5 × 17.8 in. Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, E16494-0.

Visually, this work is constructed through alternating stripes both vertically and horizontally, including the vertical zigzag stripes, the loom bars, and heddle and shed rod.

Kira Dominguez Hultgren with a warp blocked into multiple color fields.17 Yet through the use of a color warp, which she leaves unwoven in the middle of the textile, Juanita is able to embed a visible counter-narrative that runs the entire length of the work. There is a lone red warp strand in the midst of a section of green warp (fig. 5). Through this strand, Juanita materializes her refusal to blend in or perform a role given to her. Despite being woven over and covered in places, as Juanita constructs an image of the U.S. flag, this red warp strand resists burial, visually defying the sign and outworking of colonialism. Yet it is not just through the structure of weaving that Juanita operationalizes the flag to her own rhetorical purpose. She also uses the imagery of the flag, such as the stars turned into crosses. Three white crosses are visible outside of the blue canton (fig. 4). These crosses create a division or distinction between those grouped within the canton and those outside of it. As markers for U.S. states, the crosses outside of the canton might be read as places that will never be granted statehood, people who will not be counted. Or are these sovereign places, places that the U.S. sees as existing within its borders, whether they want to be counted as part of the U.S. or not? Like the crosses, the thirteen red and white horizontal stripes in the upper half of the weaving also transgress their boundaries to form what could be read as a second flag below. Everything in the weaving becomes oriented in relation to the stripes: the horizontal loom bars on either side of the weaving, the heddle and shed rods in the middle of the unwoven warp, even the vertical zigzag-columned stripes that alternate a red stripe after every multicolored stripe (fig. 6). It is as though the textile is giving warning that to come near or encounter this flag is to be transformed into another stripe in its encompassing field. Through weaving, Juanita enacts the erasure that came with the creation of the U.S. flag. The single blue star functions in a similar way to the loose warp strands in the middle of the weaving (fig. 4). It shows what lies beneath. For every cross that is woven in, Juanita must leave out that much blue yarn from the weaving. This material gesture performs the conceptual addition of states onto the flag. 17 Ann Hedlund, email correspondence, February 25, 2018.

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For every state added to the U.S., something or someone is excluded or extracted. To add a star, to draw a reservation boundary, to put Navajo land in relationship to the U.S., is to bury or erase an alternative set of relationships to the land that existed before colonialism. Juanita both enacts and refuses this erasure by weaving back in the blue yarn that was extracted. While prompting the audience to acknowledge those who are lost at the intersections of nation building, Loom with Textile also narrates the compromises made by Juanita and her husband, Manuelito, in order for the Navajo nation to survive. The treaty of Bosque Redondo in 1868 allowed the Navajos to return to their land after five years of U.S.-determined imprisonment, which the U.S. called “the federal Indian assimilation policy,” but which Indigenous studies scholar and historian Jennifer Nez Denetdale describes as a systematic “ethnic cleansing.”18 To sign the treaty meant that the Navajo gave up most of their original homeland, as well as “tribal autonomy and freedom.”19 The treaty made the Navajo dependent on the U.S. for both the determination of the physical borders of their land and for their day-to-day survival. After five years of imprisonment, their food and livestock were nearly gone. The Navajo depended on U.S. annuities for ten years to enable restoration.20 But there was no alternative. Denetdale writes, “They did what they had to do in an impossible situation to allow their people to have a future.”21 Juanita’s loom enacts this impossible negotiation between dependency and sovereignty—or, as Denetdale claims, in weaving Loom with Textile, Juanita shows a “critical consciousness about the politics” of her situation.22 In weaving a U.S. flag and in submitting to the performance of self shown in the Charles Bell photograph, Juanita acquiesces to the role given to her in this domestic-dependent relationship. Yet, through Loom with Textile, Juanita also embeds resistance strategies into this sign of nation building, constructing a counter-narrative of sovereignty. Consider the loose warp strands in the middle of the weaving (fig. 7). These warp strands run the entire length of the loom. Any weaving done is made dependent on them. They are more than just a bridge between two sections of weaving. Rather, they are the web 18 Jennifer Nez Denetdale, “Naal Tsoos Saní,” Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States & American Indian Nations, ed. Suzan Shown Harjo (Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian in association with Smithsonian Books, 2014), 122.

