Fine Arts Commons^™

Reimagining The Silver Screen: Contemporary Film Stills, Kyle Demartino

Senior Honors Projects

During the late 19^th century longer rolls of celluloid photographic film, and motion picture cameras were first introduced, which allowed for the capture of rapid sequences of still images at a relatively high speeds. The first films shown to audiences on a larger screen, although rudimentary, caused people to gasp or run from the cinema, as they believed the images on screen were real. As technology increased feature films progressed from only showing a simple static event to creating full stories spanning over various sets and containing multiple characters. With the advent of sound, filmmakers were given another tool ...

Ua68/1 Potter College - Dean, Assistant Deans & Committees, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Finding Aids

Unprocessed records created by the Potter College of Arts & Letters Dean, Assistant Deans and Committees.

• Series 1. Cultural Enhancement Committee
• Series 2. Fine Arts Festival

Revitalizing Cities: Adaptive Reuse Of Historic Structures, Sara E. Sharpe

Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2012 Digital Publications

Adaptive reuse is employed when revitalizing an existing infrastructure while maintaining important aspects of the cultural architectural heritage and promoting sustainability. The option to turn away from older structures and build new is a large problem in cities such as Detroit. Historic preservationists are trained to observe a structure’s potential before walking away. Meanwhile interior designers obtain the skills to rejuvenate such buildings for a new use. Case studies have shown the benefits of these two professions teaming up to apply adaptive reuse on historic structures for modern purposes. By studying the creative space planning methods and historic preservations ...

Incorporating Historic Preservation Into An Accredited Interior Design Program, Reasoning And Application, Jenna M. Woodcox

Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2012 Digital Publications

Due to the recent decline of the economic situation in the United States, more credibility needs to be established in regard to the professions that are deemed “luxury career paths”. This essay focuses on interior design and historic preservation integration. This literature is intended to bring more credibility and awareness to the interior design field to show outsiders the potential and importance it holds. Most importantly, this proposal is for current designers who are not working in the field, to not give up hope for their design careers and think of ways to reinvent themselves (like choosing a specialty) to ...

Art As Affordance, Katherine Leduc Ms.

Totem: The University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology

Abstract. – This paper examines art as a property as opposed to a noun, in an attempt to answer, or nullify, the question “what is art?”. It will examine the way in which objects, observers and artists relate to one another through their materiality, how this communication may be interpreted as a type of action, and how such an action illuminates the affordance of ‘art-ness’. Concluding this discussion I will address some potential problems with the art as affordance definition by contrasting it with some of the more dominant art theories.

Sites Of Passage: Art As Action In Egypt And The Us-- Creating An Autoethnography Through Performance Writing, Revolution, And Social Practice, Tavia La Follette

Dissertations & Theses

As a performance artist and arts activist I present my research project to the audience in performative writing, a postmodern research style that advocates the integration of the artist/researcher identity. In the summer of 2010, I left for Egypt to teach a performance and installation art workshop at Artist Residency Egypt, the first step of the Firefly Tunnels Project, a virtual and tangible exchange between artists in the United States and Egypt. This venture began with the awareness that the 10th anniversary of 9/11 was approaching. What I could not have foreseen were the other world events that ...

Arts & Letters: The Magazine Of Potter College At Western Kentucky University, David Lee, Dean, Kelly Scott, Managing Editor, Potter College Of Arts & Letters, Western Kentucky University

PCAL Publications

No abstract provided.

Path - Loss, Gregory S. Cook

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity, Department of Art and Art History

The term “path loss” could be considered somewhat idiomatic – it refers at once to a very specific technical definition and an easily relatable conceptualization, but perhaps its most immediate read is one of defeat, literally “a path, lost.” I find this beautifully problematic. In its original end as a term in radio-engineering, it’s used to describe the attenuation of a signal through physical space on its way to a receiver – that is, “path loss” describes some kind of thin-ness of intensity, the parts of something snagged along the way; parts caught in bedrock, lost in soil, or tangled in ...

Change And Durabilty Within Senegalese Fashion And Identity, Camille L. Wright

Undergraduate Research Symposium

This text is the documentation of formal and informal research on the fashion culture in Dakar, Senegal, drawing upon personal interviews, secondary sources such as essays, photography, and fashion illustration, and observation of Dakar Fashion Week 2012. The text focuses on personal identity in fashion, globalization, and the Western construction of African “authenticity” and “Africanness,” as well as the challenging of that construction by fashion designers from all over the African continent. Inspiration for the research was born from experiences with black youth in Chicago, Illinois and the growing trend amongst them of promoting black identity through afrocentric clothing, as ...

Romantic Exoticism: The Music Of Elsewhere In The Nineteenth Century, Josiah Raiche

Senior Honors Papers

Western art music has drawn on many sources. One of these is non-western music, which can be integrated into European classical music tradition in the form of exoticism. This paper will highlight musical elements used by composers seeking to create exoticism, examine selected works, and note common elements of western music that have exotic roots. In the nineteenth century, there were three general trends in exoticism. The first, non-musical exoticism, utilizes conventional western music alongside extra-musical exotic elements. Romantic exoticism portrays distant lands using musical elements, drawing these from the audience’s perceptions of the music represented. Realistic exoticism attempts ...

