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Sincerely, Regan Leigh Chrisman-Boman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sincerely is a compilation of diaristic narratives depicted through the lens of a distorted reality. This distortion is manifested through the influence of social norms placed on me and my gendered experience of this world. The stories I tell through my work deal with the mind, body and daily life. My images within this body of work are sourced from my written journal, and creating a visual diary. I provide a space of relatability for the viewer to feel seen and not alone through the discussion of personal experiences that are both unique and not unique to myself. The work …

Passages, Arden Carlson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Passages is a collection of wood sculptures and drawings by Arden Carlson, exploring a mesh of southern intimacies and queer musings; underpinned by the logics of belief, grief, and love. The result is a tender field of angelic birds fixed in flight over gnawed surfaces of grain and graphite. The following dissertation details the artist’s logic during the construction of the visual art thesis exhibition, Passages. The writing is composed in an autoethnographic format, backed by supporting anecdotes and creative methodologies that help to route the operational modes used. Near the end of this writing, you’ll find an additional addendum …

Pillowfort Logic, Victoria Barquin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I use textiles, everyday objects, and my own studio archive to create assemblages that are both abstract and familiar. I follow my body, operating without preconceived notions as to what the materials are or how they should act, creating a liberatory practice of working intuitively, embracing play, and challenging my own conceptions of what’s possible. In my thesis exhibition, Pillowfort Logic, this methodology of reimagining what already exists is fundamental. The construction of these pieces mimic the act of building a fort in the living room where chairs are walls and blankets are roofs. The parts may return to work …

Porous, Janice A. Agustin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Porous presents sensory modalities to convey the theme of memories, creating an active site that resists erasure as an immersive art installation. Through a collage of multichannel video performances, Porous is an assemblage of fragmented, abstract, and non-linear aspects of memory. These videos are portals to sites of resistance, collaged and entangled as the essence of memories. All videos touch slightly on the wall, displaying their interconnectedness. The videos coexist with layered audio and live water ambient noise.

Overpowered, Benjamin Pearey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Overpowered is a temporary installation of a tiled living room, modeled after my own living room in a rental apartment in Fayetteville, Arkansas. It takes its name from a kind of sci-fi electro-disco love song released in 2007 by Roísín Murphy, who breaks down romantic attraction into preprogrammed meanings, chemical needs and matching data - and her sense of losing control, succumbing to the overwhelming forces at play. My installation is borne from a similar feeling. It is a continuation of a navigation of daily life under the pressures of external forces exerted by the various systems that underpin society …

Standing On The Edge Of A Dream, Parto Ahmadpour Mobarake

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Standing On the Edge of a Dream delves into the intricate tapestry of lived experiences shaped by relocation, emphasizing the nuanced space that exists between reality and imagination. As an individual who has undergone the transformative journey of immigration, I recognize that the concept of relocation is like standing on the edge of a dream. This notion becomes a living structure, intricately woven with threads from our past, present, and future. My artistic exploration extends beyond my artworks, yet it remains deeply rooted in my personal narratives. The artworks in the exhibition continue to draw inspiration from personal memories and …

Ways To Endure, Skyler J. Maggiore

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ways to Endure is an installation of photographic-based inquiry through light, steel, emulsion, glass and, healing welted skins. Topographic satellite imagery of flood-prone peaks and valleys within my rural home county are abstracted by a Google Earth glitch. Acupuncture needles are a reminder of sorrow and relief and an indicator of boundary and location. The Fresnel lens has a historical responsibility as a beacon, a tool of survival and navigation, originally used to concentrate and project light in lighthouses, and fire starters in survival kits. The Fresnels are fixed in front of intimate portraits to magnify and abstract. This installation …

Death Like Dreaming, Junli Song

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This written dissertation accompanies my thesis exhibition, Death Like Dreaming, which took place in Sculpture Gallery in the spring of 2023. This show was the culmination of my MFA at the University of Arkansas and centered around my most recent zhenmushou sculpture. I began making these mythical beings from my mythology in the summer of 2022. This essay will provide theoretical, historical, and personal context to the work, expanding upon my artistic journey and exploration during my degree. I will focus on my conceptual and formal decision making, areas of research, and discuss the world building and personal mythology that …

Forever, Thomas Long

School of Art Undergraduate Honors Theses

FOREVER is a short drama film following a time loop within a mysterious cabin that acts as a catalyst for the film's own loop format, with the work repeating and building upon itself in a gallery setting. This is a culmination of a multimedia research process between cinematic arts and experimental media practices.

2+2=Cake: A Book Of Conversations About Possibilities In Business And Art, Elizabeth Ann Alspach

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

2+2=CAKE is a toolkit for people interested in creating their own economic container to support their livelihood. Calling upon the entrepreneurial experience of artists and creatives who founded or run organizations, the book and accompanying workbook and motivational posters serve as an incubator, buoy, and affirming resource for those looking to build the economic container in which they make their livelihood.

