Abstract
What roles does art play in shifting perspective? Western culture often romanticizes rugged individualism and humanist philosophy, putting humans at the center of everything, hierarchically superior to other beings. This perspective is problematic as it informs how we view, experience, and treat our environment, severing our connections with it, and has led to issues like global warming and environmental degradation. In contrast, feminism in art and philosophy challenges the hierarchical perspective, shifting the analytical lens to look at and understand the world from various viewpoints and perspectives. Feminist theory in this context works toward creating equal and inclusive spaces for everything, including non-humans. It is non-hierarchical, believing that everything plays an important role and holds intrinsic value. Similarly, rhizomatic theory is non-hierarchical, heterogenous, and non-centered. The idea is that everything comes from something before it. An example of a rhizome is beech tree roots beneath the ground, which off shoot in every direction. There is no beginning, end, or center, and if one root is severed, it sprouts another root and connects with something else. When pausing to observe our surroundings through various viewpoints and perspectives, it becomes impossible to isolate and sever ourselves from these connections. Like a rhizome that grows for thousands of years, new shoots and nodes sprout and seek out new relationships and connection points, as others wither and die away, blurring the neat organizational categories and socially constructed hierarchies. Everything becomes interconnected, enmeshed, and entangled. When magnified closely enough, we can no longer tell where one thing begins and another thing ends, but we can gain a deeper understanding of the complexity and interdependencies between humans and non-humans and the spaces we cohabitate. My thesis is an attempt to explain my artistic practice rhizomatically, through different lenses, frames, viewpoints, and pathways. Rhizomatic theory, created by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia(1972-1980),uses the rhizome as a metaphor for an “image of thought,” based on the botanical rhizome, like the root systems of beech trees. Rhizomatic thinking allows for multiple, non-hierarchical nodes, acting as connection points, where some nodes offshoot and grow into multiple ideas creating different nodes that expand and branch off into other ideas. As ideas grow and expand over time, others fade or whither into the background, become weaker and eventually die off leaving room for other connection points or ideas to form.