School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at The Village West

EXIT: [refused] is, at its core, structured around a straightforward yet convoluted sentiment: I don’t want to be a person right now.  Rendered like a deteriorating analog horror video game, the video follows a series of attempted exits from the self, presented as a character-select screen from which the ‘player’ is invited to choose between. Each character, whose narratives are entangled with mental instability, medication, self-destruction, and survival, offers the possibility of escape, transformation, or reinvention. Yet the promise of becoming someone else rapidly begins to fail as the characters short circuit, systems malfunction, and every available path eventually collapses into fragmented distortion. Ultimately, the game glitches beyond repair, and the player is left without a viable selection, refused access to the fantasy that another self might provide an escape. Drawing from internet culture, psychiatric narratives, and my ongoing interest in fragmented digital selfhood, the work asks what happens when every potentially stable version of yourself eventually becomes inaccessible. Rather than offering a successful selection, the game refuses the premise altogether. What interests me is not the possibility of escape itself but the moment when escape becomes futile—the point where the system can no longer produce a stable self to inhabit.

Al.lison Jackson (25/They/She) is a Mexican-American, Brooklyn-based multimedia artist and archivist of the self, working with fragments across video art, creative writing, collage, and media theory. Informed by their scholarship as a graduate student in media studies, Al.lison’s practice lives in the tension between documentation and distortion—exploring the glitch self, digital embodiment, fractured identity, emotion, and memory. She is drawn to nonlinear timelines, soft (and rough) errors, and the shifting texture of digital selfhood. Whether through analog capture or digital manipulation, their work is always trying to hold something that is collapsing or already ruptured.

Smart Cookie comes from the series Don’t Take the Sugar Bait (DTTSB). DTTSB is a series of sweets advertisements spanning the decades since the 1950s, marketed towards children. DTTSB pairs these authentic advertisements with facts and history about sugar overconsumption in a series of games designed to engage children in health education while merging critical advertising skills.

Smart Cookie is an archival advertisement from the 1960s for Nabisco cookies designed to “play” similar to pin the tail on the donkey, except modified to include the grams of sugar in each cookie and facts about sugar and health from history. The piece is an inkjet print, laminated and mounted to metal, with magnets.

Artificial Sweetness comes from the series Don’t Take the Sugar Bait (DTTSB). DTTSB is a series of sweets advertisements spanning the decades since the 1950s, marketed towards children. DTTSB pairs these authentic advertisements with facts and history about sugar overconsumption in a series of games designed to engage children in health education while merging critical advertising skills.

Artificial Sweetness is a cube puzzle with 6 possible configurations. 3 of the configurations display archival advertisements of candy marketed towards children from the 1950s, while the other 3 display “fun facts” about the history of sugar and health.

What do you see?

 This is Dora Maar. Or at least, it is what the Internet suggests she is. 

This image was generated through a mathematical process: a code assigns a specific area to each image, proportional to how frequently that image appears when searching for Dora Maar on the web. The more visible an image is, the larger its presence within the composition. 

At first glance, the image appears to be an objective synthesis. In reality, it does not represent Maar herself, but the processes that shape her visibility. What we see is not simply an artist, but the outcome of decades of selections, interpretations, hierarchies, and repetitions that have determined which images, artworks, and narratives deserve to be remembered. 

 If this were your only source of information, who would you think Dora Maar was? Which aspects of her artistic production appear dominant? Which marginal, which absent? Does this representation confirm what you already know, complicate it, or create an entirely new understanding? 

The Research

What is it about?

 This research begins from a simple observation: searching for Dora Maar still means, more often than not, encountering Pablo Picasso first. 

Over the last several decades, exhibitions, publications, and cultural institutions have frequently described Dora Maar as an artist who has been “rediscovered,” or “re-evaluated.” Yet, the representation emerging from the image displayed here suggests a different story. Despite the growing critical attention devoted to her work, her public image remains deeply tied to the same associations that historically contributed to her marginalization. 

The thesis takes this contradiction as its starting point. If Dora Maar has indeed been re-evaluated, what kind of re-evaluation are we talking about? To what extent has it actually transformed the way she is understood and represented? And to what extent does it remain conditioned by the same interpretive structures that once reduced her to Picasso’s muse, lover, or biographical footnote? 

Rather than simply asking who Dora Maar was, this research investigates how, by whom, and through which mechanisms her story has been constructed, rewritten, and circulated over time. 

