Digital Commons Network^™

Rupture, Dionis Ortiz

Theses and Dissertations

I am an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, video and installation. I employ these mediums to create a coming of age story as a Dominican New Yorker, exploring masculinity, vulnerability, the supernatural, family, and religion, as well as how culture plays a role in my community and in my life.

Object Language/On Defining Sculpture, Thaddeus Barak Moore Celia-Zoellner

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Object Language

In the current era we in the Western, developed world, have almost universal free and uninhibited access to almost every piece of information in existence. Increasingly, regardless of the source, material presented to us as fact has become increasingly suspect. Together, these two things mean this endless stream of data is useless. The question is how to combat this decline, how to reverse the process of a meaningless, constant data-dump. The answer lies in the language used to communicate information. Language is the means by which we communicate complex ideas and knowledge from person to person. Language is …

The Body Carrying Its Otherness, Rae Yuping Hsu

Masters Theses

Prosthesis points to an addition, a replacement, and also an extension, enhancement, transcendence.

Prosthesis points to subtraction, the creation of a void, a need, disability, deficiency.

This thesis explores the ways in which the body and technology come into contact with one another and are incorporated, integrated, fused and reciprocal. It seeks to negotiate the slippage space within these contrasting stand points and propose that the body and its otherness was always already one.

Thesis, Robert Joseph Anspach

Masters Theses

This is a seemingly didactic account of the nature of the mind, art, and the end of the world. It is probably not very good and the author does not stand by what is stated within it, but has to turn something in in order to graduate. Maybe do not read it.

Dermis, Julia Betts

Masters Theses

I create situations that hold onto spaces or things. That psychic energy can be transferred to a viewer. I’m curious about this transference and The Aesthetics of Disengagement and the empathetic nature of making work.

I often engage the viewer through overwhelm (such as: texturally, amount of objects, length of performance, mark making…) to create anxiety/tension around a body or around how a body relates to space. To create this overwhelm, I use ritual, repetitive labor that is between obsessive and meditative. In this boundary, I wonder about whether art is healing or can be. I’m interested in creating spaces …

The Past Is Today, Afra Al Dhaheri

Masters Theses

Process is a vital element to construction and deconstruction. Yet, materiality serves as a vehicle to expose the aesthetics developed by the process. However, without memories, the construction of these bodies of work would have never been conceived. Rapid change was the initial experience that formed memories in the first place, it was inevitable. Hence, an adaptation method had to be examined. The trees had proven to be worthy of the investigation. The trees required materials and the materials demanded a process. Process developed the work and the work had to have context. Context evolved from memory and required more …

I Am Come Back To You, Eleanor Tomlinson

Masters Theses

Through various forays into psychological science and affect theory, this work attempts to understand how quick and simple commodities might coalesce into a complex portrait of individual and collective memory.

Tendrescopic Endeavors And Other Dynamics, Jared Akerstrom

Masters Theses

Tendrescopic Endeavors and other Dynamics is an attempt to coalesce the ideas and skills that have been flying around my studio over the course of the last year into a single project. A trip to Storm King Art Center and ideas of modular making began a cycle of exploration into the way custom fittings could create light-weight and transportable sculptures. Developing a greater ability to digital model and create my own unique parts has been the charge that I have built this work upon. Science and the devices that facilitate scientific discovery act as the embodiment of the desire to …

Sight Lines, Makia Sharp

Masters Theses

Through investigations of liminal phenomena, this written thesis explores the direct and indirect effects of time, light, architecture , and metaphysical space. Along with the work, it is an attempt to create a framing around these phenomena which are both banal and transcendent, and which exist of the edge of perception.

Phantom Nation, Peter J. Hoffmeister Mr.

Theses and Dissertations

Phantom Nation is a sculptural installation consisting of “document-objects,” sculptures created using declassified and leaked U.S. government documents as their source.

Beginner's Mind, Martin L. Benson

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My art distills my relationship to spirituality, digital culture, and the practices and side-effects therein, into a simplified visual language. The work manifests in the form of paintings, drawings, and light sculptures. Meditation and mindfulness training are a large part of my influence and interests. I often wonder how mindfulness practice can be mirrored in my artwork, not only in my process for creating the work, but also with what the resulting imagery does for the viewer. My intention is to provide an art form that invites one to look and experience one’s own capacity to observe, without the need …

"Collaborating With Chance", Alyse Gellis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Have you ever felt a desire to get lost on a journey much larger than yourself or experience the thrill of the unknown? Think about a time you intentionally swam further out in a lake or the sea than you have before, or drove down a road without knowing where it would take you, or wandered around a new city without a map. Think about how you made the decision to push those boundaries. Remember how taking that risk in pursuit of an unknown made you feel, because it is that thrill that drives my artistic practice. Through my thesis …

Purge, Amanda Foshag

Graduate Theses

This thesis statement describes the eight hanging veil-like structures and sculptures that constitute my thesis exhibition work; it further comments on the movements, philosophy, and personal sensibility that most influenced the art making: Process Art, Taoism, and my own empathetic experiences. The movement of Process Art is discussed in reference to materiality and the physicality that goes into making these pieces. The influence of the Taoist philosophy is discussed in light of the unity and balance found in the combination of dualistic materials, and their relationship to one another, in these sculptural forms. Lastly, this statement expresses how the emotional …

