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Navigating The Interim, Joseph E. Saphire Jr

Masters Theses

Navigating the Interim attempts to build a framework for the ways in which visual art, media studies, and forms of social practice might intermingle within a career in the arts, as well as within a thorough art education curriculum. From broad theoretical analysis to the specificity of technical exercises and prompts, this paper serves as a roadmap for the ways in which production, teaching, and organizing might begin to merge into a single holistic practice. The author’s projects provide an anchor from which to analyze the various conceptual trajectories of art that have stemmed from modernism throughout the 20th century, …

The Void, The Mystery, The Vast Array, The Infinity Of Unities, The Otherworld, The Absolute, The Hidden Order, The Randomness, The Infraworld, The Nothing, The Zone Of Immaterial Sensibility, The Silence, The Hollow Of Space, The Ineffable, The Emptiness, The Wild, Drew Ludwig

Masters Theses

This thesis presents the culmination of two years of excursions into and longing for the void: the sense of absolute presence and connectivity that I have always found in the desert of the Colorado Plateau. Away from the desert, I use my artistic practice as a means of approaching this kinship with the wild, the void.

My work may be understood as a series of experiments, striving to locate and access the void through different language, logic and media. My process speaks to a deep respect for the external wild of landscape (the desert), and a growing recognition of the …

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 …