Repository logo

MFA Visual Studies

Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/10177/40343

The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Studies program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon provides experienced makers with the opportunity to enhance and diversify their creative skills through independent research and critical analysis.

Browse By

Browsing MFA Visual Studies by Author "Rice, Morgan"

Filter results by typing the first few letters
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Morgan Rice 2024
    (2024) Rice, Morgan
    Xanadu is a tabletop role-play game about social construction: the concept that societies collectively invent the terms that then come to define reality. My purpose is to suggest that there is revolutionary power in this, and to explore the ways in which play, imagination, and nonlinear storytelling can develop viable descriptions of reality outside of Western constructs. My artwork often responds to observations about social systems and epistemologies. From what I observe, the systems that dominate societies worldwide derive primarily from slavery, war, and supremacist Western ideologies, and work in tandem to power a centuries-long process of mass exploitation. In my thesis work, I wanted to distill these intertwining systems into a microcosm that names and deconstructs, but does not reproduce, the violence of these systems of oppression, while making space for creative experimentation with alternatives. Writing the game was also a way of creating a context for the artwork I would make in response to it. The exhibition is designed to show the temporality of the project’s composition, and to offer thematic breadcrumbs about the game’s narrative universe. It functions as a pathway, wall-papered with notes and early concept sketches that give way to more concrete game materials, alongside symbolic works relating to the game’s themes of performativity, social construct, authoritarianism, and community. The “destination” at the end of the pathway mimics the scene in which player-characters find themselves when the game begins.