Digital Commons Network^™

L, M, N, O, P, Matt Jones

Theses and Dissertations

A meditation on my painting and drawing practice in relation to the work of Philip Guston, Nancy Spero, and Frank Moore, among others, just before and during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Several Houses, Anthony L. Cudahy

Theses and Dissertations

Within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the thinking that informed my painting practice fixated on the purgatorial temporal space of waiting, a questioning of utopian and apocalyptic impulses, and the preservation of deceased artists' archives.

For The Love Of Existence, Paul Joseph Vogeler

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, artist Paul Joseph Vogeler discusses his influences and current art practice. He covers topics like Catholicism and mortality, BDSM and erotic art, Tarot, spirits and the afterlife, photography and painting, and bones and relics.

Don't Forget Me, I Can't Hide It, Thomas H. Morrill

Theses and Dissertations

Memory, technology, and space are the metaphorical and material players in my work. The video represents an emerging consciousness stuck in a nostalgia-laced, self-referential, emotive loop. It weighs the probability of its experience of life as solipsism. The walls are facsimiles of walls.

The Potency Of Emptiness, Kennedy L. Bailey

Theses and Dissertations

I investigate language and neurology by integrating intangible personal experiences with painted manifestations of rupture within structures. I utilize a hyperbolic translation of white and black to investigate the dismantling of a structure as an explicit quotation of space, matter, existence, and mind.

Who's Mess?, Jordan Stohl

Theses and Dissertations

Sculpture, Video and Painting have become tools for mediating a hyperactive society fetishizing sensory overload.

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.

Loop, Lap, Leap, Hannah Schutzengel

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings use slow, subtle gestures to create experiences of quiet emotion: casual warmth and comfort, playfulness, ease. My focus is the irregularity of a poured liquid; the slow release of an ironed crease; the push and pull of care against things drooping apart.

Trackable Painting, Jisoo Hur

Theses and Dissertations

This paper describes how I suggest a way to read images in painting by supposing that the gap between paintings can have a new role in the reading. This process consists of three parts that go through references and titles of my paintings.

Umberto Boccioni's States Of Mind, Sonya Shrier

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Umberto Boccioni’s series the States of Mind (1911) and discusses how these works represent a breakthrough in the artist’s search to find a pictorial expression for concepts that occupied him throughout his career. The States of Mind exists in four complete iterations each comprised of three images: The Farewells, Those Who Go and Those Who Stay.The first set of oil paintings, begun in late summer of 1911, are in the Divisionist style and are in the collection of the Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan. A set of charcoal and contè drawings on paper, likely completed in …

Sex Is Always On The Table, Jordan D. Artim

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines my work parallel to the formal and symbolic qualities of Renaissance painting, specifically the work of Bronzino. Through understanding the visual representation of the queer community throughout art history, harkening back to specific artists such as Paul Cadmus and Robert Mapplethorpe, my work attempts to find new ways of representing queer experience that extends beyond eroticism and the sexual gesture.

Anywhere Out Of This World, Amanda C. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This essay discusses my paintings alongside Merleau-Ponty's theories of perception and the history of form and color in painting. The relationship between perception and color is examined in the work of Paul Cézanne, Hans Hofmann, and Luis Barragán, along with Henri Matisse's Chapel of the Rosary.

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

Theses and Dissertations

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.

Archaeology Of Social Patterning, Chase Bray

Theses and Dissertations

The episteme that created the grid as a structure for logic has been usurped. We compose meaning from an adulterated grid, or pattern. I process meaning through the abuse of acrid patterns and the grid, the reduction of imagery to silhouettes and by referencing both cultural and classical mythology.

On Memory And The Radical Black Imagination, Todd Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

On Memory and the Radical Black Imagination is an exploration of the personal, sociological, and historical elements contained within the art of T. Eliott Mansa (Todd Eliott Thomas) Mansa examines the memorialization of black death and the radical black imagination. included are illustrations of specific art works and descriptions.

Double Splinters, Theresa M. Daddezio

Theses and Dissertations

Awareness of matters outside oneself can be heightened by a repetitive task, one that requires a meditative focus on the rudimentary of movement. The construction of a line is a projection from a fixed point that creates a multiplicity of lines, synapses, and connective fabric in the mind that project outward to any possible or arbitrary point. When assembling our reality, our eyes operate as the mediators of such points, drawing in visual clues to the world around us. Sight is composed from the movement of light particles alongside of individual and collective memories that construct what is.

A Caprine Carnival: Goats At The Vālaikkāl Vāyil, Madhini Nirmal

Theses and Dissertations

Madhini Nirmal uses Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnival to imagine a goat-led subversion of political and social dogma in the context of the South Indian city of Chennai. She uses the mediums of monotype, painting and collage to create these artworks where the undoing of hierarchies is a result of the natural and bodily.

