Ollie Kearney BFA General Fine Arts Thesis Spring 2024
Fallen Doves is a multimedia installation, a tribute to the trans folks and sex workers who fought to be heard and seen. The bedroom stands as a monument to the influential changes they made in history and in my personal queer identity. This room is an amalgamation of all my research, and the hard work to uncover buried sources and history. It is a visual representation of everything I’ve read and consumed to prepare for my thesis and to do justice to those who have passed. Fallen Doves is a visual gathering of my community and their work as well, this installation would not be complete without components from my community and is a testament to the strength found within queer communities. This work is a gathering of past and present, of those who have made history and will make future history, of all the folks and their ideas that encouraged me to be who I am. Some specific works reference key figures in my research, some works reference the general ideas or sources I came across in my research, and the empty spaces are reserved for stories of POC that I haven’t thoroughly researched or discovered yet. In this work I tried to create a fictional narrative these figures could fall into place with. The trinkets and ephemera take guesses at what these figures may have done in their day to day life and how they lived. I tried to make most things from scratch such as the rug, the small pillows, the flower and candlestick arrangements, the collection/archive of things such as matchbooks etc. My work is visually comprehensive to try and represent how comprehensive and thorough my research is.