PNCA MFA Graduation Speech

I delivered this speech on May 23rd, 2010, as part of the Pacific Northwest College of Art Graduation ceremony.

GRADUATION SPEECH

Thank you to everyone one, friends, family members, fellow students, for taking the time to be here today to witness this event. It is an honor of deepest kind to be speaking in front of all of you, representing my MFA class along side my fellow speaker, Mindy McGovern. And it’s kinda cool to be back here at the Tiffany Center, where I had my high school prom 11 years ago.

Today marks an important day. It signals the end of a journey for a specific group of individual. This day will be remembered forever as the day for the last episode of Lost. After six years on, the TV show LOST ends tonight. But I’ll get back to that later.

First I want to tell you a story, which I have called “The Allegory of Facebook.”

It is morning, and I am awoken, by the light on my face. I open my eyes to see the shadows of my curtains playing on my bedroom wall. The first few glimpses of day are shining through the blue cloth in my windows, bringing me out of my dreams in into the world that is my bedroom.

Then I do what I do every morning.

I open my computer and get on facebook.

After strolling through pics from Tom Manley’s rocking kegger, and Greg Ware’s post about his amazing buttered toast he had for breakfast. I noticed Tanner Dobson posted a link to an article on Yahoo.com entitled “Worst Paying College Degrees.” It was a list of what Yahoo deemed as the lowest paying jobs as defined by your bachelors degree. Number one on the list was Social Work, and number two was Elementary Education. Now as someone who was a kindergarten teacher for four years of my life, I tried to not take offense to that. It was a greater relief to know that a degree in Fine Arts was only number nine on this list, right behind careers in Theology, Horticulture, and Hospitality and Tourism. Good to know an art degree has some clout.

Then I look at someone’s status update about the horrible state of the economy. I can’t help but remember my first few weeks at PNCA in the fall of 2008, as the market started to crumble. Everyday on the drive to work I heard on NPR about a different bank falling apart.

Then I look at someone’s link to the huffington post, about how some BP exec called the oil spill in the gulf small compared to the size of the ocean.

I am discouraged, and it is only morning. I realize I am stuck in a room of shadows and forms that is not fully reality. I can see that outside of my room there exists a world, outside of my status updates, and my party pics, outside of my grad studios, my critique class, and the PNCA campus, There is a world that awaits for me.

I log of facebook, close my laptop, and I leave my room. End of story.

When I look at the dire state of the world outside my room, I can’t help by be discouraged. The United States is still recovering from the great economic turmoil since the Great Depression. We are still embattled in a war in the Middle East. The oil spill in the Gulf Coast threatens to be the greatest environmental disaster of the decade.

Yet amidst all of this, I can’t help but ask, what is the purpose of an art degree? Then I am reminded of the role of the artist. I believe it is the responsibility of the artist to affirm that which is beautiful.

Now, if I have learned anything in grad school, it is that beauty is as subjective from one person to the next. I create beauty in my photographs by representing the natural landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. My fellow MFA colleagues do this quite differently. Nashoba Temperly depicts and presents police brutality, for the viewer to re-experience in the public sphere. Laura Hughes plays with the luminance of light, and how it glows, and distorts the viewers perceptions. Allison Halter dances and moves her body with the greatest of grace. Some of us seek to subvert, some represent, others looks to name that which exists right in front of our eyes. Despite that our visions of what is beautiful differs from one person to the next, I believe that this is our common thread. That we seek to name and affirm our individual visions from shapes and shadows in our minds into the actual in the world.

Let me tell you another story:
I entered grad school somewhat broken. My mother had passed away only 5 months previously, and I felt so lost in those first few months of making. What I found was an amazing collection of 15 people who would become my dearest friends. I am not sure I can appropriately describe the growth and change that has occurred in the last 21 months, but I am so thankful for being a part of this graduating class. And thanks to MK Guth and Arnold J Kemp for leading us through this challenge and growth.

Now back to Lost. For those of you that don’t know, LOST is about a group of people stuck on an island somewhere in the South Pacific.

To tell you a little secret, I’ve never seen an episode of Lost, but I know enough about the world to tell that this day, May 23rd, 2010 will live on in infamy, not as the day that 15 graduate students received their Masters Degrees, but as the end of a television era. LOST is this decade’s Twin Peaks and lives freshly in the collective consciousness of my generation. . It is so important that my cousin Dawny decided to stay in Seattle to go to a LOST party rather than attend this graduation ceremony.

You see, in Lost, the inhabitants of the island are stuck in their own version of Plato’s Cave. They are in a liminal place that is neither reality, nor any world they know of.

Fellow graduating students: We, too, are in a liminal place. For these brief two hours, we are neither PNCA student, nor an inhabitant of the world outside. Not yet at least. The ideas and concepts we have learned these past few years are still shadows and forms on the wall for us to look at. We have the chance to leave behind the hermetically sealed cave of art school, and walk into the bright light of day. This ritual of graduation gives each one of us a chance to enter into the world a new being.

As we leave this room today, as the Faculty stands at the threshold between this place and the next, we are offered the ability for transformation. We can leave behind the shackles of school and enter in the day as citizens of the world, naming and affirming beauty in the world

Thank you.