Weather Permitting, Acadia Kandora

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Weather Permitting is an exhibition of objects and printed matter, primarily in the form of publicationsthat examine my relationship to nature and the idea of nature as both sanctuary and armor. At a young age, my parents would take my on a hike every Sunday instead of going to church. The hikes acted as a weekly pilgrimage deep into the woods and a ritual instilling the idea of nature being a place of spiritual refuge and retreat. A sanctuary - of course, weather permitting.

As I grew up and experienced hardship, my first instinct has always been to go hide …

Turning Tides, Lauren Whitmore

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Synthesizing personal narrative, sociological phenomenon, and art historical analysis, Turning Tides examines the relationship between power dynamics and sexual assault. Inequities and injustices with regard to the handling of sexual assault, and the norms that allow this issue to be pervasive, are woven throughout the cultural fabric of the United States. Feminists and feminist activist artists in the 1970s brought the matters women, and other marginalized groups, were facing to the forefront of political and social dialogue. The resulting work left an indelible mark on public perceptions and allowed for other activists and artists to build upon the foundations; creating …

In-Between Spaces, Trinity Kai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In-between Spaces is a paper based in personal narrative that uses Critical Race Theory and art to analyze the history of photography and systems of discrimination facilitated by hegemonic culture. Body is at the center as a symbol of the physical and psychological impacts systemic inequalities have on people that are classified as other and how one can be absent and present in institutional and public spaces.

Optimistic And A Little Flawed, Christian Schultz

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The accompanying exhibition to this paper, Optimistic and Flawed is a body of drawings and objects that explores the liminal space between playful and intended actions. Inspired by the landscape of the yard and the actions that take place within, the goalless play of a child and the laborious maintenance of an adult. The value of play exists within labor and labor exists within play. The drawings observe this through the theoretical framework of telic and paratelic motivational states as they relate to drawing. Abstracted yards and landscapes provide a space for the labor of the hand. A history of …

Perceiving Mathematics And Art, Edmund Harriss

Mic Lectures

Mathematics and art provide powerful lenses to perceive and understand the world, part of an ancient tradition whether it starts in the South Pacific with tapa cloth and wave maps for navigation or in Iceland with knitting patterns and sunstones. Edmund Harriss, an artist and assistant clinical professor of mathematics in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, explores these connections in his Honors College Mic lecture.

Gut Feeling, Shelby Fleming

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Through curated space and abstracted sculptures that reference the viewer’s body, Gut Feeling, acknowledges the viewer’s experience as the focal point of the exhibition. I designed the whole gallery as an art object using both positive and negative space. The sculptures act as one unified system that guides the viewer through the exhibition in a counterclockwise rotation inward. The viewer follows the forms as they puncture through the walls of the gallery, while considering their own body’s relationship to the forms being seen. The viewer directly engages with the scale of the forms, sculptural placement, and sensory experience; these elements …

The Branch On Which The Blossom Hangs, Thomas Sterling Coffey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Branch on Which the Blossom Hangs is a body of paintings which address the relationship between landscape or physical presence and the primary experiences of emotion and perception. Through this examination of phenomenology and the malleability of the perceptual apparatus, the paintings express my feeling of dislocation caused by a cycle between depression, dissociation, and mental well-being. They question how an individual relates to their environment. The paintings seek to elicit the allusive and embodied qualities of poetry, framing and evoking a broader experience without defining it. By using the recognizable visual language of landscape, abstracted to the point …

Intervals, Nicolette Bonagura

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Intervals investigates the complexities of visual perception, using the camera as a tool to document time and light. The photograph is a restricted experience dually existing as a physical impression of light onto a surface and a fixed representation that makes light tangible. Using time and light as my subject and ritualistic gathering as my methodology, I explore the complexities of control and perception as they relate to photography. I collect images of everyday occurrences; and then use those as material to both compress and expand time. I do this to interrupt our understanding of it. Documenting time through mundane …

Zitrone, Chase Roy Young

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis paper is to describe the elements and narrative associated with the exhibition, Zitrone, as well as the conceptual and theoretical ideas influencing the work. The exhibition is centered around an invented singular historical object in the form of a vehicle, and a museum display of artifacts, documents, and recreations intended to validate the existence of the central subject. Drawing on the work of artists Marcel Broodthaers, Damien Hirst, and David Wilson in conjunction with theoretical writings of Dave Hickey and Lewis Hyde, the exhibition seeks to address the perception and presentation of history as absolute …

Seeing Through Feeling, Christopher Mitchell Rodgers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this paper is to describe both the inherent formal qualities and conceptual framework that are addressed within the exhibition, Seeing Through Feeling. The exhibition is centered around the methodology of making, collection, and display all through the one singular positioning, the object. The objects within the exhibition are either handmade or collected fragments that weave together around the singular position of craft and history under the pretense of how our understanding of time may not always be true. The thesis breaks down key components through specific themes into the categories of the hand, eye, symbol, object, value, …

Give Up The Ghost, Hannah T. Mcbroom

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Give Up the Ghost is a series of six paintings created in Fall 2018 and Spring 2019. The paintings are an introspective examination of transgender subjectivity in visual narrative.

