Edges are a Shared Contour: A Formalism for Future Collaborations

Abstract

Edges Are a Shared Contour: A Formalism for Future Collaborations explores abstract painting as a critical field of inquiry and a method for entangled, more-than-human perception. Departing from the modernist framework of aesthetic autonomy and medium specificity, this dissertation proposes an expanded formalism rooted in embodied, processual, and reparative forms of attention. Engaging thinkers such as Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze, and Daniel Neofetou, it considers how painting might operate not only as a visual language but as a practice of knowledge-making that resists closure, extractivism, and representational finality. Drawing from my own research-creation practice, this dissertation grounds its arguments in formal analysis of material processes: layering, erasure, gesture, and provisional mark-making. These techniques are explored as methodological refusals of hierarchy between form and content, surface and depth, viewer and object. Through engagement with the works of Amy Sillman, Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and others, I argue for abstraction as a site of critical friction—a space where affect, history, and subjectivity fold into one another. The project introduces care/full looking as a reparative mode of perception that values slowness, uncertainty, and mutual responsiveness. Abstract painting becomes here not a retreat from meaning but an opening into multiplicity—where attention is shaped by what resists immediate comprehension. In theorizing edges as shared contours, this dissertation reimagines form as a relational threshold—a fractal curve—suggesting that painting can act as a collaborative interface between human and nonhuman, body and environment, past and future. Ultimately, it positions abstraction not as a formal tradition to preserve but as a continually unfolding terrain of speculative and collective inquiry.