Haunting visions: The refusal of settler-colonial containment in C. Ree’s Dark Water and annie ross’s Pots and Other Living Beings

Leatherman, Brittany

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124459 Copy

Description

Title

Haunting visions: The refusal of settler-colonial containment in C. Ree’s Dark Water and annie ross’s Pots and Other Living Beings

Author(s)

Leatherman, Brittany

Issue Date

2024-05-02

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Romberg, Kristin

Department of Study

Art & Design

Discipline

Art History

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.A.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• Hauntology
• haunting
• settler colonialism
• anti-colonial
• refusal
• Indigenous art
• contemporary art
• history
• performance
• installation art
• nuclear violence

Abstract

This thesis considers two projects—C. Ree’s Dark Water and annie ross’s Pots and Other Living Beings—through concepts of haunting that figure in contemporary Indigenous or anti- colonial thought. By focusing on acts of settler-colonial violence embedded in surroundings that have been rendered neutral, Ree and ross utilize a hauntology. They alter their audiences’ perception of the spaces they work in, making them aware of the settler-colonial “containers,” or settler-colonial ontologies, that frame how these spaces are understood. Dark Water and Pots and Other Living Beings are analyzed in this thesis for their similar hauntological characteristics. They each deal with bodily representation through an absent presence. They each forgo representing a corporeal figure in space, resorting instead to other strategies of invoking human presence. Agents of contamination are present in both works, in which each contaminant is meant to portray the slow and enduring violence of settler-colonial ways of knowing and operating. The ways Ree and ross’s projects differ also provide generative units of analysis for this thesis. Their differing environments, contrasting attunement to haunting, and different mediums allow us to analyze the ways in which settler-colonial vision is constituted through multiple “framing” and “containing” structures, which a hauntological approach makes visible.

Graduation Semester

2024-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Brittany Leatherman

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