Digital Commons Network^™

Healthy Living For A Healthy Haiti, Elizabeth Grace Binney

Senior Theses

This project is twofold. The art and the book work synergistically to represent Haiti and health literacy. The pieces selected for this discussion are placed in chronological order of their creation, not the thematic order as they are organized in the book. This allows for discussion of the works as individual pieces of art, artistic development, the creation of a unified theme. They are the representation of a beautiful nation and people, as well as an expression of my inner self.

The Force Of Water: Columbia After The Flood, Rebecca Johnson

Senior Theses

Nearly two months have passed, and South Carolina is still recovering from the unprecedented inundation of rain that pelted down in early October. Record amounts of precipitation pounded the state over just a few days, resulting in the flooding and erosion of land, the deterioration of public infrastructure and the loss of human life and capital.

The worst of it was in the capital city. Columbia recorded the highest water levels and the highest number of fatalities of all the affected areas. The city’s utilities could not handle the torrent of water: dams were destroyed, canals were compromised, roads were …

In Time But Not Of Time: Jessica Eaton And Erin Shirreff's Counterpoints Of View, Ruth Skinner

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study is situated within an ongoing investigation of photography's ontology, objecthood, and materiality. Jessica Eaton, Erin Shirreff and their cohort continue a conceptual tradition of experimentation with photography's singularity, plasticity and referential nature. The contemporary photographic is both the culmination of and contributor to our conceptions of time, space, and subjectivity. In the post-digital era it is the access point for new durational and phenomenological encounters, even as it extends backwards to reinvigorate past aesthetic approaches. Shirreff's Signatures and Monograph series shift the familiar sensory qualities of the sculptural object onto the photographic, opening up its two-dimensional confines. In …

Hand-Eye, Michael S. Pszczonak

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This integrated article thesis has two distinct chapters: The first chapter is a case study on a selection of works by German artist Sigmar Polke using Hal Fosters writing on the historical and neo-avant-gardes. The study traces the way Polke revisits the first avant-garde project and comprehends its attempted traumatic rift from dominant ideologies for the first time. The second chapter is a comprehensive artist statement which simultaneously outlines the theoretical underpinnings of my work as well as the process leading to the body of work on display at McIntosh Gallery. The research sets out to answer the following question: …

Faces Of (And For) Toronto: Community-Engaged Portrait Projects In The Neoliberal City, Jennifer E. Orpana

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates how community-engaged photographic portrait projects variously support and challenge neoliberalism in Toronto. It examines how photographic portraiture is used to constitute communities that are simultaneously the public face of the diversity of the city and the targets of neoliberal rationality, policies, and procedures that further marginalize these groups. This research investigates how portrait projects variably demonstrate the intensified inequality of neoliberalism, while, at the same time, their focus on identity and community sometimes obscures the systemic causes of exclusion in the city. Chapter 1 considers how Pierre Maraval’s Mille Femmes (2008) and Dan Bergeron’s Regent Park Portraits …

Creative Collaboration On A Creativity Book, Jane Harvey

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

Based on existing roles as writer and designer, two Master’s students partnered on one project. This project was dually about the creative product and creative process. The final product result is a book on creativity, but much of the project learning was about collaboration during the creative process itself. The project included the creation of written and visual content and a production-ready book layout on the subject of creativity. This paper describes the process followed to create a fast reading, jargon-free book with a special academic end section.

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, …

A Walk In A Dream, Alison Therese Mccarthy-Weglewski

All Student Theses

A Walk in a Dream is a body of work consisting of 25 16" x 16" color prints. The photos are of nature looking at contrasting textures and focus. The photographer used a Holga camera at multiple state parks. The negatives were then scanned and manipulated in Photoshop. The artist has explored Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photography and Gaston Bachelard’s writings to compare to her work.

