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Arrival Of Spring, Ryan Johnson
Arrival Of Spring, Ryan Johnson
Theses and Dissertations
Ryan Johnson’s plein air paintings address a season of personal longing by relying on the empathetic power of observational painting. His current series of oil on linen panels, painted on site, track the transition from winter to spring in and around New York City. In “Arrival of Spring”, he reflects on the decisions made on site, art historical influences, and the hope of anticipation.
The Fuller The Bucket Is, The Harder It Is To Fly, Jacob Littlejohn
The Fuller The Bucket Is, The Harder It Is To Fly, Jacob Littlejohn
Theses and Dissertations
My abstract paintings are informed by the momentary sublime rooted in the vastness of the natural world. Based on imagined and real landscapes, the work evokes minutia and phenomena that affect our perceptions of reality, and signifies a longing to reconnect with the natural world.
Past And Future Winds, Alicia Ehni
Past And Future Winds, Alicia Ehni
Theses and Dissertations
Ehni’s thesis reflects on the role of wind to connect and transform. Looking at science and invisible forces like Earth’s magnetic field, her "Oculus" sculptures evoke old tools for orientation & migration. Birds, insects, plants, roads and sand, appear in a video and an experimental 16mm pinhole film of her bike journey along the Hudson River, NY. “Coordinates”, a magnetic drawing installation, addresses impermanence, attraction to land and fragility. Tracing memories of the Paracas desert in Peru, this thesis follows her interest in alchemy, ecology and the cosmos.
Affectionate Facsimiles, Julio C. Williams
Affectionate Facsimiles, Julio C. Williams
Theses and Dissertations
The paintings in Affectionate Facsimiles are journeys into the expansiveness of color and memory via the accumulation of gestural action. Sporadic freneticism is used to archive desire and time and their relationship to identity. Thin and translucent layers are built up in bursts of intensity as palimpsests of intentioned labor.
Place-Conscious Vs. Place-Bound, Julie Avetisyan
Place-Conscious Vs. Place-Bound, Julie Avetisyan
Theses and Dissertations
Julie Avetisyan’s installation of sculptures, paintings and printmaking works are driven by an exploration of constructed identity that is not place-bound, but place-conscious. In this paper, she explores how her art practice generates world building under the context of the Armenian Diaspora – considering histories of indigeneity, migration, and assimilation.
“This Little Patch Of Earth Is Inexhaustible”: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner And The Outdoors Movements, Erica Evans
“This Little Patch Of Earth Is Inexhaustible”: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner And The Outdoors Movements, Erica Evans
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis focuses on the influence of reform movements and hiking and mountaineering organizations on the life and work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. I explore how principles of these outdoors movements, including a healthy mind/body connection and rustic lifestyle, inform Kirchner’s works created while living in Davos, Switzerland.
Emotional Landscapes, Jin Young Jeong
Emotional Landscapes, Jin Young Jeong
Theses and Dissertations
“Emotional Landscape” delivers a sense of gravity, openness, and breathing space through oil paintings on linen of abstracted bodily forms. The imagery in the works generates an atmosphere where one can feel rooted and anxiety-free. The paintings invite a close read of the complexities of compounded affects.
Painting The City In Flux, Simon S. Smith
Painting The City In Flux, Simon S. Smith
Theses and Dissertations
In this paper, Simon Smith describes the way in which the cityscapes of New York serve as a source of inspiration for his painting process. The paper focuses on New York City's warping of time and space, and lays out how Smith sees abstract painting, grounded in a kind of not knowing, as an apt extension of or response to the experience of the city.
Tomtom Oracle, Grant B. Wells
Tomtom Oracle, Grant B. Wells
Theses and Dissertations
TomTom Oracle explores the conceptual and material processes throughout my body of work as an expression of a psychological tethering to a digital visual experience that removes us from the physical world.
The Dream Of Being Totally Open, Frederick Greis
The Dream Of Being Totally Open, Frederick Greis
Theses and Dissertations
This essay details four major themes in the paintings of Frederick Greis: spiritual experience, nature, pleasure, and humor. These themes are described within the context of the artist's main goal, which is to create an experience of profound unburdening.
A Personal Approach To Landscape: Empathy, Sentiment, And The Environment's Representation In Tumultuous Times, Lauren Hensens
A Personal Approach To Landscape: Empathy, Sentiment, And The Environment's Representation In Tumultuous Times, Lauren Hensens
Theses and Dissertations
My work approaches the multitude of personal experience within the landscape, considering its cultural representation, aiming to give the environment agency within these tumultuous times. The following text is a personal narrative, realizing the many lenses through which a landscape can be experienced, including analyses of artists, writers, and musicians who have represented landscape through their own individuality.
