My Dear Friend, Time

Abstract

University of Washington Abstract My Dear Friend, Time Jing Xu Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Ellen Garvens Photomedia I like thinking that my work instigates performance; it encourages viewers to perform in a multivalent emotional collaboration with it. I create immersive, site-specific installations in all media—painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, furniture, murals, video, et al—that create dreamlike, fictional spaces that disrupt reality and present more questions than they answer. While I turn to art as a means of resolving my own identity—allowing my very private inner thoughts and questions to become public—I hope that the humble, honest manner of sharing the work serves viewers by opening up similar opportunities for reverie. I believe that if something exists in the mind, it exists in the world, the trouble seems to only come when we try to reify it. Apparently I like making trouble.