19 20 21 22

Ibid, 126. Ibid, 127. Ibid, 126. Denetdale, Reclaiming Diné History, 100.

Kira Dominguez Hultgren

Figure 7: Juanita (Asdzáá Tł’ogi), Diné (Navajo), Loom with Textile (detail), 1874. Wool yarn, wooden rods, 35.5 × 17.8 in. Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, E16494-0.

The loose warp strands, seen between the upper and lower sections of weaving, run the entire length of the work.

within which neither section can disengage. As a way to speak about treaties, this weaving enacts a mutual dependency between nations. There are two ways to think rhetorically about this: kinship and engagement. First, the common web shows how the two sides are related to one another. They share something essential: the same warp. Indigenous studies scholar Kimberly Wieser classifies rhetoric

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that appeals to commonality or relationship as a kinship model of discourse, or a rhetoric of relatedness. This kind of rhetoric marked intertribal and later extratribal interaction.23 Wieser claims, “Allies were conceived of in terms of familial relationships,” and supports this claim by looking to the work of Daniel Justice (Cherokee), who analyzes Cherokee discourses in the late 18th century with their repetitive uses of the word “Brother” and “friend.”24 The loose warp may be materially enacting this kind of rhetoric of relatedness. Certainly, if Juanita sought to affirm the terms of the treaty, appealing to the U.S. to stand by those terms, it would make sense for her to create a work that brought to the fore how the U.S. and the Navajo nation were now in a relationship, one to the other. Rather than weaving the two sections together, leaving the loose warp visible ensures that the relatedness of two now mutually dependent nations is acknowledged. However, the loose warp could also be seen as a rhetoric of engagement: two sides brought together, tied in such a way that neither can leave the engagement. The loose warp acts as an index to a maker who has brought two sides into tension with one another. Compare this to Seneca leader Red Jacket’s speeches from the 1790s. In his essay “Red Jacket’s Rhetoric,” Indigenous studies scholar Matthew Dennis argues that Red Jacket used a rhetoric of engagement to pit the British against the American powers in their claim to sovereignty over the U.S. colonies. While at first maintaining a middle ground between these two powers, in the end Red Jacket excused the Seneca from allying with either.25 Read this way, Juanita’s loose warp becomes a site of agency where she, after keeping the two sides of weaving in literal physical tension with one another, decides that maintaining this tension is more than she is willing to hold. Loom with Textile is woven from both sides of the warp toward the middle. As Juanita wove, the opening through the warp strands (the shed) got smaller. The warp would have slowly begun to press in on her hands as she moved closer to the middle. She was literally trapped by this weaving. Rather than finding 23 Kimberly G. Wieser, Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies, American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series 70 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), 164. 24 Ibid. 25 Matthew Dennis, “Red Jacket’s Rhetoric,” American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word

Magic, ed. Ernest Stromberg (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 28. 26 Malea Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing,” College Composition and Communication, vol. 53, no. 3 (February 2002): 400. 27 Ibid, 399–400.

Kira Dominguez Hultgren a way for the two halves to meet, she excuses herself from entrapment by leaving the warp unwoven. Through the unwoven warp, Juanita refuses to be bound to either the symbol of the U.S. flag or the role of conquered Navajo weaver. She weaves here, and no further. In her article “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing,” Indigenous studies scholar Malea Powell terms as survivance discourse that intersects or weaves survival together with resistance.26 Working through the writing of Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), Powell explains how “the Indian” is a simulated representation, and that to act within the term is to do so ironically.27 One resists even as one enacts, since the representation is an image or expectation imposed by the colonizer. “The Indian” is so removed from any one person’s story that when a person occupies the role, this occupation both ruins and falsifies the representation. The person renders “the Indian” amiss, and absurd, exposing the logic upon which the representation is constructed. Through the loose warp, Juanita gives the representation of Navajo weaver back to the colonizer. She simulates the visible expectations or signs of the U.S. flag, on the one hand, and the Navajo weaver on the other, and leaves both in ruins. Through Loom with Textile, Juanita shows not just how the U.S. flag is operationalized, but how that operation can be disrupted. In using her own body at the loom, she appeals not to the visual image of the flag as that which she and her audience have in common, but to our own bodies and material knowledge. We may not all be weavers, but we know the motions of layering material on top of another (weft over warp), of removing material that does not fit into an allotted space (the blue star), and being squeezed in diminishing spaces (the loose warp in the middle). To analyze Juanita’s weaving through material rhetorical analysis is to follow her woven actions as tactics for visual disruption. It is to recognize her presence as a material, performative counter-narrative, and as an invitation to embed our own counter-narratives into signs used to bury us. Decolonization is at hand. It began with Juanita.

