Art, Art History and Design, School of
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
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First Advisor
Walker Pickering
Committee Members
Dana Fritz, Sophie Isaak, Matthew Sontheimer, Katie Anania, Wendy Katz
Date of this Version
5-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Citation
A thesis presented to the faculty of the Graduate College of the University of Nebraska in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts
Major: Art
Under the supervision of Professor Walker Pickering
Lincoln, Nebraska May, 2026
Abstract
Part of the Family examines television as both a domestic object and a cultural force. TV was not simply something my family watched, but something we lived with. Through CRT televisions, VHS recordings, family photographs, altered TV Guides, fictional broadcasts, and immersive living-room installations, the project explores how television shaped memory, kinship, attention, and belonging in the American home. Drawing from my family’s archive of Chicago-area broadcasts recorded between the 1990s and early 2000s, the work treats VHS as a hybrid form of home movie, preserving the flow of commercials, news, station IDs, sitcoms, movies, and accidental overlaps that structured everyday viewing.
The exhibition includes three major video installations: Channel Zero, Problem Child, Problem Child, and Movie of the Week: Vynegar. Together, these works reconstruct and distort the language of broadcast television to reveal how entertainment, advertising, nostalgia, and ideology become inseparable. My mother’s Alzheimer’s disease, my experience of adoption, and my memories of family viewing rituals inform the use of looping, repetition, temporal drift, and fragmented archives. By inserting myself, family imagery, and collaborators into recreated television formats, I move between viewer, participant, and producer, questioning who controls the narratives that shape personal and collective memory.
Through domestic installation, mixed-media photographs, and participatory objects, I consider television as comfort and control, intimacy and hazard. Asking how nostalgia is manufactured, how memory is mediated, and how television became part of the family.
Advisor: Walker Pickering
Comments
Copyright 2026, Brian Garbrecht. Used by permission