Digital Commons Network^™

Perry B Marks • Artist Statement, Perry B. Marks

CGU MFA Theses

My work cuts through the distractions and travesties of modern American life, revealing the nonsense that multinational corporations spew. Consumption as a way of life is now a familiar part of the global culture. Political and corporate icons have made their way into individual identity by means of branding, product placement and crossover promotion. They are ubiquitous, embedded in myriad experiences to attract, entertain and satisfy artificially stimulated appetites. Similar to placating drugs, they function like the bread and circuses of the Roman Empire.

My process breaks down elements and symbols from the past and present, remixing old and new …

Why Not Kinkade? An Evaluation Of The Conditions Effecting An Artists Exclusion From Academic Criticism., Kelly Drum Moran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Though prevalent in non-academic debate, the subject of Thomas Kinkade and his artwork is discernibly absent from the realm of academic discourse. This paper is an investigation into that condition and the circumstances for its perpetuation. Central to the issue is Kinkade's art theory and practice, which establishes his coexistence in both the art and business domains, creating inherent contradictions. Further explication is revealed through an evaluation of the contemporary criticism of four posthumously canonized artists: William Blake, Phillip Otto Runge, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Rousseau. Consistencies among them correlate to the treatment of Thomas Kinkade, suggesting a common …

Discovery Through The Art Of Making, Andrew Daly

All Theses

Between growing up on a farm, and working in a saddle shop, I have been conditioned to understand my environment in an empirical and experiential manner. There is a certain kind of education that can only be achieved through working with your hands, and the knowledge obtained in that fashion cannot be sufficiently translated through the written word, or with the use of technology. It is important to me to keep this type of education alive.
I have disciplined myself to learning the traditional printmaking techniques of engraving and lithography for their laborious hands on qualities so that I can …

Magic Meat, Adam Stewart

All Theses

Have you ever been really secure in what it means to be? If not, it's ok. If so,
don't be delusional. Either way, I have created a series of devices that present the
challenges of self-division and fluctuation, and reveals this complicated human
characteristic not as a product of being broken, fractured, and dysfunctional, but as an
advantageous ability to adopt complex multiple perspectives, sometimes simultaneously.
These devices can be thought of as 'gym equipment' to exercise the more
immaterial, invisible portions of ourselves. Strengthening the connections between
physicality and the mental/emotional aspects of our bodies demonstrates an ability to …

The In-Between, Derrick Logan

All Theses

This body of work explores my perception of the landscape. I traverse spaces that exist in the in-between. My work functions on a personal level in that I am seeking a reconnection with my surroundings through a physically intense interaction with the land. It is an attempt to reengage the land, to form knowledge, awareness, and a sense of belonging.
Through performance I explore transcendent potential within the landscape. These performances of slow walks through the landscape are documented through video. Viewing of the documentation grants points of projection for the viewer. The videos both engage and undermine how people …

Go Big Or Go Home, Concepcion M. Sanford

CGU MFA Theses

My work embodies my response to the American Dream. Big houses, flashy cars and glamorous lifestyles are what many of us work for. Coming from a military family, I grew up moving often without an idealized connection to a single structure. In response to this, I use artwork to create translucent, ephemeral sculptures of these items, revealing them as tangible, hollow shells of their former selves. Clear plastic and packing tape sculptures leave a ghostlike reflection of what was. These shells of inanimate objects are personified through their creation, a process similar to what I compare to mummification or embalming. …

Mihyang Kim - Mfa Thesis Show, Mihyang Kim

CGU MFA Theses

My works are a sort of journal, which is truly personal but at the same time belongs to the public. All of my experiences are connected to the outside world and each piece is connected to a story. I paint abstract emblems that stem from my interactions with people expecting their deaths, living as immigrants, or being disconnected from their pasts. My work represents my sympathy and compassion for the pain they have. I record my emotional and experiential individuality, based on the situations in which I have found myself. The precarious state of nature and the human environment are …

Religion As Aesthetic Creation: Ritual And Belief In William Butler Yeats And Aleister Crowley, Amy M. Clanton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley created literary works intending them to comprise religious systems, thus negotiating the often-conflicting roles of religion and modern art and literature. Both men credited Percy Bysshe Shelley as a major influence, and Shelley's ideas of art as religion may have shaped their pursuit to create working religions from their art. This study analyzes the beliefs, prophetic practices, myths, rituals, and invocations found in their literature, focusing particularly on Yeats's Supernatural Songs, Celtic Mysteries, and Island of Statues, and Crowley's "Philosopher's Progress," "Garden of Janus," Rites of Eleusis, and "Hymn to Pan." While anthropological definitions …

