Singo, Zachary Logan and Webb, Brent The Moment of Encounter. 2025. Radford University, Thesis. Radford University Scholars' Repository.
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Abstract
The Moment of Encounter explores the tension between memory, masculinity, and inherited tradition. The work is a culmination of these moments of tension between father-son dynamics and care and control. Drawing from Appalachian imagery, personal recollections, and philosophical inquiry, this body of work engages with the idea of the encounter theorized by Louis Althusser and Epicurean atomism. The material process includes scraping and layering of soft washes while incorporating a combination of gestural abstraction and figuration. Artistic influences include Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Franz Kline, and Susan Rothenberg. While examining philosophical inquiry provided by Althusser, Lucretius, Epicurus, Engels, and Marx. These works create not just a visual component but an analyzed theoretical element. Each chapter pairs with a single painting examining the conception of materiality, encounters, nostalgia, and the role of obligatory tradition. Through depictions of hunting, fishing, play, and labor, the work questions inherited roles of masculinity, perception, and familial authority. These moments, frozen in time before the act, leave the story open-ended. Memory distorts, reshapes, and fabricates, using saturated, unnatural colors and fragmented forms to inform the unreliability of one’s own recollection. This thesis investigates the space where imagery, theory, and historical materialism converge. It asks what we inherit, what we proceed with, and what we resist. Instead of providing a resolution, these paintings contend with the tension of bittersweet memories and the possibilities of their outcomes.
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general |
| Divisions: | Radford University > College of Visual and Performing Arts > Department of Art |
| Date Deposited: | 03 Dec 2025 06:05 |
| Last Modified: | 17 Apr 2026 16:48 |
| URI: | http://wagner.radford.edu/id/eprint/1275 |
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