Just As It Should Be: Painting and the Discipline of Everyday Life

In this Master of Fine Arts Thesis dossier, I focus on contemporary painting’s capacity to question and challenge the roles and behaviors expected and directed by the social order. I am specifically concerned with the production of a normative subjectivity through the organization and configuration of domestic spaces and objects. Through a Case Study of Belgian artist Michaël Borremans, in a Comprehensive Artist Statement of my own art practice, and in examples of my work in the Practice Documentation section, I demonstrate how the discipline of painting can reveal and resist the everyday disciplinary procedures of contemporary society. Through its own expected social role and conventions, painting can be a viable means of exploring these concerns, while offering a method of enacting gestures of resistance and agency