Her artist statement is as follows: In today’s world it is hard to disconnect from media. Even when we are surrounded by natural beauty we still feel a need to connect with the digital world. Photographs …

Light Sensitive, Andrew Thompson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

I am an excremental artist. I do not mean an artist who works with feces or is interested in manure but one whose artwork is expelled through the results of process. As a photographer, I am not as interested in indexing a location, a person or a moment as I am dissolving the structure of photography through the manipulation of photographic materials. I typically photograph landscapes that catch my attention for a myriad of reasons. The commonality between these images is anonymity of place. Hints of location are always present but never accentuated, instead their purpose is akin to a …

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 …

Ruin Porn And Urban Representation In Photography: The Aesthetic And Politics Of Appropriation In "The Ruins Of Detroit", Elyse Remenapp

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project examines the politics of representation in The Ruins of Detroit, a book of photography by Yves Marchand and Romaine Meffre in order to understand Detroit as a privileged site of ruins photography, critically referred to as ruin porn. Examining the book as a representation of Detroit's decay reveals an implicit power dynamic which neglects Detroit's complex history and the lived experience of its residents. Paying particular attention to the dialectic of race and labor under capitalism, this project traces the urban history of Detroit in order to contextualize and reframe the state of ruin presented in the …

The Misconception Of Knowing, The Invention Of Time; Curiosities & Introspections Of Vernacular Photography, Patricia D. Drummond

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The Misconception of Knowing, the Invention of Time; Curiosities & Introspections of Vernacular Photography is a body of work that combines photography, artist books, and alternative processes in a series of pieces that explore the synergy between the act of creating vernacular or common photography, the photograph in its many forms, and the interaction with the photographic image at all the stages of its existence. It also exists in conjunction with this written monograph, which supports and gives insight into the work. Through the use of poems, sketchbook musings, the history of photography, critical theory and social norms within photography, …

Neighborhood Eats, Local Restaurants In Nj, Laura Palladino

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The context of this project is a digital magazine format featuring lifestyle photography for local restaurants in northern New Jersey. Conceptually, the intent of the magazine is to provide the reader a glimpse of restaurants in their entirety, from food to environment. I produced all content, except for the real user reviews, and created the design and interactive elements to accompany the content. The reviews are from actual customers who I talked to at each restaurant location. After multiple trips to each restaurant to photograph the food and atmosphere and talk to staff and customers, I edited the content in …

Diaspora Times Two, Benjamin Cleeton

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Diaspora Times Two is a photographic journalistic study of Africans living in Guangzhou, China and Chinese in Accra, Ghana. The study focuses on two young men from the Gambia who are looking for low-wage work in Guangzhou and a house of five Chinese telecommunications workers employing Ghanaians in Accra. A micro approach was taken, seeking similarities and differences between the immigrants, making images that record details not found in a general photographic survey of the areas. The project brings together stories collected from both Africans and Asians, providing insights into the process of international relocation driven by economic challenges and …

Enduring Peripheries, Anna Yeroshenko

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

In the 80s when Russian state-sanctioned architectural production consisted of standardized buildings that deplored any unnecessary ornament or decoration, an architect functioned only as an interpreter of numerous limiting factors. As an act of protest against the stagnation in architecture, a group of young architects began to create projects that existed only on paper. For them ‘Paper Architecture‘ became a way of bypassing restrictions and dissenting, a way to critique the dehumanizing nature of the architectural style that prevailed at that time. Spatial compositions, which were hard to comprehend visually, elements of inverse perspective, and impractical, idealistic environments depicted a …

Tales From The Fells, Anne Elder

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Our relationship with the natural world is complicated and under scrutiny as we make irrevocable changes to the earth. We enter the woods to get lost, and to find ourselves. We walk there to find thrills, peace, inspiration; to hear ourselves think, to be surprised, to make profit. Our childish fears may have changed from bears, monsters and getting lost, replaced by adult fears (bears, unsavory humans, getting lost). The woods may frighten us or be a place of comfort, but it is rarely a neutral experience. When we lose access to these spaces, it affects our ability to find …

Irradicable, Katharina Erika Marchant

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Katherina Marchant MFA Creative Project

Water: Experience, Recognition, Conversance, Kristine O'Reilly

All Student Theses

The exhibition of the photographic work entitled, Water: Experience, Recognition, Conversance, is the culmination of the artist’s life-long interest in the natural environment. The title also infers a chronological description of how interest in the subject evolved as well as how this document and the exhibition has been constructed and curated.

