If You Take All My Blood There Won't Be Any Left

MFA Thesis

By Olivia Wall

If You Take All My Blood There Won‘t Be Any Left

The human experience compels us to assign meaning to the meaningless. As an artist, I collect visual fragments of the world around me—the souvenirs of our intentions, actions, politics, and idiosyncrasies. This work is based on apophenic tendencies and the innate human desire to organize chaos in order to comprehend reality. Our intrinsic inability to disregard the mundane and then assign value to the meaningless is what makes everything inherently meaningful.

If You Take All My Blood There Won‘t Be Any Left is a project focused on the act of looking and how we process finite information despite a lack of complete and accurate data. My process relies on ambiguity, surrealism, and formalism. The jarring perspective, isolation of the environment, and an ambiguous title each act as a fragment of the whole but bereft of any realistic resolution to the narrative unfolding. The viewer compiles the information and is left with conclusions conjured via this basic human instinct to use context clues and find story lines—surreality found through fractured reality and vice versa.

The use of seemingly prosaic objects, circumstances, and situations as subject matter allow for an exploration of this cultural universal propensity to see something vague as significant, connect A to B, and find patterns in the random. I use formalism and curation as a device to shift the viewer’s perception of seemingly unrelated subjects. The formal elements provide a constant among the visual variables. Providing the viewer with multiple fragments of similar banality assigns importance, and unwittingly, we decide there must be something crucial and essential involved within the fictional narrative unfolding. Co-occurrence of visual stimuli creates relationships where none exist.

If You Take All My Blood There Won‘t Be Any Left ultimately addresses my own innate inability to deal with the illogical, irrational world around me. How does one survive when everything is wrong, everything is breaking, when everything has been given, and yet, nothing changes, nothing is ever fixed? Blood is used as a metaphorical representation of my coping ability, my patience, my intellect, my words, my thoughts, my actions, my everything. How much blood will be let just trying to deal with you, with the world, with the system? There is a constant assault of the impossible and the unexplainable. These situations and circumstances are inescapable, and yet I am expected to endure nonetheless. If You Take All My Blood There Won‘t Be Any Left is a culmination of my surrender, my serenity, and my sanity.

Olivia Wall, If You Take All My Blood There Won‘t Be Any Left, 2015, Installation View.

Blood Bath

Olivia Wall, Blood Bath, 2015. Mixed Media. Overall dimensions vary with installation.

Drawing Blood- Your Tourniquet or Mine?

Olivia Wall, Drawing Blood—Your Tourniquet or Mine?, 2015. Fabricated Neon Sign. 4 feet x 3 feet x 3 inches.

A Self-Portrait of the Artist as Expressed in Blood Volume (3.44 Liters/0.9088 Gallons)

Olivia Wall, A Self-Portrait of the Artist as Expressed in Blood Volume (3.44 Liters/0.9088 Gallons), 2015. Mixed Media. Overall dimensions vary with installation.