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Hiding in Plain Sight: Mimicry of the Leak in the Work of C. Ree H O LLY M C HU G H

Holly McHugh

“ I hear the downpour and wonder if I will see clear water seeping through from overhead... Will I see the water or feel it first?”1 C. Ree, a San Diego-based artist, works with photography, video, installation, and performance to call attention to the various ways that bodies of alterity are often ignored, unseen, and subjugated through built forms of dispossession and marginalization typified by urbanization. Haunting plays a central role in Ree’s work as a recurring trope that manifests formally through abstraction, repetition, and iteration, and insists on reappearing to trouble the normative built environment. In exhibiting various types of haunting, Ree uses leaks (literal and metaphorical), and the subsequent stains they produce, as directional devices for the viewer. The leak points backward toward what came before it. The boundaries between projects are as difficult to demarcate as leaking water; projects are ongoing, fluid in form, and contain elements recycled again and again. It is as if, through the documentation of leaks, Ree’s process also manifests the leak. Ree photographs ceiling leaks found in public spaces, such as police stations, public schools, and corporations. She also creates her own version of ceiling leaks inside the gallery space, either using the existing ceiling or constructing a false ceiling. Circling the periphery of Ree’s work is a performance character called Agent O, a shadowy figure that remains on the margins and occasionally seeps into a center role (like a stain or residue), to shift, operationalize, problematize, and instigate questions of legibility/illegibility. Ree uses shapeshifting as a strategic leak to evade dominant protocols of identification, both corporeally and as a manifestation of practice. Haunting has conceptual power to occupy space between certainty and categorization. Capable of leaking through narratives

Sightlines 2019 of dominance, haunting produces heterogeneity, multiplicity, and indeterminacy. Specifically, the ghost, beyond being a figure of alterity or the other, is “pregnant with unfulfilled possibility”— that is, with the something to be done that the wavering present is demanding.2 This something to be done is not a return to the past, but a reckoning with its repression in the present. 3 A haunting, or the appearance of a ghost, is one way to signal that the past has returned and will always return. Created out of damage or violence, the ghost does not conform to the normal boundaries of time (it arrives from “elsewhere”) and has a purpose: to haunt. Haunting is inscribed in the formation of identity itself. Although heavily policed, the boundaries between normative and non-normative subject positions (race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality) are not always immediately perceptible, which produces an anxiety that there may be more to a subject than meets the eye.4 This notion can also be seen in Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. A subject’s identity is disjointed as it becomes both revenant and arrivant: It returns from the past (citing a history without being anchored in a singular origin or essence), while at the same time constituting its own futurity—arriving, as it were, from and through iterative acts yet to occur. This slippage ruptures binaries and breaks down boundaries. 5 In Ree’s Dark Water, v.2 (2009), an installation on a university campus, a carefully placed leak drips from overhead, and eventually the liquid seeps into the ceiling and marks the building as a site for potential dysfunction (fig. 1). In a later version, Dark Water, v.5 (2010), Ree installs a false ceiling using everyday building materials, creating a self-made leak inside the gallery space (fig. 2). Through a system of clear tubes, brass valves, and plastic water tanks (which had to be refilled almost daily) on a high shelf behind a gallery wall, gravity pulls the water down to selected ceiling tiles, which eventually leak over time. A bucket or metal bowl captures the leak and produces sound.6 The structure is falsified, but the leak is real, alive. The selfmade leak troubles what is real, not just in its mimicry, but because

3 4

Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting,” Handbook of Autoethnography (Abingdon: Routledge Handbooks, 2013), 653. Italics in original. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 183. Ibid, 183. María Del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, The Spec-

tralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 310. The same slippage can be seen in Donna Haraway’s Promises of Monsters, where she utilizes the semiotic square to search for the in-between spaces that interrupt narratives of dominance. “Interview with C. Ree.” Email interview by author. August 20, 2018.

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Figure 1: C. Ree, Dark Water, v.2, 2009. School trailer, water, bucket. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 2: C. Ree, Dark Water, v.5, 2010. Suspended ceiling, water, buckets. Image from “A Glossary of Haunting.”

