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Winter Solstice, Jingwen Cao
Winter Solstice, Jingwen Cao
Masters Theses
For a long time, I have been thinking about what contemporary photography is, what its position is, and what the relationship is between artists and audiences. At the same time, I was developing my concepts and photographic directions and trying to make my work and my perspective on photography relevant. Winter Solstice includes a series of essays that locate my thinking and my work. Its title references the longest night of the year.
The position of photography has changed significantly over the past few decades. The way people read photos is also changing. Perhaps because of reverence for art and …
Modern Times, Will Beattie
Modern Times, Will Beattie
Masters Theses
At the intersection of glass, photography and sound lies issues of perspective, framing, and information. These factors as well as the conceptual space between object and image offer an opportunity to explore the way we register narrative through contradicting signifiers. Glass historically has been used as an instrument to reveal spaces, moments, and phenomena previously imperceptible to the human eye. This rendering of previously unseen spaces through language, technology or vision, may work to reorient the viewers’ perspective and allow for a new understanding of the world. The power of disruption as a potential catalyst is central to my studio …
America, Dreaming., Sarah Meftah
America, Dreaming., Sarah Meftah
Masters Theses
There is a version
of America
that exists
only in dreams,
a kind of folklore,
shrouded in images,
technicolor interiors,
wrapped in plastic,
ghosts of recent past
to haunt and guide;
a constant reminder.
Wishful thinking
a constructed imaginary,
one I can hold in my hand.
Popular culture and spectacle, America and the domestic ideal, capitalism and the collective unconscious of a national identity. As an artist, I am interested in the myriad images that manifest for a viewer when they think of the spectacle of American pop culture, its domestic archetypes, and the material worship it revolves around. My …
Intangible Shells, Elena Bulet
Intangible Shells, Elena Bulet
Masters Theses
The following essay mimics the constant disruption of a fragmented memory. It reflects on intergenerational gendered family dynamics since the civil war and dictatorship-era Spain and how memory articulates narratives of belonging within the matrilineal lineage. A process of excavation departs from personal memories, familial archives, contemporary interviews, theoretical readings, photographic reenactments, and observations of traces in the landscape of Almayate’s town. The author attempts to retrace her roots, as well as her family history, acknowledging the impossibility of making personal histories tangible.
The Day The Door Flew Open, Clara Delgado
The Day The Door Flew Open, Clara Delgado
Masters Theses
A journey is a chance to better oneself, to go and come back anew. This kind of pilgrimage does not only happen in the spectacular realm of far-off travels. Often it happens where the soles of one’s feet comprehend the curvature of the land. Then, without forewarning, time opens a sliding door that appears on the recognized ground. Stepping in, the world is realized in a new way.
The writings that strike my tongue with ravishing bittersweet flavors are fictional narratives, with voyages that sail through day and night, disguised as lovely prose while critically probing the world. This written …
Mason & Dixon: History And Identity In The Borderlands, Drew Leventhal
Mason & Dixon: History And Identity In The Borderlands, Drew Leventhal
Masters Theses
My project, Mason & Dixon, traces the footsteps of the original surveyors of the Mason-Dixon Line and their search for purpose in the borderlands between Pennsylvania and Maryland. For the past 250 years, the Line has inscribed a violent and painful scar on the land, filled with memories and (re)written histories. Holding the legacies of slavery and colonial expansion deep in its soil, the region is now a visceral example of the ongoing divisions and conflicts around the past, the present, and the future of the United States. The friction is in the air, it is in the monuments, and …
Rememory, Jonathan Mark Jackson
Rememory, Jonathan Mark Jackson
Masters Theses
Rememory, coined in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, refers to the psychological action of placing forgotten or misplaced memories into a narrated context within the self. Rather than directly “remembering,” the characters in Morrison’s novel, like their author, rely on a web of socially produced or shared memories as a way to understand their past. This essay catalogs an on-going performance of rememory in my photographic work. Through an interrogation of physical archives, I remap the historic presences of Black life in New England. This research based practice takes me to the preserved homes and to the workplaces of my …
The Great Delusion, Beth Johnston
The Great Delusion, Beth Johnston
Masters Theses
The climate crisis is a wicked problem that poses many obstacles for action and understanding. This thesis is a non-linear accumulation of academic essays, interpolated with lists, anecdotal observations, data, and artwork that together explore the entanglements and complications of the climate crisis and my journey in making artwork as a response to those complications. The thesis surveys six bodies of artwork created over the course of graduate school, which use photography, sculptural installation, performance, and video to illustrate various topics and methodologies. Grounded in research on environmental justice, this essay explores temporal disjunctures, climate data encounters, the decolonization of …
