…is a doctoral candidate in the Art Education Department at The Ohio State University. Her research uses a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective to investigate writer subjectivity as it shapes, and is shaped by, intersections of art criticism writing and visual culture critical analysis in an undergraduate television criticism course.

curriculumvitae_feb_2009_vicki-daiello

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A graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University, with a BFA concentration in metals, Vicki grew up in a rural town near Lake Erie. Her most vivid childhood memories are of long summer days spent exploring the parade of wrecked vehicles passing through her father’s auto salvage business. She credits these early years as being instrumental in the development of her vivid imagination, the use of metal fabrication in her art, and an overwhelming desire to collect and examine all manner of metal and glass scrap on streets and sidewalks.

She describes her art and writing as a process of exploring distances and silences between words, objects, sights, and memory:

I enjoy the demands of working with metal: the rigidity of this material invites repetitive processes in order to effect transformation. I feel the demands of the process in my muscles, on my skin, can even smell and taste in the air the acrid presence of sanded, abraded, and chemically treated metal. The hammering, cutting, forming and shaping of the metal creates sounds in a rhythmic cadence, like a language. While attuned to these sounds, I am acutely aware of the silences between the hammer blows, the boundaries of sound. I look to these silences and gaps as shapes of poignancy and integrity: They are the absences and repetition of absences within which form and presence become meaningful.

As I develop a sculpture piece, I develop a written, visual dialogue through essay, poetry, drawings. In this way, several processes are set in motion, allowing for interplay of idea and form, thought and language, materials and action. I think of the concurrent activities of writing, drawing, and metalworking as a way of developing and responding to questions, in layers. I seek to understand the ways in which experiences are interrupted, stretched, and challenged by the demands of time, form, and material processes.

I’ve come to realize that, no matter what material I am using, I am working through questions about the ways in which forms, materials, and experiences shape representation. The rigidity of metal necessitates demanding and repetitive processes to effect representations of meaning(s), however, writing and image-making can be just as demanding and repetitive. Words demand and repeat… delight and disappoint. Their seductive promise to anchor and steady the slipperiness of representation and meaning appeals repeatedly to my desire.

In my dissertation research, I am attuned to the relationship of form and meaning. I’ve explored the possibility of creating a polyvocal, poststructuralist research text. A text that makes process visible, is reflexive about form, and is self-conscious about the vulnerabilities of language. Is it possible to create an ethical, sensitive research text that exposes the dense, contingent weaving of experiences that construct self and/as other, within a symbolic order that constantly tricks and deceives with its promises of representation?