Your Turn, Samuel J. Berner

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity, Department of Art and Art History

I pursue art that makes physical contact with the viewer, art that needs to be touched and changed by its surroundings and inhabitants. Relational Aesthetics are integral to my conceptual approach. I value the life my work takes on through the viewer, stemming from the object. A temporal grouping of participants, their reaction and effect, complete the work. Interactions take a democratic approach, giving every viewer a chance, to promote dialogue through shared experience.

My work challenges the notions of art and the relation of preciousness and object. Through participation I hope the viewer asks: What is art? What is ...

Half True - All Real, Matthew G. Blache

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity, Department of Art and Art History

I love making things up.

I am a fabricator of moments: a storyteller who relies on construction rather than incantation. As a child, making was labor, holding ladders, watching, and helping carry heavy equipment. It was a requirement, a rite. Making was also playful - stacking something on top of something to make something. That something could be anything. There was, I learned, a satisfaction in bringing an object into the world. It was a marker of my existence.

“Half True-All Real" is a convergence of my compulsion to make things and my desire to give form to my narrative, which ...

The Ambiguous Graveyard: Religious Sympathy And Erotic Desire In Sir John Everett Millais's The Vale Of Rest, Greg W. Spangler

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity, Department of Art and Art History

The Vale of Rest, 1859, despite or because of its oddities—two nuns digging a grave—was in its own day understood as a touchstone for Sir John Everett Millais and his career. Its critical reception in 1859 was hostile, with charges of “ugliness,” but by 1897, it was hanging in the Tate museum. Scholars and biographers have accordingly seen it as a turning point in Millais’s abandonment of Pre-Raphaelite realism for a more aestheticized and bourgeois style. The subject of nuns has led other scholars to investigate Millais’s sympathies with the Oxford Movement, the midcentury effort to ...

Many Worlds Converge Here: Vision And Identity In American Indian Photography, Alicia L. Harris

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity, Department of Art and Art History

Photographs of Native Americans taken by Frank A. Rinehart at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898 were then and continue to be part of the construction of indigenous identities, both by Anglo-Americans and Natives. This thesis analyzes the ramifications of Rinehart’s portraits and those of his peers as well as Native American artists in the 20^th and 21^st centuries who have sought to re-appropriate these images to make them empowering icons of individual or tribal identity rather than erasure of culture.

This thesis comprises two sections. In the first section, the analysis is focused on the ...

Dream State , Audrey L. Stommes

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity, Department of Art and Art History

My work explores the moments before falling asleep as well as my dreams, allowing my experiences and subconscious to emerge in the paintings. My bed has become my sanctuary and permeates my life and work. The tight confines of my studio apartment push all conceivable activity to, on, or around my bed. The paintings, in turn, have become a visual diary of the occurrences within this space, allowing me to explore a fundamental human experience of dreaming.

My current work translates my experiences while I employ visual language from past work developed from observation. I combine techniques of drawing and ...

Threshold, Alexandria Knipe

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity, Department of Art and Art History

My decisions in the studio are tied to my experiences outside of the studio, intertwining the complex relationship of memory and sentience. Each work precariously balances between softness and rigidity, vessel and sculpture, monumentality and intimacy. These tensions transform the familiar into the enigmatic and are an integral part of my philosophical approach to making.

Soft curves and billowing planes are punctuated by the structure of defined edges, hard angles, and areas of dark shadows. This duality suggests two worlds, one of feeling, intuition, sensuality, and dreams, the other of intellect, reason, structure, form, rhythm, and geometry.

By contradicting the ...

Agravio: A Technical Direction Project, Erica G. King

Student Research, Performance, and Creative Activity: Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts

Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (UNL) opened the Fall 2012 season in the Howell Theatre on October 04, 2012 with Agravio. My thesis project was the technical direction of Agravio. As the technical director, I took the designer’s ideas and made them a reality on stage. My responsibilities included organization, construction drawings, ordering supplies, problem solving, supervising build and the budgeting of time, people and money. In the course of this thesis I will discuss the process I took to assure the set would be built on time and under budget ...

When The World Went Quiet, Megan E. Mcleay

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity, Department of Art and Art History

The basis of my work is a consciousness of the presence of the soul and the choices that compose our reality. I use light to illuminate space and manipulate human emotion. The landscapes are mirror images of my mind, dreams both light and dark, of beauty and brutality, the expression of my invisible world. My practice uses destructive drawing actions to produce creation and suggest emotional trials. My images represent this deeper bond when all emotions are felt and experienced together. The figures are not saints, but are meant to generate the idea of divinity within the restraints of the ...

Geographies Of Story, Emma Nishimura

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity, Department of Art and Art History

Family stories are told and retold, evolving over time with new details and other layers. One story merges with the next, while photographic images, oral and written accounts dissolve into the fabric of memory, building the family narrative. Both individual and collective, these histories continue to grow and transform as a new language is created, one that is visual, written, spoken and unspoken. As the complexities develop, the impact of these stories on our lives and the need to make sense of them in relation to our own identities increases. Yet, as I wade through my own family’s tales ...

"You Know Your Voice Is Kind Of Nice When Your Mouth Isn't Screwing It Up.”, Jennifer Anne Grant

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

We watch movies, mostly for the mind-blowing special effects, extraordinary actors and actresses, and/or the unforgettable stories, but when do we ever remove the visual and just listen to the scripts or embrace the noise? In my work, I stray from the visual studies and draw that which I hear. I am interested in capturing the visual formation of words that become noise as they build up in my memory. As the mouths group together, so then does all of the character dialogue, ultimately resulting in incoherent noise.

Through growing up around parents who started an audio visual business ...