statement
A dichotomy exists in all of Western culture; pitting the landscape, the feminine, the intuitive, the untamed, and the decorative against “dominant” cultural spaces, the masculine, the rational, the civilized and the essential. My work focuses on such dichotomies as they manifest in the American South. Pattern and repetition are at the center of my work, acting at once as inspiration, method, and subject matter. I complicate visual forms with found language, text or objects collected throughout my investigations into Southern culture. Treating language as image and, often, image as visual pattern, I abstract and camouflage language within design and form in order to obscure its legibility. My work attempts to subvert and twist the boundaries of false hierarchies in order to challenge the notion that the two ends of a spectrum could ever be separated, that they could ever be anything other than different but equally important threads in the larger tapestry of life.
about
Caitlin Adair Daglis is a visual artist creating work that explores and exaggerates the complicated layering of histories, personal and societal, embedded within the familiar surroundings of a Southern home. Daglis’s choice of medium follows a best-tool-for-the-job mentality, resulting in the use of a variety of techniques and materials, primarily primarily paper, print, and fiber. Her interest in historical craft practices, such as lacemaking and chair caning bring a wide visual vocabulary of techniques into the work. Her research interests are equally expansive and include history, gender studies, linguistics, and sociology.
Daglis exhibits nationally and internationally. Daglis currently works as the Book Arts Studio Manager at the University of Richmond. In 2021 Daglis graduated with an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Georgia. She earned her BFA in Printmaking from Georgia Southwestern State University in 2015.
bie modern theory.
Bie Modern theory is an emerging indigenous Chinese theory of modernism and cultural development, pioneered by Professor Wang Jianjiang of Shanghai Normal University. Ideological imperialism, in the form of foisting Western ideological values onto non-Western art, is one of many forms of colonialist violence perpetrated by the West onto other cultures. Indigenous theories of cultural development can begin to combat this violence and erasure and to force a renegotiation of Western understandings on non-Western work. Bie Modernism can also be a useful lens through which to look on Western understandings of cultural progress that are usually taken for granted.