Holly McHugh it is in fact a real, intentional leak.7 In another iteration of Dark Water, a leak was built into the existing ceiling, which prompted a visitor to suggest that the artist should call building maintenance to alert them about the leak. 8,9 The misrecognition of the real leak and the intentional leak create a duplicitous subject. Over the course of the two-week installation, the waterlogged ceiling sagged, ending in a penetration of the boundary threshold of the ceiling and an eventual collapse. Thus the stain leaves a mark, identifying the building as a possible site for institutional dysfunction.10 Today, this dysfunction is rendered through gentrification and the modern-day dispossession that removes cultural histories in favor of urbanization’s most recent demands. As the viewer sees the ceiling, real and constructed, they are left questioning and looking for what else is leaking through our present-day urbanization. This strategy of the leak can be traced to earlier photographs, including Albertsons (2009) (fig. 3). A darkened stain appears on one of the ceiling tiles, its black rings thicker around the outer edge due to the seep of water overhead. It is the only organic shape in the composition and stands in stark contrast to the smooth geometrical grid of the ceiling infrastructure. A stain is evidence of a leak, and in this case, a leak somewhere in the infrastructure of the building. Ree’s indexical relationship with the leak and the stain—manifested in a multiplicity of iterations, from disorientation and repetition to symbolism and suggestion—conjures an abeyance that exposes invisible forces of power that exert processes of subjectification embedded in our everyday experience. In other words, the leak becomes tied both to Ree’s body, as the one who marks its presence, and the infrastructure that it ruins. But through the gaze, it also becomes indexical to the viewer, to those who look. In Albertsons, the ceiling above shifts and becomes the gridded landscape before us. What typically is unseen and unnoticed above our heads is thrust into our direct vision. The ceiling suddenly becomes the wall. The disorienting perspective challenges the 7

As Lacan notes: “Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage…it is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled— exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare.” The title Dark Water is taken directly from and is a response to the Japanese horror film by Hideo Nakata

of the same title. Nakata’s film suggests no resolution to haunting, but a rather a coexistence, a deferral, and even an embrace of the anxiety symptomatic of everyday dysfunction, historical violence, the paranormal, and the futility of conquering the dead. Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting,” 653. 9 “Interview with C. Ree.” Email interview by author. August 20, 2018. 10 Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting,” 653.

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internalized assumptions that the ceiling is always stable, never collapsible. Disorientation can be unsettling. In this case, the perspective directs the ceiling toward us. Photography’s rectangular format is an implicit grid and directly frames the ceiling. The grid serves to stabilize the viewer and acts as a structure.11 This disorientation is a reorientation that puts the ceiling and the water seepage within view. The organic shape of the stain is framed by the ceiling’s grid—a framework of crisscross or parallel bars. Originally used as a function of infrastructure, the grid’s purpose shifts figuratively and literally on its head and takes on new meaning. The leak is organic and ever-expanding, defying the rigid nature of the grid, yet simultaneously mimicking its infinite nature: never contained, only framed. The water seepage, seen at the top of the frame, is the only organic shape in the structured, built environment. The notion of the grid provides fertile ground for analysis, as the leak acts to rupture both modernism’s championing of the grid and the form’s echoes of colonial architectures and city-planning frameworks. Objects are reoriented and reactivated. There is a palpable absence of the body in Dark Water and Albertsons. The leak and the stain in Albertsons becomes a stand-in for the abstracted body. The seepage, taking the form of a darkened yellow-ochre water ring, is that which crosses a border. The color palette mimics skin tone, soft and warm; the yellow shape seeps through the white and fleshy ceiling, transgressing boundaries of the ceiling above our heads. The architectural body transitions into a corporeal body, subtly abstracted yet still recognizable, so as to decenter the viewer. The walls that seem impenetrable are penetrated by the darkened stain. In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed describes whiteness as a wall. Walls are precise evidence of the materiality of race and gender; what one body experiences as a solid, another might experience as air. This is particularly true for those who are nonwhite, for whom whiteness is experienced as a wall: something solid, a body with mass that stops you from getting through.12 The stains in Dark Water transgress racialized experience and demand a recognition and a misrecognition, activated and reoriented by strategies of reduction and abstraction. 11 The grid is also used in aerial photographs, as an optical device, or as reference for locating points.