The concept of the exhibition is to remind or provide a vehicle toward remembrance to those ephemeral instances that we as a species have all experienced. It is intended to incite a response or perhaps inspire an action or a reaction or just a renewed appreciation of one component …

Conscious Delusions, Judith K. Hanacek

All Student Theses

Views of the world come from watching, looking, and feeling emotional relationships between people, things, and places. This fabricated series establishes the willingness to believe the images are actual photographic records by combining subjects viewing a variety of images. Metaphorical narratives show a vision of the incongruent world. The engagement begins with a shadow or back of someone or thing looking into the frame. Color, texture, and form within produce a voyeuristic psychological and emotional response. The paradox is what pushes the edges of expectation. Synchronicity of the elements within the images thrust us into a surreal moment. Belief in …

Outside Spaces, One Artist's Journey, Bonnie L. Schroeder

All Student Theses

The beauty and simplicity of outside spaces often overlooked in a busy world are intimate places to regenerate. There are simple moments in life going on all around us which can be most profound, effortless catalysts triggering memories or creating new ones. Looking at something and interpreting it comes from one’s inner self construed by those defining moments that make who we are, a product of our life experiences. Taking time to day-dream, quiet or settle one’s mind, even if momentarily, transports the viewer to another place, a solemn way to achieve peace of mind. There are gifts all around …

Lenses Of Industry: The Rise Of Industrial Photography In The United States And The Lake Superior Mining District, 1880-1933, Robert Anthony

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This thesis, Lenses of Industry, examines how industrial companies and engineers adapted photography to their needs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Innovations in camera and plate technologies marketed to a broad range of people contributed to a steep rise in the number of photographers in the United States. Recognizing the potential that photography held for industrial companies and engineers, a handful of experts advocated the idea that photography had the potential to make many aspects of business faster, and easier, as well as to make visual records more truthful and accurate. Likewise, innovations in halftone printing technology …

Dispersal: A Multidisciplinary Investigation Of Plant Life, Alexandra E. Arzt

Theses and Dissertations

Using plants as a basis for exploring the interstices between the human and nonhuman, this thesis investigates ideas of awareness, intelligence, deep time, animism, and the fluctuating human perception of the agency of Nature. It outlines environmental art practices since the 1950s involving vegetal life. In addition, the paper provides a critical analysis of plant perception of Jakob von Uexküll’s work and theories of vital materialism and “critical plant studies” while noting recent studies in plant neurobiology. In my work, plants become active participants via their movement, seeding, and smell. This study takes the form of imitation, purposeful symbiosis, anthropomorphism, …

Unapologetic Self, Aashish Maskey

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This body of work began with an intention to transform the mundane. During this process of intuitively interacting/improvising with my surrounding environment, objects and people, I noticed the photographs had more to them than my intentional concept. They were perhaps fragments of my subconscious at the time of making each of them. This body of work represents the contents of my conscious and subconscious mind, connected through my intuition. It is a visual story of polarity, which perhaps resides within us all.

New Patriarchies: A Turbulence Of Source And Subject, Stephen Fuller

Theses and Dissertations

Experiencing a turbulence of source and subject in the variable inversions and supports of one source to another--the wreck of the U-352, Carpeaux’s Ugolino and his Sons, a movie poster for J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible, and Cassiopeia mythology--these four sources as sons, in sacrifice to and surviving by way of “daddy” documentation, are here refigured to reenact and critique the patriarchally recreational, monumental, cinematic, and mythological infrastructures supporting the sources of this work and thereby serving to critique the newer patriarchies to which these sources and their subjectifications here seek to cross consumptively dead end. Following three public …