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The Standard Model, Manny Llanura

CGU MFA Theses

Photography is my medium. “The Standard Model” is a body of work created from photographs of the Los Angeles Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2019 Collection runway.

Each final work starts with over a thousand photos that become the raw materials from which I eventually produce my final piece. Deep in the final piece are the lights, shadows, hues, tones of a themed shoot.

I believe that the ability to focus on what is in front of you is not directly proportional to how detailed the image is. My goal is to incite appreciation of what humans have done or …

Autopathography, Aurora Berger

CGU MFA Theses

For centuries the stories of disabled people were not our own to tell. We were silenced by politics and power dynamics beyond our control, and when we succeeded it was “in spite of” our disabilities. I am interested in the reframing of this narrative and discovering my place in this historic trajectory.

I am a disabled artist. I have claimed this identity. It is critical that this identity remains tied to my work as I navigate the worlds of fine art, academia, and critical theory. My art is intrinsically tied to my academic work. They are inseparably bonded through my …

Kleptomaniac, Leslie Frank

CGU MFA Theses

I am a Kleptomaniac of public and private moments. Using my iPhone, I steal images of people and objects in public environments and frame these moments with the addition of my own poetic essence. I feel that Los Angeles is a unique city built on imagination, expectations and disappointments. Another aspect that is satisfying to me is the validation that I feel when I am at the right place at the right time. We don't always get to feel this in everyday life. Whether the experience is similar or foreign, the empathy is significant.

All Glory Is Fleeting, Steven Beswick

CGU MFA Theses

The statement is specifically linked to my MFA thesis exhibition.

Everything, Everything Seemed Once-Upon-A-Time, Denisse Leung Liu

CGU MFA Theses

The pleasant feeling of being relaxed is what I want the viewer to feel with my work. The art I make is the source of peacefulness and tranquility I treasure, in a way that there is tranquility and absence of noise, yet it whispers quietly to the viewer.

Everything, Everything Seemed Once-Upon-A-Time, Denisse Leung Liu

CGU MFA Theses

The pleasant feeling of being relaxed is what I want the viewer to feel with my work. The art I make is the source of peacefulness and tranquility I treasure, in a way that there is tranquility and absence of noise, yet it whispers quietly to the viewer.

Vida En Sombras, Tommy Canales Burns

CGU MFA Theses

Verisimilitude. What is reality? Subconsciously we are acting out and absorbing information collating data and in turn responding with instincts. Learning processes to view and shape this world. I think of the Hermann Hesse’s doppelganger, the idea of a shadow self. Group identities can also have strange shadow selves. It is bizarre to look back at history and see the changing context of social norms, fashions, traditions, scientific, philosophical, and political thought. Art is a sign of the times, creating space for the inner dialogue of collective consciousness to be purged and hashed out.

Aesthesia, Cindy G. Garcia

CGU MFA Theses

My art practice in itself, is first and foremost about me as a Human on this planet. Second, I am drawn to the cognitive dissonance that happens within each individual, this is key to the majority of my work. For this show I really wanted to emphasize; A: The textural, corporal involvement that I personally really enjoy and get satisfaction out of. B: The color of Life. C: The beauty in very introspective particular instances that happen in day to day life.

Lara Salmon, Thesis Statement, Lara Salmon

CGU MFA Theses

My art brings together materials and ideas inspired by personal experience that do not usually exist side by side. My body is the primary mechanism with which I make work, incidentally making me the subject matter of the work. I use my physical self as an instrument to coalesce and transform other materiality. Through live performance and photographic installations I create tension and balance between crude biology and bright, polished formalism. This body of work focuses on Millennial Feminism and the Middle East.

Blue Balloons And White Fog, Stephanie C. Meredith

CGU MFA Theses

My paintings begin with an examination of photography’s authority; practically the ubiquitous family snapshot’s power over memory and the development of our constructed identity. The amateur photographer’s desire for a pleasantly scripted narrative can easily misrepresent the reality of a moment. Because of this, I see family photo albums as mythological artifacts: they arise out of reality but are incapable of fully reproducing it. By using my own family photographs as reference material I embrace this mythology, indulging myself in a fantasy of place, history and narrative. This interest in the mythology of my past is contradicted by my own …

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 …

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.

Jane Gillespie Pryor Mfa Thesis Statement, Jane Gillespie Pryor

CGU MFA Theses

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Since 1980, Sookyung Bae

CGU MFA Theses

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Erin Payne Mfa Thesis Statement, Erin B. Payne

CGU MFA Theses

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