12 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 145.

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Figure 3: Albertsons, 2009. Photograph, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 4: Detail from Research Wall, 2018. Installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Image taken by author.

Holly McHugh Our desire to look and be looked at has been central to the discussion of photography since its invention. As Roland Barthes suggests in his text Camera Lucida, the look in photography is the presence inscribed by the real, a presence that “addresses me without seeing me.”13 The leak is a haunting presence, not unlike the photographic medium itself. It activates the compulsion or desire to collect, to see, to recognize and, at the same moment, activate a misrecognition. I am constituted in the world by my looking and being looked at; I am an object of the spectacle at the same time that I identify myself through a performance of myself.14 Lacan takes this further, insisting that the subject is a stain, a shadow, stuck to the signifier in much the same way as the referent sticks to the light-sensitive film in photography—a ghosting effect. The psychological structures of the gaze enable the subject to invest ordinary objects with the capacity to return the gaze. This is the language of the uncanny, the (day)dream, and the magical illusion, but it is also the language of ghosts, phantoms, and clairvoyants.15 The notion of “making strange” is embedded in the idea that the leak becomes something more than what it is, that “the stain stares back”: a statement that implies the object, the inanimate thing, reciprocates the gaze in this instance.16 The stain is a twofold seepage, exceeding the symbolic boundaries of the visual text and managing to bring the symbolic into the realm of representation.17 The stain and the leak, traditionally rendered inanimate, are presented as living, breathing things with the ability to return the gaze to the subject and invert the subject/object dynamic.18 Circling the periphery of the Dark Water series is a shadowy character developed by Ree called Agent O, “an opaque older Asian woman,” rendered ambiguous and sporting a visor over her face (fig. 4).19, 20, 21 Agent O dismantles the Dark Water installations, clipping the ceiling wires with vigor, inducing a collapse of Dark Water. 13 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Noonday Press, 1988). 14 Jacques Lacan, “The Line and the Light,” trans. Alan Sheridan, in The Four Fundamental Concepts (New York: Norton, 1998), 97. 15 Anne Marsh, The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire (Melbourne: Macmillan, 2003), 108. 16 Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting,” 653. 17 Anne Marsh, The Darkroom, 47. 18 As Lacan notes: Adaptation does not exist in mimicry. The major dimensions associated with mimicry are travesty, camouflage, and intimidation. The gaze is equivalent

to what we desire to see and masks what is actually seen by the eye. We gaze because we are lured by the medium to see what it is it wishes us to see, by covering what is actually there. Jacques Lacan, “The Line and the Light,” trans. Alan Sheridan, in The Four Fundamental Concepts. 19 “Interview with C. Ree.” Email interview by author. August 20, 2018. 20 Following Sara Ahmed, “I use the word dark deliberately here: it is a word that cannot be untangled from a racialized history.” Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 144.

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Avoiding a reading of the work in which it is legible simply as an installation, Agent O is operationalized to stain the work through the actions of her body to leak and unfix the boundaries of the performance and installation logic, refusing either framework. Though the performances were never done in public, Agent O lives on to stain the video and photographic documentation. She returns later in a confluence of information, disorienting ceiling photos, found images, and sound in another work, Research Wall (fig. 5). Research Wall (2018) is part of an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego called Being Here with You/Estando aquí contigo. The collage of images includes text authored by Ree, documentation of past performances, found images, newspaper printouts, and numerous other forms.22,23 The hanging methodology is low-tech, as if it were directly extracted from the artist’s studio. Forming a “U” shape, the images on the left overlap densely and consist of found images. At the bottom of the collage, three photographs of Agent O connect the two “sides” of the installation. The cropped snapshots on the right appear to have a cohesive narrative to them. Also present are staged photos of Agent O in various locations and article printouts describing the government’s use of psychics in their investigations. If the leak, in addition to being a series of multiple meanings, is a directional device that reorients and reactivates objects, Agent O simultaneously obscures and perpetuates an uncertainty. Her shapeshifting resists identitarian foreclosures and remains open to ghostly returns. An altered image of Agent O shows a figure with multiple arms and eight heads on top of layered ceiling photos (fig. 6). Agent O makes an appearance again, this time unmoored and floating above disorienting layers of multiple ceiling stains. Though once in the background, the composite grafted figure, like the original ceiling stain, is brought to the foreground, rendered legible as a body, yet still illegible as a singular identity. 21 Agent O would visit during closed gallery hours for her “performance,” or sometimes unannounced during open gallery hours, to destroy the work. The performances were never advertised. They were to be as camouflaged as the ceiling drip. Agent O’s absence from public view remains a secret embedded in the gallery installation left behind. Her role in the ceiling’s destruction is not mentioned in gallery materials, nor are the videos or photographs displayed as part of the installation. This secret creates a private space for the artist, a space in

