What is Lost When Time is Saved: Drawing in Collaboration with the Urban Periphery

<p>I pay attention to the overlooked spaces where land and industry meet, prompting me to wonder what can be gleaned in the oily and cracked urban periphery. With a focus on my hometown St. Louis, this industrial city is my subject matter. And so, I draw in a neighborhood bisected by a highway. I animate with sand near the river confluence on land preserved after a historic flood. I make my own bricks in this Brick City, setting up in locations of former terra cotta clay mines. I sit in the tension of what author Michael Martone calls the “midwestern paradox,” in which “I [feel], simultaneously, my isolation on one of the margins of the world and my connection to what is essential in the scheme of all things.” </p> <p>In this paper, I use four recent artworks to describe my relationship with drawing, time, and site. I expand my methods for image-making by using sand, clay, and metal as drawing materials. Committed to working observationally, I use drawing to slow down and observe what would normally flash through my car window. I work on site to be in collaboration with the landscape and meet passersby who share their stories. I emphasize time’s relationship to the industrialized landscape by inefficiently rebuilding common forms, producing sequenced analog works and making display systems which suggest movement. By emphasizing time in the work, I ask what is lost when efficiency is prioritized.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Art

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Graduate School of Art

Year dc:date.available

2025

Author dc:creator

• Ribaudo, Carmen

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cheryl Wassenaar
• Sage Dawson
• Amy Hauft

• St. Louis
• Midwest
• Drawing
• Ruderal
• Site-responsive
• Urban
• Infrastructure
• Analog
• Animation
• Sequencing
• Art and Design
• Fine Arts
• Landscape Architecture
• Other American Studies

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/mfa_visual_art/37

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:openscholarship.wustl.edu:mfa_visual_art-1041