My Senior Thesis project at Drexel University was this hypothetical museum exhibition exploring the intrinsic connections between the events of World War I and the Dada art movement. It was set up in a timeline format, highlighting key events from both the war and the art movement. The sections illustrating war-related events were done in large, industrial concrete slabs with imposing, oversized photographic cutouts and newspaper-style informational panels. The Dada sections did not have a set structure and many were interactive, including a section that encouraged visitors to create and recite their own Dada-style poetry, a wall of TV screens that played back a disjoined recording of a performance art piece, and recreations of magazines published by Dada artists that could be read through.
My goal was to contrast the bleakness of the war with the wildness of the Dada movement, using scale, material, and contrast between rigidity and abstraction. War recruitment propaganda filled the walls next to art magazines and oversized black-and-white soldiers loomed in the background at every turn.
The graphics and images used for the model were a mix of real photography from the time periods and events discussed, images of art pieces, found typography, and original creations. The final model was a roughly 3’x2’ scale recreation of the concept.