which to incubate considerations. “Interview with C. Ree.” Email interview by author. August 20, 2018. 22 Research Wall is the title that the artist uses for the piece; the museum tag titles the piece Agent O. 23 See e.g., a still from a film, an appendix from “A Glossary of Haunting,” online articles printed out and pinned to the wall, two portable am/fm radio players, and headphones for viewers to privately listen to the audio played on the tape. Images are held to the wall with thin black tape, others pinned with tacks and one is hung via magnets.

Holly McHugh

Figure 5: Research Wall, 2018. Installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Image taken by author.

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Figure 6: Detail from Research Wall, 2018. Installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Image taken by author.

Holly McHugh Leaks are a form of haunting implicit in their ability to return; they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet.24 Research Wall presents the return: It does not offer something “radically new,” but returns in ways that are unpredictable and not always easily demarcated.25 The redacted information draws the viewer near, enticing us to “look closer”—a play of proximity and distance. The leak is embedded in multiple forms: the photographs of the leak, the leaking of information by way of the news headlines, and the leak through the psychic interview as compiled on the audio. In this sense, the leak is seeping beyond the frame in its refusal to be just one thing; architecture, sound, and photography morph into information and knowledge. Agent O reappears in Research Wall with a visor protecting and obscuring her face, and concealing her identity. Accordingly, Agent O becomes a double, triple, quadruple agent, manifesting as a cyclops (the visor acting as a single eye), a destroyer of ceilings, one that wields psychic powers among other manifestations. Ree purposefully traffics in stereotypical Asian imagery through Agent O, playing into a negative bias that invokes century-old stereotypes of inscrutability. Recently, in November of 2018, lawsuits against Harvard gained national attention when it was revealed that Asian-American applicants were consistently assigned negative points when scored in the personality category. Agent O-as-cyclops brings a monstrous read to the figure that, like the figure of the ghost, shows its power in an unruly resisting of categorization. By grafting the psychic, the monstrous, and the performance elements of Agent O, conceptually and formally, onto the installation, Ree resists being reduced to one category, as the viewer is unable trace a singular trajectory or origin story amid the spread of indeterminacy and uncertainty. 26 In an interview, Ree notes that Agent O is “both me and not me.” This echoes Anne Cheng’s model of otherness in the Melancholy of Race as struggling to emerge within and sometimes against the self, delineating an intrasubjectivity that is nevertheless not incompatible with or absolutely different from intersubjectivity.27 Thus it can be said that the ghost arrives from within and from without as a part of 24 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006), 211. 25 María Del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, 32.

26 There are multiple origin stories, according to the artist. “Interview with C. Ree.” Email interview by author. August 20, 2018. 27 Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 29.

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the self that is also—and foremost—part of the world.28 Understanding the purpose of the ghost reveals elements about our socio-political, historical, and cultural world, because the conditions of the world, after all, are the conditions that create the ghost and therefore are inseparable from our interactions with haunting.29 Agent O is both familiar and rendered a stranger. 30 Yet, although she exists within structures of urbanization and constructed racialization, it is unclear if in fact Agent O actually reinforces the structures she tries to leak through and stain. Redaction, occlusion, and information circulate around the images, while the lack of historical and political specificity of the use of “Agent Orange” as chemical warfare glides over the literal atrocities of war and the horrific, traumatic, and ongoing effects of Agent Orange. Perhaps this is Ree’s strategy: to purposefully occlude political and historical references to the realities of Agent Orange as a weapon of mass destruction, in order to reimagine or redistribute power. But as Gayatri Spivak warns, we must be attentive to the dispossessions suffered by particular groups, which should not be compiled into an undifferentiated spectral mass. 31 The assembly of images of mythical seers on the top of the installation, including Agent O, creates a constellation of redaction, reduction, and erasure, and that risks flattening race and history. The portrayal of mythic ideas are reduced to their image content. The image collection remains flat and takes the shape of a grid, constrained. But the return of the trope and stereotypical imagery can be seen as a strategy for subverting the gaze as well. Haunting has the ability to stir something in us. Haunting draws us affectively, sometimes against our will, and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of reality through which we come to encounter the knowable and unknowable. 32 The inarticulable pinpoint is the key to unlocking that which reveals something about 28 Carla Freccero, “Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past,” in The Spectralities Reader, 349. 29 This is taken from Derrida’s notion of the ghost in Spectres of Marx. Derrida’s ghost, instead of being a representation or uncanny double of oneself, is a version of the other and of alterity. For Derrida, the ethical injunction is not to attempt to impose a final interpretation, but to remain structurally open to possibilities not yet known to us. This differs from notions of self-haunting, the uncanny, or other Freudian interpretations. 30 Following Ahmed: “Strangers become objects not only of perception but also of governance: bodies to be managed. You can be managed out of existence.”

Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 146. 31 This warning is specifically directed to Jacques Derrida as a response to his Spectres of Marx. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Ghostwriting,” Diacritics vol. 25, no. 2 (1995), 66. 32 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 8. 33 For more on phenomenological readings of structure, see Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 68: “The personal is structural. I learned that you can be hit by a structure; you can be bruised by a structure… A structure is an arrangement.”

Holly McHugh our world. The inability to know or annunciate is akin to what moves us. Ree, using strategies of visual and conceptual iteration, moves the viewer through disorientation and misrecognition, enticing notice and an attention to the built environment—and, by extension, exposing that the invisible structures of power and whiteness are also built and constructed. 33 Power made manifest through subjugation and oppression can also be ruptured. The leak is a directional device that points to what came before and is made present through structure, while at the same time ruining, staining, and disrupting the structure. By remaining open to the return of the leak and the possibilities of haunting, we can remain structurally open to possibilities not yet known to us.

Sightlines 2019 CONTRIBUTOR BIOS Holly McHugh is an artist and writer completing a dual degree in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. From 2014-2015, she was a participant i n the Queer Ancestors Project, an interdisciplinary workshop committed to establishing relationships between the LGBTQI community and its historical lineage. In 2018, she was a recipient of the Barclay Simpson Juried MFA Award and a finalist for the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. Her thesis committee includes Michele Carlson, Jacqueline Francis, and Viêt Lê.

Kira Dominguez Hultgren is a California-based textile artist. She studied French postcolonial theory and literature at Princeton University, and performance and fine arts in Río Negro, Argentina. Her research interests include material and embodied rhetorics, loom technologies, decolonizing material culture, and analyzing textiles as a performative critique against the visual. In her third year at California College of the Arts, Dominguez Hultgren is earning a dual-degree MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies. Her thesis advisory committee comprised Michele Carlson, Jacqueline Francis, and Karen Fiss.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies (VCS) would like to acknowledge all who helped bring this year’s thesis projects and the Sightlines journal to fruition. Michele Carlson led the way as the cohort's Master's Thesis Project Director: She supervised the students' thesis writing, prepared students for the VCS Spring Symposium, and assumed responsibility for the production of Sightlines 2019, as well as the thesis exhibition posters. Our Visual Studies Program colleagues provided invaluable guidance and critique to our students as Faculty Advisors: Karen Fiss—an art historian, writer, and curator—worked with Kira Dominguez Hultgren, and Viêt Lê—an art historian, artist, and curator—worked with Holly McHugh. Winston Struye, MFA Candidate in Design, collaborated with Hultgren and McHugh to design their Thesis Exhibition Posters. MacFadden & Thorpe designed the Spring Symposium program, and the poster and mailer that advertises this event. It is a pleasure to work with Brett MacFadden; we also thank Project Manager Maggie Wallace, who handled a tight production schedule with grace and aplomb. Christopher Dare is our copy editor. ShawnJ West, Senior Manager of Academic Programs in the Humanities and Sciences Division at CCA, handles the business side of VCS and front-of-the-house duties as well. Above all, he keeps us calm. VCS is proud to be a part of CCA's Humanities and Sciences Division (H&S). We are grateful for all of our H&S colleagues, and we must offer special appreciation to Dean Tina Takemoto and Director of Academic Administration Mike Rothfeld for their unwavering support.

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