Dead Letter Room, Allie Tsubota
Dead Letter Room, Allie Tsubota
Masters Theses
Dead Letter Room is a photographic and textual dialogue with images that emerge from the end of the Asia-Pacific Wars and World War II in the Pacific. These images are governed by the historical contexts that produce them; they are mediated by the explosive aftershocks of nuclear war, the transoceanic space of imperial desire, and the onset of oblivion in the aftermath of catastrophe. Throughout this essay, I present the historical, image-theoretical and psychoanalytical frameworks that meaningfully guide my address of historical images and my approach to making new ones. With detours through various artists and theorists, I offer the …
The Reenactment : "Object" As Performance, Yue Jiang
The Reenactment : "Object" As Performance, Yue Jiang
Masters Theses
Throughout history, women have endured many obstacles placed upon them in both the private and public spheres. Women are pressured to achieve an ideal beauty standard and the expectation to fulfill the obligation of traditional domestic roles. As a 23-year old Chinese woman who daily faces these pressures, I intentionally critique them using my body as the site and the pressure as subject. Through acts of performance, using handmade and mass-produced objects consumed daily by women, I highlight the insidious pressures and expectations placed upon women’s bodies. By utilizing the format of photography to document the discomfort of “wearing” or …
Imaging "Interracial": Performing Racialized Desire In "Interracial" Heterosexual Hardcore Pornography, Megan Christiansen
Imaging "Interracial": Performing Racialized Desire In "Interracial" Heterosexual Hardcore Pornography, Megan Christiansen
Masters Theses
“Interracial” is a term that implicitly categorizes sex between Black cis men and white cis women within contemporary hardcore pornographic video. The artistic and research practice described in this paper is located in, influenced, and driven by pornography itself as an important entry point for thinking about racialized desire.
Looking with care and criticality at the pornographic representation of sex between Black men and white women can allow us to think about how issues of gender and race are key in constructing notions of desire and taboo in America. Through this work I begin to consider how racism and misogyny …
Wounds Need Air, Camilla Jerome
Wounds Need Air, Camilla Jerome
Masters Theses
A personal essay in the first-person voice describes the artist’s lived experience navigating the American medical industrial complex with multiple misdiagnosed chronic pain disorders. The artist’s personal story spans thirty years and is contextualized by illness, gender, race, age, ability, class, and is grounded in the artistic expression of self. Descriptions of mental illness, physical disability, and access to proper healthcare are weaved into an examination of embodied knowledge.
Martyr (In Exile), Xinyi Mei
Martyr (In Exile), Xinyi Mei
Masters Theses
Xinyi Mei (meimei) is an image maker. She looks to make assessments on the moments when consilience is woven through viewing and limited imagination. She also uses images to examine the precarious state of identity flowing between the individual and the collective. She usually practices with video installation, photography, and writing.
Becoming A Precipice: The Liminality Of Queer Cruising, Chance Deville
Becoming A Precipice: The Liminality Of Queer Cruising, Chance Deville
Masters Theses
In “Becoming a Precipice,” I am analyzing queer cruising areas as psychological landscapes from a queer, non-binary perspective, counter to heteronormative conventions. These landscapes are important to me, as being a full participant in this culture is my main form of sexual interaction. My inquiry is prompted by the need to interpret how this specific form of desire molds itself into visceral responses and manifestations of performative masculinity. Entering the cruising landscape itself increases awareness and intensifies the senses, in a space where signals become critical in determining transactions with other individuals beyond spoken language. These somatic reactions are uniquely …
I Just Can't Get You Out Of My Head : Frenetic Vortex, Animal As Image - Field Notes (1989-2021), Steffanie A. Padilla
I Just Can't Get You Out Of My Head : Frenetic Vortex, Animal As Image - Field Notes (1989-2021), Steffanie A. Padilla
Masters Theses
This essay is an attempt to describe a hypnosis induced by media through the accumulation of images in everyday life starting the day I was born. Raised by television and the internet, I go through a chronological timeline of my life selecting banal memories to showcase how violence to animals became neutralized/rendered invisible. The work is primarily concerned with mental health while focused on the youth, ecological destruction, and how sensory overload keeps us from knowing ourselves. The motivation of this paper is to better understand how our environment shapes our reality by using a psychological, media theory, and cognitive …
Fossil Morphology, Leah Zhang
Fossil Morphology, Leah Zhang
Masters Theses
Fossil Morphology is a multi-media art project based on my research on the coal mining area in East Pennsylvania. It consists of a film, a series of photographs, and a sound installation. Together, the three works form a dialog among each other about the ecology and aesthetics of the region’s coal mining landscape and its underground.