In this paper, I separate the personal and research through first and third person, similarly to how I separate imagery and mark making in my paintings. The paper is broken up into a description of the project, the history and theory which informs the work, and why painting is used to describe bodies and spaces.

Give Up the Ghost refers to giving up social expectations as determined by gender. The paintings …

An Echo From The Living Room, Makayla Nichole Songer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We are unable to interface with reality as it is. Everything that encompasses our understanding of reality and ourselves—from our physical perceptions to our memories—are subject to innate flaws that make a complete grasp of reality impossible. an echo from the living room is invested in the idea that reality itself is malleable, taking influence from altered states of reality such as dreams, nightmares, and memory. Drawing from the personal experiences of recurring nightmares and living in a haunted house, as well film, the uncanny, and the multiple, an echo from the living room strives to create space for these …

Audio To Architecture: House Music As A Form Generator, Polina Timchenko

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Contemporary music undergoes similar process of creation to that of the design process through computation and variation. House music as a representation of contemporary culture has a layered structure that allows specific characteristics to identify it as house music. Song components can vary and mix in different orders that form new dynamic compositions. I am going to explore the idea that every house music component can be translated into geometry with the use of parametric design techniques.

Modified Landscapes, Esther Nooner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Modified Landscapes is a body of work that reflects serious thought regarding Nature and its future. My personal experience and beliefs are at the core of why I believe this subject to be of great importance and why it will sustain many artists’ investigations for the time to come. The influences that informed this process are explored through experiences I had traveling, reading and exploring the photograph as a material object. The manipulation of the photograph is meant to question the beautiful, untouched scene and break the Romantic gaze that is historically tied to representations of Nature and insist upon …

Picturing A Nation Divided: Art, American Identity And The Crisis Over Slavery, Louise Michelle Hancox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1859, Arkansas artist Edward Payson Washbourne produced a lithograph entitled the Arkansas Traveler. Based upon a popular folktale originating twenty years earlier, Washbourne used the image to convey his understanding of the crisis over slavery in the western territories. Artists in north and south responded to the slavery debate with differing visions of the western landscape; one characterized by free labor, the other slave. Westward expansion also highlighted debate about Indians, long relegated to the role of the savage other by the myth of the frontier. Yet, on the southern frontier, the conversation was different, as slaveholding Cherokees claimed …

Offside, Maryamsadat Amirvaghefi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

OFFSIDE highlights the parallels between artists and athletes, as well as the professional communities in which both operate. Through the use of sports related imagery, the artwork explores notions of ethnicity, gender, and politics. While much of the work is autobiographical, OFFSIDE is able to consider the political and personal views surrounding a young Muslim woman while lives with constant uncertainty in the United States and trying to start a career in one of the most competitive cultural fields.

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 …

The Life And Work Of George Dombek, Jeffrey Scott Ramsey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

George Dombek is an accomplished artist who graduated from the University of Arkansas with degrees in Architecture and Painting. His career as both professor and painter has taken him around the world and produced a substantial body of work. This work seeks to examine his art in a larger art historical context and consider the development of the subjects and style of his paintings over the span of his career.

Tableau Vivant [Living Picture], G J Christopher Drobnock

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With an overwhelming concern for functionality, the design world and industrial production have moved far beyond the pure necessity of the handmade object. With the paper coffee cup, disposable utility is the primary goal; afterwards the service is performed and the thing is discarded. On the other hand, the clay object can be used and reused allowing a personal relationship to form between the user and the object, the maker and the user. My work is meant to reconnect us with the haptic; the tacit knowledge of the physical. I want the user to think of a place beyond the …

Void Loop ( ) {, Jonathan Barrett Cromer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Void loop is an exhibition that addresses the dynamics of survival through an investigation of power, predation, migration, destruction, and renewal. As an installation of sculpture, video, and sound, the work on display explores associations between the human and natural worlds that inform who we are as individual, Social and biological beings. The repeated code surrounding the “void loop” title is a basic call and response serial communication between the microcontroller and the sensors. It commands the microcontroller to infinitely loop all code following the function, mimicking the repetitions of a pulsing heart. For the exhibition each piece is based …