In my bachelor's thesis, I draw on my own experience as an artist to closely examine what the learning process in Visual and Fine Arts entails, and its result in shaping my identity and profession.
Across four chapters, I identify the circumstances and multiple experiences that triggered my concerns and lines of research for the development of the body of work I produced throughout four years of undergraduate study. This includes the selection of media, materials and disciplines explored (ceramics, photography, video, object art, painting, sculpture and installation), as well as the recognition of the evolving themes and theoretical-conceptual territories of said works — among them, art theory and sociology, and especially the analysis of modernity from a decolonial perspective, with particular emphasis on race, class and gender.
I also incorporate literary references that were significant to me during that period, presented either as brief literary analyses or as epigraph citations, to invite the reader to connect with the content. At the end of the document I include a research piece I carried out in 2016. Both written works are accompanied by photographs of my own artwork and of works by other artists I reference.
Among several conclusions, I reveal the transformative effect generated in the person who studies and produces art through processes of deconstruction and reformulation of individual and collective thought, and I emphasize the self-questioning this implies. I also address the self-referential condition of the artist's subjectivity in their work, and its capacity to generate unprecedented knowledge through aesthetic experience. Finally, I underscore the degree of responsibility of the artist as a social agent.
Keywords: Metaphor; perspective-taking; aesthetic experience; art system; contemporary art; artistic practice; sculpture; abstract painting; digital photography; new media; body and gender; feminism; modernity; decoloniality; civilizatory processes.
Thesis advisors: Sofía Táboas and Karla Villegas
Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda”
Ciudad de México, 2018.
Research title of the essay carried out in 2016 (begun in 2015) : Research project to clarify the elements that foster the adoption of body modification dynamics and self-flagellation within female bodily rituals, and their relationship with Western beauty standards characteristic of the stereotypes of the patriarchal capitalist economic system, which culturally define women through their physicality.
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