Polyanthroponemia: A Pursuit Of Mystery, Magdolene Dykstra
Polyanthroponemia: A Pursuit Of Mystery, Magdolene Dykstra
Theses and Dissertations
I wish I could believe in something. Having grown up in a religious household, I have continually teetered between faith and doubt. Landscapes seen and unseen are my last source of awe; here my doubt is suspended – for a moment. Using unfired clay, I create alternate landscapes inspired by sublime philosophy. The sublime experience is born in a sense of amazement linked to fear of something beyond our understanding or control. The amazing intricacy of microbiology, a whole universe existing alongside and inside us, fascinates me. The abundance of unfamiliar life in my work triggers a cautious curiosity. My …
Through My Window, Haiyin Liang
Through My Window, Haiyin Liang
Theses and Dissertations
I convey my thoughts through art jewelry; making jewelry is my language of communication and commemoration. Inspired by historical Chinese art and contemporary jewelry, my practice pays attention to bring classical Chinese aesthetics of hazy poetic and ideal arrangement into the contemporary jewelry field. The attention to detail refers to the quiet contemplation and emotional experiences encouraged by each of my works. Through my research, I use metalsmithing language to communicate with non-precious materials finding my own way of expression and meditation. Meanwhile, I build environments that display jewelry off the body in order to construct a picturesque landscape. The …
Southern Grotesque, Maggie Ellis
Southern Grotesque, Maggie Ellis
Theses and Dissertations
The scenes I paint are submerged in specific landscapes I have encountered in Georgia. Honoring my experiences from this vantage point, I depict the rough and tumble attitude of my upbringing that is at odds with a rarefied New York art world I currently live in.
A Chair In The Woods, Victoria Dolloff
A Chair In The Woods, Victoria Dolloff
Theses and Dissertations
Victoria Dolloff's MFA Thesis considers traces of play and perception in the development of her artwork, exploring the idea of reorientation through subtleties of the absurd. Her installation Untitled (Landscape) questions object as place and place as memory utilizing fragmentation as reconstruction.
Between Rock And Breeze, Lena Schmid
Between Rock And Breeze, Lena Schmid
Theses and Dissertations
My thesis project consists of a series of works on paper and songs about the collusion of the body and nature. I use a lens that both distorts and makes clearer the ineffable ways our bodies shake their boundaries, moving without us and within us.
Light And Space, Lindsay M. Burke
Light And Space, Lindsay M. Burke
Theses and Dissertations
I make visceral images that are simultaneously elusive and confrontational. They are in dialogue with the historical tradition of figurative painting and drawing, but also aim to subvert those conventions. I want to catch and retain, as long as possible, the attention of my viewer by creating a familiar space that is slowly undermined. In my works the human body is dispersed in space; plants and tree parts are stand-ins for human desires, and gender is assigned to fragments of the body and to objects, then withdrawn.
Climbing Mt. Rainier, Kathleen O'Connor
Climbing Mt. Rainier, Kathleen O'Connor
Theses and Dissertations
My work addresses notions of the American landscape through image, memory, and experience. Using found images, video, and a variety of materials to make objects I investigate the intersection of external representations of landscape in American culture and internalized desires of landscapes.
Literary Landscapes: Mapping Emergent American Identity In Transatlantic Narratives Of Women's Travel Of The Long Eighteenth Century, Leah Thomas
Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines intersections of the development of maps from the Native American-European encounter to the establishment of the New Republic and transatlantic British and American narratives of women’s travel of the long eighteenth century. Early European and American maps that depict the Americas analyzed as parallel “texts” to canonical and lesser-known women’s narratives ranging from 1688 to 1801 reveal further insights into both maps and these narratives otherwise not apparent. I argue that as mapping of the New World developed, this mapping influenced representations of women’s geographic and social mobility and emergent “American” identity in transatlantic narratives. These narratives, …
Like Alike, Jill Zevenbergen
Like Alike, Jill Zevenbergen
Theses and Dissertations
Like Alike explores notions of pleasure and beauty through an examination of mundane activity. Pleasure is simple, uncomplicated niceness. Pleasure is forgettable and related to the norm. Beauty is complicated and hardly predicted. Finding beauty in the banal provides an escape from mundane life. The banal, then becomes unforgettable. The nondescript, everyday experience becomes important and gains meaning. Like Alike's electronic format is adapted from the original format of an artist book.