How was it conducted?

The research approaches these questions through three complementary perspectives. 

The first chapter reconstructs Maar’s artistic and biographical trajectory, distinguishing the historical figure from the narratives later built around her. Particular attention is given to the social, cultural, and institutional contexts that shaped both her career and her reception. 

The second chapter examines the broader transformations that made her critical re-evaluation possible, focusing on the institutional legitimization of photography, the emergence of feminist art history, and the changing structures of the contemporary art world. 

The third chapter analyzes how exhibitions, archives, collections, and the art market continue to shape and circulate Maar’s public image today. Rather than simply asking whether she has been re-evaluated, it investigates the terms through which that re-evaluation has taken place. The research suggests that corrective narratives may sometimes replace one form of marginalization with another: from the muse of a celebrated male genius to the symbolic example of a forgotten woman artist, without necessarily restoring the complexity of her artistic practice or historical experience. 

Why does it matter?

Cultural institutions do not simply preserve the past: they actively participate in constructing it. 

Museums, archives, universities, auction houses, digital platforms, and search engines influence which stories become visible, which interpretations acquire legitimacy, and which perspectives remain marginalized. For this reason, the issue extends far beyond Dora Maar. 

If an artist can be declared “re-evaluated” while still being represented through frameworks that limit our understanding of her, then it becomes necessary to examine not only the narratives institutions produce, but also the processes through which those narratives are created and maintained. 

Making these processes visible is essential for fostering transparency, accountability, and public trust. Not in order to establish a definitive version of history, but to better understand how historical knowledge is produced, how it is shaped by institutional structures, and how it might be communicated in more critical, responsible, and intellectually honest ways. 

Ultimately, this research is not only about Dora Maar. It is about the responsibility of cultural institutions in producing knowledge, and the public’s ability to understand how that knowledge is made. 

About Carlotta Assalto

Carlotta Assalto is an art historian and cultural researcher whose work explores the relationship between cultural institutions, artistic legacies, and systems of value production. Originally from Italy, she holds a degree in Management with a specialization in Art Markets and Museum Management, as well as an MA in History of Art and Design from Pratt Institute in New York. Her academic and professional experience spans galleries, auction houses, archives, art fairs, and research environments. Her research focuses on historiography, institutional narratives, cultural heritage, and the intersections between contemporary art, public discourse, and market dynamics. She is particularly interested in how institutions construct and communicate cultural value, shape collective memory, and negotiate questions of legitimacy, visibility, and accountability.

Abstract 

Sampling resembles collage in a lot of ways: both techniques are built around taking existing content, reframing it, repurposing it, and using it to build something new. Analyzed through their similar approaches to soundmaking through subversive methods, this thesis studies how noise can be a powerful art tool for resisting established systems of order. Emergent in different contexts, yet similar political strains, I argue that similar subversive methods in art can emerge in different contexts in similar ways, yet differ in their effectiveness depending on their relationship to their audience. Following a chronological thread from the avant-garde movement’s emergence in 1916, this thesis explores Dada’s relationship to sound, music, and its interests in bending them against reason through the particular experiments of artists like Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Kurt Schwitters. The second chapter follows the emergence of the self-proclaimed Neo-Dadaist movement in mid-century New York that sprung from the teachings of John Cage, who was deeply influenced by Marcel Duchamp himself. Apart from touching on some of the Fluxus Group’s work through artists like Nam June Paik and George Brecht, this chapter also focuses on the evolution of sound recording technologies and the possibilities this posed for popular music composition and consumption, particularly through Pierre Schaeffer’s Musique concrete. Lastly, the third chapter takes a closer look at historically Black methods of music making that have been considered subversive through the resignification of noise and standardized composition methods to finally land on Hip-hop at the later twentieth century. Following the genre’s establishing technique, sampling, as a guiding thread, the final also section presents Public Enemy and their heavily layered sampled sound as an example of the technique’s significance and versatility. 

About Lucía González 

Lucía González received her B.A. in Art History from Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana in Mexico City and her M.A. in Art and Design History from Pratt Institute in New York. Her work mostly focuses on modern and contemporary art and culture, particularly music, Latin American art, and underrepresented cultural communities. Through an interdisciplinary approach, her research often explores unexpected connections between distinct cultural contexts to better understand the development of artistic practice across history and

communities. Her work emphasizes subversive cultural production and aims to make art historical analysis more accessible to a wider audience.