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Shade, Jonathan Bolton
Shade, Jonathan Bolton
All Theses
SHADE is an exhibition of graphite pencil drawings that place viewers on the precarious edge of meaning. Techniques of representational drawing such as form and perspective vaguely allude to latent, traceable narratives, then destabilize the viewer’s search with confounding two-dimensional spaces, and loosely defined forms. Small, mundane scenes such as campsites, diners, and bars, are enveloped or obscured by dense, graphite expanses of skin-like surfaces. These elements destabilize viewers’ convenient categorizations of darkness, fog, or space. The identifiable scenes have reduced contexts: facial expressions, interior décor, and landscape features. These are obscured or withheld to reduce visual justifications for the …
Popular American News Media Explained Through Visual Arts: Using Drawing As A Tool For Humorous And Obligatory Cultural Critique, Joel Murray
All Theses
Through my drawings, I focus on jostling the passive American viewer out of her/his complacent acceptance of the images delivered by popular media outlets. Using humor as a multi-functional tool, I combine and reinterpret recognizable media artifacts to comment on the content that makes up American culture. This body of work is a cultural critique, pitting the ridiculous and superficial entertainment we (Americans) so easily ingest against current and crucial moments in time (i.e: political protests, violence, death, etc). Often times, the current media landscape is saturated with fast-cycling images and stories that do not promote careful contemplation. Instead, these …
Invisible Labor And The Preservation Of Dignity, Laken Bridges
Invisible Labor And The Preservation Of Dignity, Laken Bridges
All Theses
My art seeks to question the social value of labor. Throughout history, labor hierarchies influenced by social class and economic stigmas have informed how laborers are viewed in the United States. Physical jobs such as menial and domestic work are a common form of invisible labor that experience debasement and stereotyping. In my art, I use labor-based and ordinary objects as a metaphor for the worker, linking the value or disposability of the object to the societal value of labor. This critique of labor is enhanced by the manipulation of text, by the formal tools of scale and perspective, and …
Contested Grounds, Carly Drew
Contested Grounds, Carly Drew
All Theses
My drawings reference the American landscape tradition and Regionalism to comment on contemporary rural experience and highlight our interactions with nature. I do this through utilizing personal and family history to develop imagery that documents the economic changes taking place. I discuss why the American landscape tradition is important for a cultural understanding of my work, how industrial language impacts our understanding of these spaces and finally how my work visually encapsulates the contrast between objective forms of mapping and the subjectivity of personal experience. These contexts help discuss some of the larger issues of land ownership and use by …
Deviant, Courtney Richards
Deviant, Courtney Richards
All Theses
ABSTRACT
I create portraits and self-portraits that explore the dualities of the western human condition, namely the deviant and the ideal, the refined and the unrefined, and the perfect and the flawed. Drawing on personal experiences with people considered outsiders or social deviants, I construct figures that embody the conflicting ideas inherent in these dualities. I explore these conflicts in drawings that are constructed with marks and shapes that are both basic and refined, and in photographs that use analytic documentation to describe social turmoil. I reference artists both contemporary and historical, such as Egon Schiele, Robert Longo, Kathe Kollwitz, …
Physically And Viscerally Made, Jenny Hutchinson
Physically And Viscerally Made, Jenny Hutchinson
All Theses
Through the mediums of painting and drawing, I seek to create a figure that communicates particular states of being relative to contemporary conditions in society. Today we are individuals consumed by visual media and interconnectivity. I question -in wake of those conditions- how often we are self-aware. By living our lives through these two devices, we increasingly satisfy external needs, but may neglect internal needs. This situation, I believe, causes a dislocation of mind from body, and allows us to behave body-less. The distortion that we feel viscerally and live physically is actualized through the paint and drawing mediums. An …
Mouthful Idol, Claudia Dishon
Mouthful Idol, Claudia Dishon
All Theses
In my work, I create an imaginative realm as a means to structure chaos. This fictional realm is a place to manifest my perceptions of the world. In alignment with my world view, the pieces exhibit multi-faceted sprays of information meant to explain a more rounded picture of reality. Mental clutter becomes visual clutter when realized in my prints. Recognizable objects, animals, foods, herbs, and written text are layered to form compositions that function abstractly at a distance. A closer inspection reveals identifiable forms within the layers of color and shape.
Haphazard imagery receives the same attention and support as …