For a long time, coal, as an raw material for mass production, has been understood and examined from its economic values and social meanings. The gradual abandoning of this material by our industry therefore leads to the seemingly inevitable decline of the coal mining …
First Sweet Truth, Jessina Lynn Leonard
First Sweet Truth, Jessina Lynn Leonard
Masters Theses
First Sweet Truth is a photographic dialogue with mystical texts written by Christian women in the late Middle Ages. These visionary accounts are not only significant historically—many of them are the first known texts to be written by women in the West—but, moreover, provide a foundation for non-anthropocentric knowledge. In our contemporary landscape informed by algorithms and data-driven forms of knowledge, mystical experience inherently defies the logic of our time. Today we largely assume seeing to be a disembodied act. In a constant flow of images, our eyes skim, understand, move on—what the philosopher Laura Marks calls seeing-as-mastering. In contrast, …
These Inadvertent Marks, Thomas Wilder
These Inadvertent Marks, Thomas Wilder
Masters Theses
These Inadvertent Marks is a photographic investigation of scuffs, stains, residue, scratches, holes, and blemishes as a complex set of inadvertent marks which possess an inextricable relationship to the human intention to find and make meaning in the world. Excluding marks that are clearly the result of highly substantial accidents, I look to consider those which are largely deemed trivial and peripheral as a means of renewing perception and surrendering to the unconsidered. The photographs included are the result of a process of discovery and close consideration through wandering in my local surroundings: urban streets, private homes, airports, bathrooms, alleys, …
The Knots On The Underside Of The Carpet, Lily Colman
The Knots On The Underside Of The Carpet, Lily Colman
Masters Theses
A woman enters marriage, guided by a rich lineage of strong, lifelong marriages, yet is also caught in a web of misplaced ideals and expectations deferred by culture. She carries the weight of these histories, as well as her own expectations. Throughout history, women have been minimized and shoved into their own separate, domestic “spheres.” Future generations inherit these traumas, which in turn affects how they experience life. When a woman realizes her marriage is not what it should be, that she has been turned into a flat and unfulfilled version of herself and ultimately files for divorce, the weight …
Make Yourself At Home, Han Seok You
Make Yourself At Home, Han Seok You
Masters Theses
“Make Yourself at Home” is a personal journey of self-documentation to discover a definition of “home” and family, and to reenact the missing scenes from my youth. As a child who grew up in many different places far away from home, I missed out on many family moments and a sense of belonging. As a South Korean passport holder who has lived mostly in North America, my identity is unresolved. I find myself in the balance between Korean and American. With the progression of this project, I try to reconcile my past in order to gain an understanding of my …
Amor Fati, Keavy Handley-Byrne
Amor Fati, Keavy Handley-Byrne
Masters Theses
I am searching for a way to grieve someone I never knew. At age 26, I was lucky enough to meet the woman who would become my wife. We quickly discovered that there were many coincidences and connections that could be found when we examined our lives a little more closely – our parents shared a wedding anniversary, our fathers each had five siblings, Alice’s parents shared their names with my grandfather and his second wife (Walter and Joan). But what quickly became apparent to me were the links between Alice’s mother and my grandmother. Apart from photographs and memories …
How To Be Simultaneously Precise And Nondescript, Mckinzie Trotta
How To Be Simultaneously Precise And Nondescript, Mckinzie Trotta
Masters Theses
As I stood by my car, I kept coming back to the phrase. It is more difficult to hit a moving target. This time, it was not just a passing platitude. I thought more. Just as it is more difficult to intentionally hit a moving target, a moving target is simultaneously more difficult to intentionally miss. It might be easier to hit a moving target if what one is really trying to do is miss it. Isn’t this why car accidents happen? People hit the thing they are by all means trying to avoid. Everyone is in motion and despite …
Between Gods And Animals : Deconstructing Heteronormative Masculines Pursuit To Sustain Power, Shawn Bush
Between Gods And Animals : Deconstructing Heteronormative Masculines Pursuit To Sustain Power, Shawn Bush
Masters Theses
Between Gods and Animals is a multi-angle exploration of the Caucasian heteronormative male’s endless pursuit to sustain power and inability to live by their own set of codes. Using the Grecco Roman period as an origin point, this work examines the forces that have historically perpetuated the myth of masculinity. Relating past ideals of maleness to contemporary standards this thesis illuminates patriarchal structures that are systematizing masculinity while providing a space to normalize a gamut of masculines. The visual works included act as an introspective approach in accepting the complacency of my existence as a man who has operated within …
Pretend Power, Rosemary Engstrom
Pretend Power, Rosemary Engstrom
Masters Theses
This is an anti-thesis about being a tender and tuff queer femme bitch with mental illness trying to exist in this shitty world by creating worlds of their own. With bright colors, video performance, dress up, collage, and a lot of feelings, I turn power structures on their upside. They become a game of pretend where queers run the show. It’s ok to be sick. It’s ok to be vulnerable. It’s ok to be queer. You’re not alone.