Weaving In The Third-Dimension, Jill Gottschalk

Graduate Theses

This thesis statement, along with my final exhibition of sculpture, is the culmination of my graduate studies at Winthrop University. My reflections upon my sculpture, as well as connections to other artists within the art-historical canon, have provided me with a foundation which will remain fast in the years ahead. Throughout my studies, my work has evolved and changed, yet commonalities remain. It is these commonalities, aspects of my own style that remain constant, that are explored: ambiguity, transparency, use of textile materials and repetitive units. My recent body of work, and the subject of my thesis Weaving in the …

Dinner, Daniel Reuben Baskin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dinner is an interactive exhibition which presents appropriated works of art collected and hung in a clustered salon style, as well as a fully realized recreation based on a 16th century Dutch banquet still-life, which presents guests with meats, cheeses, fruits, vegetables, breads, and wine to share and imbibe. Dining ware is provided for guests at the entrance to the exhibit, as are suggested topics of conversation, which are presented on slips of paper for guests to carry with them throughout their time in the space. Within the collection of wall-mounted works are references to ancient Greek and Roman marble …

A Fly Has Died A Splendid Death In A Pool Of Strawberry Ice Cream., Miranda L. Becht

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Humans have evolved an overwhelming awareness of self, other, life, and death. We have learned to selectively process information and to replace dissociated memories with less disturbing ones. We have evolved this ability to deceive ourselves, thus producing a personal reality that is innately false. As a society we tend to idealize our vision of the past, particularly our vision of home. Our idealized notion of home presents itself as a supposedly traditional form of domestic life, but bears little relation to the way people actually lived. This concept of a cozy home full of family love is an invented …

Influence: Art, Activism, And Identity As Seen Through A Neurodivergent Lens, Anna Matejcek

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

My world has no separation between art, activism, and identity. As a neurodivergent individual, I experience life through hyperactive senses. It is an intense reality; however, it is the force that drives me to create, explore, discover and learn. My mind works like a kaleidoscope, always awash in colorful abstract images, each twist or turn reveals a new perspective. For my MFA visual art thesis, I used my neurodivergent brain as the foundation of my study. The concept formed in my mind first as blurry shapes and colors, and then came into focus as I began the process of gathering …

It Takes A Long Time To Move, Issy Marie Cassou

Senior Projects Spring 2017

A doorway.

A grave.

A body.

A scar.

The hole was dug in my studio a month after I had moved in and the day after I burned my foot in the metal shop. A new navel sits on the top of my left foot and a raised scar marks an accidental grave in the ground of studio ten in Red Hook, New York. It came from water. A leaking pipe. Blueprints of the building did not point here as the source of the water main because there are no blueprints. Instead, a pipe in the corner and a shot …

Elements, Stephen Anthony Geffre

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis consisted of a gallery exhibition titled “Elements” featuring sculpture created by Stephen Geffre for his Master of Arts in Sculpture from University of Minnesota-Mankato, located in Mankato Minnesota. The exhibition ran from October 16, 2017 to October 31, 2017. The artwork explored sacredness---sacredness rooted in the natural, sacredness rooted within the minds of human kind, sacredness in the form of the classical elements Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

All the work was created in part with material that was going to be thrown away or sold at a fraction of its cost because of its imperfection.

Make It Point, Peter Avery Schreiber

Senior Projects Spring 2017

1. Finding a Willingness to Disappoint

Steel, latex paint, wood. An object that attempts to make a self-sufficient structure from a series of failed attempts. Hardware shows as an answer, but over and over, an answer isn’t enough. More than anything, each answer is the sum of its shape and weight, not its’ prescribed function.

2. My Own Sliding Self-Respect

Steel, enamel, latex paint, wood, light fixture, colored light bulb, extension cord. Scale is a measurement of self-worth. Some people know exactly how much space they take up, others lack a sturdy shape in their volume. And light takes up …

Pebbles Is A Girl That Doesn't Know Anything, Grace A. Kubilius

Theses and Dissertations

I am not quite sure how to be a woman. It’s complicated, contradictory and highly surveilled. I make videos, sculptures and wearable objects that attempt to rationalize my female identity. The body is a sustained fixture in my work: as an armature, as an absent actor for constructed environments, as fragment and as the literal inclusion of my image. It is through these various modes of dis/embodiment that I negotiate the complexities of gendered existence. Crumbling ceramic and paper objects, pieced fabric forms, videos, beauty products, and delicate flowers reference splintered narratives and unwieldy terrains. I consider the idea of …

Median, Amy Petit

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Median reflects my observation of changing forms of communication in the digital age and how that affects personal interaction, expression, and the value that we assign to objects. The sculptural objects in this exhibit stem from my formative experiences of frequent relocation, as well as a professional background in the fast-paced technological world. These factors, combined with contemplative and repetitive sculptural practices, help illustrate the anxiety and discomfort that can accompany rapid advances in communication practices. My research situates my work within contemporary art by drawing on the relevance of indexical signs, reliquaries, current discussions of communication in the digital …