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Description
This thesis outlines the conceptual and physical development of my Master of Fine Arts Exhibition, Leftover Borscht, which took place in the Everett Gee Jackson Gallery from April 2 through April 7, 2011. The project is a contemporary photographic view of the region where I grew up known as the Borscht Belt, a former and now defunct internationally known tourist destination located in upstate New York. While rooted in the personal and by my interest in histories, this thesis investigates the remaining ruins of a former era that has been chafed through time and chaotically altered by its persistent, relentless cycle. For over a year and with multiple, seasonal visits to the region, my explorations have taken me on an adventure of sorts while concurrently expanding my view and perceptions as both an artist and an individual. Sixteen were selected, created and displayed for the exhibition, from a total of eighty photographs, as the project primarily resides in a book format, also included in the exhibition and discussed in this paper. My agenda in the thesis project, exhibition and book is to examine, explore and comment on what my hometown region once was, while reflecting upon the processes and transformations of time, identifying a historical and especially personal place in its most contemporary moment. As an artist I find myself drawn to the enduring remnants of the physical site and the possible range of stories embedded within them: past, present and future. This subject has been a thread throughout my work and as a result this photographic series discloses my own perceptions of a region succumbed to time, its leftover ruins stained with the residue of their past yet very much alive in its aftermath; the entirety of it provoking both thought and question about our modern world and the direction we are ultimately heading.
