Annika Rausch 2025

Abstract

With my series of intaglio prints, I explore themes relating to identity construction and place, arguing that those residents who think of themselves as “Portlanders” should instead shift their primary allegiance to the Willamette River. My thesis work contributes to this project of identity reformation by building an affective-aesthetic matrix of imagery, recalling viewers back to local land and water forms, the reality of political violence, and the larger cosmos. My work includes references to the often-suppressed Indigenous materiality of this place, recognized as a fact of the social environment that demands reckoning, plus imagery from the distant past of my own European ancestry, as well as “composted” charts and diagrams from scientific research. By “composting,” I mean erasing the legibility of a graphic or making it esoteric, in order to remove it from rigidly emotionless systems of information-and-control. The main text of my thesis takes the form of a glossary, meant to aid in “reading” the visual work.