Writing & research

Before the First World War, art largely served as an aesthetic escape for the European bourgeoisie. The collapse of that surface, brought on by the war and the founding of the fragile Weimar Republic, opened the conditions for Dada. This paper takes Raoul Hausmann's 1920 photomontage A Bourgeois Precision Incites a World Movement (also known as Dada Siegt!) as a case study for how the Berlin Dadaists transformed art from decorative object into social critique.

Through the lens of sociohistorical, psychoanalytic, and reception-theory art historical methods, and engaging with scholars including Matthew Biro, Emily Hage, Timothy O. Benson, and Ruth Henig, the paper situates Hausmann within the Berlin Dada collective and examines how fragmentation, hierarchical disorder, and the merging of human and mechanical imagery operated as a direct critique of bourgeois society and the Weimar regime. Particular attention is paid to Biro's concept of the "cyborg self" and to Hausmann's dual role as visual artist and editor of Der Dada, where his photomontages and his "textual collages" share the same logic of disruption.

Comparing Dada Siegt! to Adolph Menzel's Flute Concerto of Frederick the Great in Sanssouci, the paper argues that Hausmann's photomontage is not merely an experiment in collage but a foundational document of the twentieth-century avant-garde, one that anticipates Surrealism and reframes the relationship between art, politics, and mass media.

Between 1913 and 1924, Russian art did not simply evolve, it inverted. Across a decade defined by the First World War, the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, and the Russian Revolution, the country's avant-garde was reorganized so completely that what began as fragmented, spiritually driven abstraction gradually became the visual language of state propaganda. This imaginary exhibition traces that trajectory through four works.

Beginning with Wassily Kandinsky's Improvisation 33 (Orient I) and its synesthetic search for transcendence, the essay moves through Kazimir Malevich's An Englishman in Moscow as a parallel rupture to Western Dada, Natalia Goncharova's Angels and Airplanes as a threshold between divine imagery and political agitation, and Adolf Strakhov-Braslavsky's The Language of the Revolution as the moment that visual grammar became an instrument of the Bolshevik state. The argument concludes with Gustav Klutsis' Proletarskoe studentchestvo, in which the avant-garde's rupture is fully consolidated into the structured language of Soviet mass communication.

Drawing on scholarship by Margarita Tupitsyn, John E. Bowlt, Jane Ashton Sharp, Anthony Parton, and Jared Ash, the essay argues that abstraction in Russia was never politically neutral. Instead, it generated the visual grammar that later made revolutionary communication possible, transformation which made Russian art reinvented itself through political upheaval rather than in spite of it.

This curatorial proposal develops The Narrowing Gallery, a single room within the larger exhibition Edward Gorey: Overgrown, conceived for the Poetter Gallery at the SCAD Museum of Art. The room translates Gorey's The Evil Garden into a fully sensory experience, engaging touch, smell, sound, and the so-called sixth sense of unease, to depict the visceral discomfort that Gorey's illustrations generate but never name.

The proposal works across three layers. First, scenography: a 138-foot corridor lined in dark cloth and filled with controlled fog, hand-knitted vegetation produced in collaboration with SCAD's Fibers Department, and rusted metal sculptures by Savannah-based artist Autumn Gary. Second, art-historical reference: the gallery's atmosphere is grounded in German Expressionist film (Nosferatu, From Morn to Midnight), Egon Schiele's psychological uncanny, and Ernesto Neto's tactile environments. Third, programming: A Candlelit Tea with Edward Gorey, a midnight tea at Forsyth Park's Fragrant Garden in collaboration with the Gryphon Tea Room, free for SCAD students and the Savannah community.

The proposal includes an artist bio, an interview with Autumn Gary, an imagined object checklist, a wall text, and full curatorial framing. The aim is not to illustrate Gorey, but to perform him — guiding the visitor through curiosity, anxiety, and release as they cross the red theatrical curtain at the gallery's threshold.

This presentation is the visual counterpart to the curatorial proposal for Edward Gorey: Overgrown. Where the written component argues the conceptual and art-historical grounding for the exhibition, this deck makes the room visible.

The slides move through the gallery's visual logic: photographic references from the Bonaventure Gates and the SCAD Museum of Art; mood-board pairings drawn from Ernesto Neto's hanging textile environments and Autumn Gary's metalwork; rendered layouts that imagine the corridor's progression toward the red theatrical curtain at its threshold. A dedicated section maps the four sensory registers the exhibition activates, smell, touch, hearing, and the uncanny.

The presentation closes with the educational program A Candlelit Tea with Edward Gorey, framed visually rather than textually. Read alongside the written proposal, it demonstrates how a curatorial argument can be carried through both critical writing and visual articulation, the two registers a curator must move between fluently.