In An Expression Of The Inexpressible: Even This Title Is Stolen, But I Chose It, Carmen Alis Mcleod
In An Expression Of The Inexpressible: Even This Title Is Stolen, But I Chose It, Carmen Alis Mcleod
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis provides a tour through an imaginary building that contains the work I have completed in the last two years at Virginia Commonwealth University. The body of the text provides a discussion of specific paintings as well as more general themes related to painting and art. The discussion includes thoughts on futility, desire, schism, the leap, collage, photography, materiality, painting, image, and landscape. The second part of the text is an abstract statement about the paintings included in the thesis show, Splinter Paintings.
A Key To All Mythologies, Theresa Frances Marchetta
A Key To All Mythologies, Theresa Frances Marchetta
Theses and Dissertations
Over the last two years(August 2006-June 2008) I have been engaged in landscape painting that takes an experimental approach to material. My use of acrylic, the plastic paint, combines landscape with distortion and artificiality. Plastic has lost the futuristic and hopeful appeal it had in the past but it might still be an apt material to employ for a truly American artwork.
Bounded Surface, Emilie Sayward Brown
Bounded Surface, Emilie Sayward Brown
Theses and Dissertations
The relationship between surface, perception, and structure has occupied my graduate studies. Locating, transforming, and transcending the surface requires play with perceptive abilities not only of vision, but of touch, hearing, and the other senses as well. How do the interactions of sense with the qualities of a surface determine our perception of the world? What role does the extension of the senses play in one's ability to perceive surface and structure? Using sense information gleaned from surfaces, the tectonics of our world are made visible. Might this relationship be played backwards as well? Composed structures produce surfaces upon which …
Toward A New Kinship Constellation, Nellie Helen Frances Appleby
Toward A New Kinship Constellation, Nellie Helen Frances Appleby
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis attempts to elaborate on my artwork during my graduate studies, while contextualizing it within the framework of the art world and the works of other artists. A main project during this time was to minimize the singular interpretation and framing of a fine art photographic print, while expanding its possibilities of meaning through the addition of important ephemera and objects such as plants, drawings, moving imagery, conversation and the unknown.
Invisible Green, Amanda Sauer
Invisible Green, Amanda Sauer
Theses and Dissertations
How is nature conceived today, a generation into the environmental movement? Many contemporary artists grapple with how to reconcile our inheritance of both a precarious natural world and the culture that created it. My work investigates the subtle intricacies of our relationship with nature. I use photography to develop a way of seeing that points to the often-unnoticed nature in front of us. In particular, my work recognizes and re-imagines nature's deep connections in the context of our ecologically changed world.
The Oldest Well, Saul Benjamin Becker
The Oldest Well, Saul Benjamin Becker
Theses and Dissertations
This body of work, representing the past two years, is focused on the idea of the composite landscape. This reconfiguring of the elements from the external world combined with invented places is a way for me to articulate the subtle transactions between the interior psyche and the external world. The way this new conglomerate space is represented is a result of my inquiry into the relationship between nature, culture, and the sublime. The place where the private acts of the studio meet the shared exterior world is where I find my intellect, fantasy, and sense of reality collaborating in chorus.
Escape Artist, Charles F. Gustina
Escape Artist, Charles F. Gustina
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis reviews the background, influences, and evolution of the body of work entitled Folia, which forms the basis for the candidate's thesis exhibition. It traces the development of the candidate's artistic inclinations from drawing to photography. Directorial and Pictorialist photography are discussed as forebears in the Influences chapter. Evolution of the Body of Work details how the current work grew from both the candidate's background and influences. A Brief Anthology of Quotations references Susan Sontag's influential work, On Photography, with quotations that have either influenced the candidate's work or reflect his perceptions of art and life. The balance of …
Magic Mountain, Diana Al-Hadid
Magic Mountain, Diana Al-Hadid
Theses and Dissertations
My installations are propositions for an imaginary world that relies on its own internal logic, a world of believability without recognition. While the work references landscape it also emphasizes its contrivance, as it is automatically estranged in an "unnatural" gallery setting. I subvert or de-familiarize the materials and processes that I use in the service of creating a fictitious environment. My places are impossible places. They are irregular, illogical, and unstable. Our imagination can be one of most dangerous things to psychological stability as it is an inventory of all things possible, no matter how irrational or improbable. The irrational …
Landescape, Dragana Crnjak
Landescape, Dragana Crnjak
Theses and Dissertations
Shape, color and line are three basic elements I use to explore the possibilities of visual language. The process in itself is important since what is left on the paper are simply records of moments from which a work is constructed. These moments are mixtures of my memory, my everyday observation, my struggles and hopes. The starting point is always in between known and unknown, and it is always a new attempt for clarity. Rather than expressing what I already understand and know, I have a need to change my working methods quite often in order to expand my own …