Date of Award

5-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Media Arts

First Advisor

Bryan Robertson

Second Advisor

Michael Polodny

Third Advisor

Michael Wartgow

Abstract

This project focuses on the use of insect imagery in art and media and the theories and concepts that have been instrumental in understanding the cultural and political significance of insect species extinction and decline. I center my work on the concept of ecohorror and highlight several artists whose work depicts insect species and conveys anxieties over ecoprecarity and climate dysfunction. I argue that depictions of insects in art and media can be interpreted in two ways - insects as destructive, monstrous contaminants and insects as constructive, beneficial terraformers - and I rely on Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind to explore these themes in a unique complexity. While I believe this interpretation captures the majority of the sensibilities associated with insect species depicted in art and media, through the work of Donna Haraway, Hayao Miyazaki, and others, I identify a potential to go beyond this dichotomy towards a new understanding/troubling of the contaminant/terraformer dialectic and a potentiality for a weaponization of ecohorror through ambiguity and synthesis that results in a critical methodology I propose as ecoabjectivism.

This research into the role insects play in culture and art and my reconceptualization of ecohorror culminate in a series of paintings, prints, and drawings, as well as a collection of ekphrastic ecopoetry that expands on the content of the visual artwork. Throughout this body of work, I use insect and other detritivore imagery, including snail and fungal species, to subvert/rot and mutate imperialist and colonial imagery as a theoretical and political statement against the durability of structures of Empire and Capital responsible for our current biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. The hyperbolic economic expansion of capitalist structures has resulted in the ecohorrorific reality of today’s species loss by disturbing habitat through extractive processes and the expansion of carbon-intensive pollutants. My intention is to salvage the disregarded, symbiotic, and monstrous detritivore community that breaks down structures, megafauna, and subverts hierarchies, solid borders, and tidy distinctions and penetrate them into colonial embodiments, driving them into a kind of Summit Disease.

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