Potential Space, Jocelyn R. Grau

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Flotsam & Jetsam, Nicolas S. Shake

CGU MFA Theses

My work is pastoral and post-apocalyptic with one foot firmly planted in historical painting and the other in traditional still-life, so it is entropic and sanguine, gleeful, despondent, and matter of fact. It comes at a point in time when the fiction of Nature as a refuge is no longer viable, persuasive or convincing. But rather than rehash this fact, my work celebrates the pastoral’s everyday ordinariness, the capacity for the viewer to experience something wondrous amidst decline. I focus on the cast-off household and utilitarian items that show up in the desert on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The …

Dislocation, Kevin E. Moore

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Tangled Up In Blue, Bryan E. Miller

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Front, Jennifer Mitchell

CGU MFA Theses

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Parts Of The Sum, Andrew Cho

Art and Design Theses

Parts of the Sum is an installation of ceramic, wood, and drawn components which examines the symbiosis of individual and cultural identity: a recursive relationship which engenders unceasing diversity. The installation uses patterns and rule-based compositions as vehicles to address the development of complexity from compounded simplicity as it relates to personality. An immersive meta-network that emulates the complexity underlying identity, Parts of the Sum ultimately relies on the active participation and inclusion of the viewer for completion.

La Modernité Esthétique Chez André Malraux : La Quête Du “Primitif”, Yulia Draganova Kovatcheva

Doctoral Dissertations

André Malraux is a prolific French writer, adventurer, art historian, statesman, and Minister of Cultural Affairs for 11 years (1958-1969). Malraux was a man of action in the service of noble causes. In 1933, one of Malraux's most famous novels, La Condition humaine (Man's Fate), was published. It won the Goncourt Prize and established his international reputation. Born on November 3, 1901 in Paris, he was a son of the 20^th century. A witness to the history of his century, he left to the future generations a literary heritage of great importance. His main preoccupation was the “mystery of …

Temporalidades Múltiples En La Encrucijada: Representaciones Artísticas De Lo Afro En Latinoamérica Y El Mundo Hispánico Durante La Actual Etapa De Globalización, Eduard Arriaga

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Nowadays talking about national, racial or gender identities and its representations is quite difficult due to current global-local dynamics of cultural formation. In that sense, approaching to these issues requires the use of comprehensive theories and complex tools in order to forge a better understanding. My dissertation explores the artistic representation of ‘afro’ in the Hispanic world (or the culture built upon the legacies of Africans and African-descendants in the New World and especially in the Caribbean) during the current stage of globalization. In my dissertation, I argue that afro-artistic contemporary representations are overcoming traditional ones -bound to race as …

Between Scenic Designer And Director: The Collaborative Process Of Four Productions, Elizabeth R. Muller

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents the unique designs for four productions: Ain’t Misbehavin’, Is He Dead?, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and Legacy of Light. Presented here are the research images, conversations, situations and their resulting designs represented in my renderings and photographs of the fully realized production. Throughout, I will state my objectives in bettering the quality of interaction with each director and my reflections on the ongoing process of creating a trusting and balanced collaborative process, one that expertly serves the production.

Quiet Moments: My Artistic Exploration, Neena Jube

Honors Theses

I believe that fate led me to dive into my artistic study on the human form. I firmly believe all things happen for a reason. Every year, every day, every hour, every minute, and every second of my life play a significant role in how things turn out. Looking back on the past two decades, there have been numerous accounts that have brought me to where I am today. The classes I have taken and the interactions with various artists have led me to pursue art, one of my strongest passions, and have influenced the development of my current collection …

Bleach, Kim E. Alexander Jr.

CGU MFA Theses

The work in this exhibition investigates the unique potential for drawing to articulate the ideas and attitudes of architecture and objects. Accepting drawing as operating in conceptual space, I explore experimental loops within the visual logic of that territory. The work asserts the material fact of drawing and its connection to forms of fabrication in other materials like wood, paint, metal, and plastic. Like painting and sculpting, the drawings occupy an intangible state between objects and ideas. I embrace this irresolution. Please see Download button in top right corner for the full statement.

"We'll Make Our History": Israeli And Palestinian Youth As Poetic Agents, Caleb Hamman

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

This paper, in short, analyzes and argue for recognition of a particular form of political action as exercised by a particular type of political agent in the spatial and 3 symbolic context of "Israel-Palestine."