Construction Narratives, Pablo M. Diaz

Theses and Dissertations

The whiteness of this work proposes a state of preparation for the painting to begin. However, it is the lighting of the room that completes it, adding a wider range of tones. The white wall of the gallery is also incorporated into the work by the opening slit. Additionally, the slit becomes a contrapposto pose, showing the space between bent knees as found in paintings of Saint Sebastian.

Polaroid Access, Becky Jane Rosen

Theses and Dissertations

In her thesis statement, Becky Jane Rosen discusses the relationships between photography, family, and the psyche through her recent paintings and artistic influences.

Quotations Like The Sharpest Claws, Johanna Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

Quotations like the Sharpest Claws describes a multimedia installation composed of paintings and sound that explores the theory of cognitive dissonance, a controversial psychological model that attempts to explain how we deal with inconsistency in incompatible beliefs. Imagination is given primacy as a source for truth-seeking and world-building. The uncanny and surreal are used as entry points into this topic.

The title is derived from a description of Eileen Myles’ poetry I once read in an anonymous review. Their writing was described as beyond poetry in a way that it could only be described as such when surrounded by “quotations …

After The Big Wind Stops I See Gentle Waves, Eunji (Jubee) Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis covers my reflections on the inspirations and the motivations behind selected works including my candidacy exhibition; Resonance and my thesis exhibition; after the big wind stops I see gentle waves. It contains my life throughout my MFA studies and the development of my art practice. Through its story-within-a-story method of narration and my describing streams of my thoughts, I am attempting to explain the processes of my development and the discoveries I have made, the little things in my daily life, and the big turning points that inspired me. My work and this document have been strongly determined …

The Twilight Zone: The Confluence Of Childhood Scenes And Future Anxiety, Jongwon Bae

Theses and Dissertations

Jongwon Bae’s paintings reflect his childhood memories as an archive that is to be repressed until it manifests itself in uncertain ways as it becomes confluent with the anxiety about the future.

High-Di-High-Di-High-Di-High, Low-Di-Low-Di-Low-Di-Low, Daniel Figueredo

Theses and Dissertations

I am a believer in our image culture and its capacity to be liberating, exploratory, and critical. I also believe in its ability to overwhelm. My own work is a reaction to this over saturation. It is equally influenced by childhood exposure to remedial computer graphics and cartoons, as well as formative experiences traveling, an in-depth Art Historical education, and a love for art developed over time.

Inside The Aviary, Nikki Mehle

Theses and Dissertations

Modularity and movement of energy are two key concepts in the construction of Nikki Mehle's paintings. Painting is an act of both processing and creating reality – the duality of reflection and invention.

Invisible Invisibility, Eugina Song

Theses and Dissertations

White America assumes its culture is the default, and Asian culture as foreign and irrelevant. I address Asian invisibility by using canvas structure as a Western framing device of painting, and make this cultural barrier visible by breaking out of the frame. Deriving from Dansaekhwa, I challenge the Western painting structure with materiality.

Welcome To My Dream – Quasi Queer Fiction, Christian A. Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

Roseate and bodacious, the hand formed surfaces of Christian Rogers' paintings explore gay culture and history though a quasi-fictional lens. While utilizing folk like imagery, Christian depicts dramatic moments of love, lust, sex and violence as he takes us to queer realms.

Departing From Photography. Place, Space, Non-Place, And The Quotidian: Painting From Pictures Of The Everyday, Mathew A. Tucker

Theses and Dissertations

This paper investigates the relationship between photography and painting. It explores the way in which Mathew Tucker's paintings have been informed by his photographs of everyday places and the ways that they depart from those images and express new and different meanings.

Perspectives, Beatrice Modisett

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings are linked to a thirst for exploring new landscapes and perspectives, my interest in the extremes and subtleties of geological phenomenon and a desire to create, chase after, and teeter on a brink. Here I will discuss these topics and work to unpack my interest in avoiding comfort, my relationship to control and the creation and function of my paintings. To extract myself from my tactile and visual world of process and paint and enter the world of written language presents very different challenges than the ones fostered in the studio. The goal in both is to reveal …

Please Read, Joseph W. Anthony-Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This is a semi-fictional story told through a series of fake found documents. It describes my work and thoughts through metaphor. Machines have the potential to gain self-consciousness through accumulation of errors. Creativity can be confused with randomly generated variety. The acceptance of chaos and loss of control can provide a path to enlightenment.

Angels And Demons: Christina Rossetti’S Goblin Market As A Social Critique Of The Victorian Ideal Of The “Angel In The House” And The Pre-Raphaelites’ Response To That Ideal, Melissa Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market presents a subversive critique on the socially constructed dichotomy of Angel versus Demon as depicted in Pre-Raphaelite artwork, Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poetry, and Coventry Patmore’s poem Angel in the House. An analysis of Goblin Market in relation to Patmore’s poem and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings The Annunciation, Ophelia, Lady Lilith, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, and Sibylla Palmifera and Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poems “Soul’s Beauty” and “Body’s Beauty” illustrate the ways in which Rossetti presents a counter-image that breaks down this socially constructed dichotomy. This is additionally supported by an exploration …