For my Senior Thesis, I have created a series of five paintings, each 4' x 6' in size to be displayed in Ball State's Atrium Gallery from April 13th -19th. The work is both acrylic and oil paint on canvas. Throughout the semester, I also made small paintings on 8" x 12" paper. Seven of these smaller works were displayed with the final series in the Atrium Gallery exhibition. This body of work is about my frustrations with moral relativism and the fallacies I see within it. The process of constructing a moral code and figuring out what is right and what is wrong has become a personal process in our culture. I think there is a lot of instability that comes out of this. Individuals are influenced and pressured by their peers and n1entors to form their moral code in agreement with them, yet are abandoned by these same people when phrases like, “what is right for me might not be right for you", or “who am I to say what is right or wrong for another" are constantly thrown around.

Stylistically, I continue to push my use of materials in both acrylic and oil paint. I am interested in the wide range of painterly effects of these two mediums, and in finding ways to combine multiple styles onto the same surface. I paint representational objects and surfaces to reference the natural world, and break up the objects and landscape references with areas of flat color and abstract painting.

I am using natural imagery as a metaphor for the created world we live in, versus the “worlds" we create for ourselves. I incorporate themes of individual pursuits of an absolute truth compared to individual creations of personal truths. Within these works, there are fragments of Creation, both seamlessly existing in a background component, and twisted and manipulated into a form that an individual tries to reside in. These paintings contain man-made, individually-built structures and dwellings. The structures appear unstable, and their placement and relation to the surrounding landscape is unclear. These “homes" represent an individual's construction of a moral code, and the fragile and isolating existence that moral relativism causes for humans.