Here's Looking When, Erica Ryan Stallones

CGU MFA Theses

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Back From Port-Au-Prince, Kerry L. Rodgers

CGU MFA Theses

In this body of work I aim to bring the possibility of intimacy and empathy to a city reeling from recent devastation. Before last year’s earthquake, Port-Au-Prince had been famous for its bright splashy colors; vibrant shades coated the homes, shacks, buildings and buses. But everything lost its color when it crumbled. The ubiquitous gray rubble is a constant reminder of the immense human suffering that the quake set into motion: death, displacement, and disease. Please see Download button in top right corner for the full statement.

Climate Change, Mfa On Ice, Christy Roberts

CGU MFA Theses

Within the confines of the body there is a longing to connect. I believe that this is a longing to connect to place and often to the others who occupy it. When this longing is not satisfied, either by place or people, tension arises. I create experiences, images, and objects that explore the tension between the body and its social, physical, and natural environment.Please see Download button in top right corner for the full statement.

Andre Goeritz Mfa Thesis Statement, Andre M. Goeritz

CGU MFA Theses

I strive to make objects of no complicity--arranging smaller parts to create larger forms, or allowing the combination of parts to allude to narratives without linearity, foreshadowing, point of entry, point of attack, conflict, context, or catharsis; a state of sustained stillness until equilibrium is no longer a desired result, at which point the parts of the whole can be dismantled, reconfigured, made anew. I think about words, rhythm, inflection, resonance or timbre, vocal dissonance, dismembered disjointed utterances, and repetition--somatic impulses guided by intent. Intention translates into action--an act of will, a willful act, an act of willful intent--a marker …

Nano Rubio Mfa Thesis, Armando Rubio Jr.

CGU MFA Theses

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Stories Of Loss And Gain, Amy L. Huynh

CGU MFA Theses

My work is about the inevitability of change and the concomitant longing for stability. It explores various manifestations of loss – death, physical distance, erasure – and the desire to hold tight to something that is already passing. The videos in this body of work convey intensely personal narratives about cultural assimilation, sexual orientation, and departure, in hopes that my own vulnerability can reveal something that is not identity-specific but human. Please see Download button in top right corner for the full statement.

A Voice From The Dust, Gian Pierotti

Theses and Dissertations

We shall not starve. We shall not lack shelter. We shall have a hearth. Awake self reliance! Our art is for feeding, warmth, protection. Ceramics– our temporal salvation. Clay– our material life-force. Transformed by fire we arise with the skills of the ancients! No longer will we live in obscurity. To the deskilled, your fate is at hand! You have chosen alienation, distraction, banality, and sloth. Embrace your digital false Gods and die or be reborn to the natural physical world. Now, together we complete our reason for being. We create a new world of kinship. A hope for the …

Producto Centro Americano : Made In Honduras, Alma Leiva

Theses and Dissertations

PRODUCTO CENTRO AMERICANO: MADE IN HONDURAS By Alma Leiva Master of Fine Arts A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2011. Thesis Director: Robert Paris, Professor Kinetic Imaging / Photography and Film I was born in 1973 in Honduras, a country under military regime. In 1982 after 20 years of military rule, Honduras finally had democratic elections. During that decade, and as a consequence of the cold war, the kidnapping, torturing, murder and disappearance of civilians became common practices among the Honduran military. …

For The Future: An Examination Of Conspiracy And Terror In The Works Of Don Delillo, Ashleigh Whelan

English Theses

This thesis is divided into two chapters, the first being an examination of conspiracy and paranoia in Libra, while the second focuses on the relationship between art and terror in Mao II, “In the Ruins of the Future,” Falling Man, and Point Omega. The study traces how DeLillo’s works have evolved over the years, focusing on the creation of counternarratives. Readers are given a glimpse of American culture and shown the power of narrative, ultimately shedding light on the future of our collective consciousness.

Eulogy., Megan Renee Levacy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses the search for identity which underlies her Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Eulogy, hosted by the Carroll Reece Museum on the campus of East Tennessee Sate University, Johnson City, Tennessee, from March 8 to May 6, 2011. This exhibit contains works which explore the artist's relationship with the natural world, ornithology, philosophy, psychology, poetry, and related personal influences.

The artist's thesis work consists of paintings, drawings, and photographs. The artist references her own investigation of poetry, philosophy, psychology, and personal history which have shaped a private sense of awareness. Also reviewed are the influences of artists …