Naturally Occurring Form, Margaret Kristensen
Naturally Occurring Form, Margaret Kristensen
Masters Theses
I am trying to find art in my body, attempting to create images that personalize and desexualize the nude. Between the body of images that we have access to via social media and the images we have seen of female nudes, emphasis is put on finding the form to be within western society’s acceptable range of beautiful; so rarely do we find organic figures existing in the photographic environment.
Having been taught how to photograph the body by looking at images of women taken by men, I don’t see myself. The photographs by Edward Weston and Irving Penn look, gaze, …
Once There Was There Wasn't, Svetlana Bailey
Once There Was There Wasn't, Svetlana Bailey
Masters Theses
Objects, places and events that occur in separate times and places can coexist psychologically. My work supposes that this coexistence can be reconciled with photographs, which, although normally fixed to particular times, locationsand stories, are nevertheless able to travel, in boxes, or as mind images on overlapping currents.
I return to places of imaginative influence in my life: to my grandmother's house in the Russian countryside where I spent my summers as a child, and to my parents' home in Germany. Through this journey of return, I am transported in time, as if opening a time capsule. Here I discover …
Interaction Between Human Experience, Landscape , And Coffee Production In The Blue Mountain Region Of Jamaica, Shohei Yoshida
Interaction Between Human Experience, Landscape , And Coffee Production In The Blue Mountain Region Of Jamaica, Shohei Yoshida
Masters Theses
In today's coffee industry, individual farmers’ identities are hardly visible from the products we buy. Each coffee farmer has different lifestyles and methods of coffee farming. Such information about farmers can make each cups of coffee potentially unique in consumers’ experience. However, there are barriers which make consumers blind from the identities of the farmers making their coffee. I will explain about the barriers, and introduce the way to make consumers associate individual farmers' identities with each cup of coffee they drink. This thesis mainly consists of two parts: a theoretical part and a poetry part. There is a small …
Mid-, Elise Kirk
Mid-, Elise Kirk
Masters Theses
This thesis explores a personal and cultural tension between rootedness and restlessness, set against the backdrop of my native Midwest. The large-format portrait and landscape photographs reflect a paradoxical longing to pull up stakes and put down roots, and the liminal state we often dwell in as a result. Playing on the conception of the Midwest as a transient zone to be passed through en route to somewhere else, the work refers to the pervasive belief that our greatest hopes and potentials can only be realized in some other place, at some future or past time. It’s a syndrome I …
Isolation Nation: Representations Of The United States In The Photographs Of Rémi Noël, Pascal Aimar, Yves Marchand And Romain Meffre, Mary Elizabeth Downing
Isolation Nation: Representations Of The United States In The Photographs Of Rémi Noël, Pascal Aimar, Yves Marchand And Romain Meffre, Mary Elizabeth Downing
Masters Theses
Visions of America vary greatly. There is an extensive variety found in foreign and domestic portrayals of the United States and these representations are affected by both pro and anti-American ideologies. Such juxtapositions can be found in contemporary French photography. In analyzing the works of photographers, Rémi Noël, Pascal Aimar, as well as the collaborative works of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, I will argue that their vision of America is influenced by their own perceptions and their viewpoint as French artists. These photographers seek to picture their versions of Texas, Detroit, and New York in ways that reveal aspects …
Seven Seas Without, Ambereen Siddiqui
Seven Seas Without, Ambereen Siddiqui
Masters Theses
In my work I explore dislocation within a diasporic experience. I use personal and familial accounts of migration, assimilation and reverse culture shock to examine and add to the collective narratives that underlie national as well as individual identities. In reconciling my own sense of loss in having moved away from Pakistan, I appropriate histories, recreate memories and envision futures to mould the present. Investigations of personal experiences inform an analysis of the larger social, political and historical contexts. In my practice I use video, animation and new media technologies to “re-view” archives. My sources include audio and text from …