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

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Art History

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Leatherman, Brittany

Contributors dc:contributor

• Romberg, Kristin

• Hauntology
• Haunting
• Settler Colonialism
• Anti-colonial
• Refusal
• Indigenous Art
• Contemporary Art
• History
• Performance
• Installation Art
• Nuclear Violence

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Brittany Leatherman

Language dc:language

eng, en

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/124459