Digital Commons Network^™

Materials And Meaning, Michael Corigliano

Theses and Dissertations

Decisive moments and their fleeting experiences are born from an individual’s interaction within a defined physical space. It is here at the intersection of environment and context that my work in site-specific art begins. I endeavor to create an examination of socio-political and environmental issues through a manipulation of materials, thereby altering one’s private, communal, and cultural response to them. My installations are comprised of slip casted multiples which reference the human form. I place these forms in galleries and specific exterior locations, and incorporate materials that are charged with societal discord, such as used motor oil and post-consumer detritus, …

A Lived-In Life, Sara Basher

Theses

A Lived-In Life documents the creation of my thesis work and accompanying discoveries. The movement of Fauvism and artists Vincent van Gogh, Alice Neel and Henry Darger are named as historical inspirations. Contemporaries named as influential include female figurative painters Jenny Saville, Xenia Hausner, Hung Liu, Elizabeth Peyton and Anna Bjerger.

I reflect on my position within contemporary art culture, placing myself between abstraction and photo realism. I discuss graduate school epiphanies on material, asserting my commitment to sustainable and safe practice. I address the historical use of photographic reference, as well as the role of photography in contemporary culture …

You Define Me, Nicole A. Klein

Art and Design Theses

The work I created in conjunction with this paper is a representation of myself and my family, both individually and as a unit. The work was spawned by a search for my identity at my current age of 25. The outcome is an installation of photographs that focus on my heritage and family work ethic and a series of altar-like tables highlighting the personalities of my grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, and sister when they were experiencing life at my stage. I believe that this work culminates in defining me. Every element, every individual, reflects a part of myself in the …

A House Not Of Our Choosing, Melisa D. Cadell Ms

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores our existence through the confinement of the human body. The exhibition of “A House Not of Our Choosing,” was presented at the Tipton Gallery, 126 Spring Street Johnson City, Tennessee, from March 1, 2013, to March 8, 2013. It will visually describe Cadell’s thoughts regarding the figure as a fragile vessel. The installation is designed to require the viewer to closely examine the work from multiple perspectives.

The exhibition consists of sculpted paper, etched, painted, manipulated glass slides, and projection. Research discusses the work produced over a three-year period. Exploration and reflection in the areas of religion, …

Day Folder, Raewyn Martyn

Theses and Dissertations

Provisional or unfinished images, forms and actions can sustain their status by continuing to change. This can resist programmed experience of their state, and shift their relationship as images within time. The sub-aesthetics of the unfinished and entropic can alter our understanding of where and how images are formed and located within time. My paintings each exist within their own emergent systems of time, structure and productive disorder. This thesis discusses these ideas in relation to DAY FOLDER and other work made during my MFA studies.

Three Squares A Day, Suzanne U. Gibbs

CGU MFA Theses

Link to thesis on-line: http://suzannegibbs.com/portfolio/mfa-thesis-three-squares-a-day-2

Isolated Infinite, Kelsey M. Kimmel

CGU MFA Theses

I explore the relationship between human borders and digital space. The porous borders between these entities shape contemporary culture and identity. Amid the digital current, I find myself over-stimulated, fighting to stay afloat through multitasking, immediacy and cramming. My sculptural installations investigate how I see, experience, interact with and react to digital space.

Verdurous, Adrian R. Culverson

CGU MFA Theses

Adrian Culverson is a painter and sculptor who uses mixed media to create installations that focus on splices of real and imagined worlds.

Gmo, Scott M. Jamieson

CGU MFA Theses

My work revolves around various interactions that occur when disparate media occupy the same space. This interplay begins in the making of the individual pieces. Whether it is ceramics, sculpture, or painting, I first consider the basic materials involved and their physical attributes. Then, I either accentuate these elements by building them up or bring them to some kind of breaking point by increasing the stress upon them. It is in this process of forming that I make decisions on how the work will interact within the space it occupies. Moving between the media's materiality and the space the works …

Traces Of Earthly Things, Kristin Frost

CGU MFA Theses

My strongest memories are visual. I feel connected to the moments of my life that have left imprints in my mind, traces of events that are still thick with color, energy, and purpose. I make paintings, collages, and installations that are visual combinations of events, land forms, and places from the present and the past. Through the repeated reworking of images and ideas in each piece, I reform my own concepts of space and time. Each aspect of my multi-step process changes not only the physical features of a piece, but also the original recollection that generated it. Through this …

Transient Motel, Bryce Hammond

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Transient Motel" is an exhibition that investigates the interactions of people and physical environments in low-income areas of Daytona Beach, Florida. The purpose of the exhibition is to raise social awareness of low-income communities among the public through visual art. Interactions between motel guests were documented as first-hand sound recordings of conversations, interviews and other activities. These recordings are projected through speakers within a constructed life-sized replica of the motel rooms in which they were recorded. Found and appropriated furniture and fixtures from the actual rooms are arranged within the replica as objects of art to familiarize the public with …

Arheologia Memoriei (The Archaeology Of Memory)., Vlad Constantin Basarab

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This thesis supports and comments upon the meaning of Arheologia Memoriei (Romanian for "The Archaeology of Memory"), my Masters of Fine Arts exhibition. Memory is our only link to the past. In a fast-moving society with plenty of distractions, in a world of selfishness and individualism, we have forgotten to remember. The past is our identity, our heritage. My work is an attempt to make my audience link the present to the past through questioning traditional methods of preserving and transforming collective memory. By referencing historic attempts at cultural effacement with political, ideological and religious motivations, I comment upon the …

White Trash, Heather Law

Theses

White Trash, is body of work that aims to reflect upon our personal role and contribution to the solid waste stream through routine consumption and waste disposal. From everything we eat and drink, to the refuse we flush down the drain, we all consume resources. Living in a materially saturated, mass-consumer society, we have evolved into an increasingly disposable culture. By identifying with our waste production, we then can better evaluate the pitfalls of our materialistic ways. Common consumer products stuffed inside a toilet creates a recognizable waste pattern found within the domestic household. Our trash is considered pollution. Once …

Color/Shape/Form/Space, Brett James Hargesheimer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Color/Shape/Form/Space begins at its title. The show is named with the same directness that I want the work to have: accessible, ready for consumption. Stripped of unnecessary information, the exhibition’s title needed to match the work itself, which expresses minimalistic tendencies, avoiding the superfluous. Everything needed to be consciously put together to operate as a well-designed whole. Simple and clear. It is the age that we live in that prompts me to be so forthright. Our present is defined by attention deficit digital connectivity. Accessibility and information sharing are rampant. With the possibilities being seemingly endless, it is an exciting …

Your Loss, Lauren Jean Hegge

LSU Master's Theses

Your Loss is an exhibition of drawings, photographs, intaglio prints, found objects and prose. Drawn from personal and anonymous archives, the works in the exhibition acknowledge various forms of breakdown, exploring individual reactions and attempts to rebuild from the fragments of loss. Inherent in the work are discussions of remembering and forgetting, finding and losing, building and destroying, growth and decay. This work is both recognition of the desire to hold on too tightly and an effort to learn to let go.

Placed Residue, Thomas Lapann

LSU Master's Theses

“Placed Residue” is a series of eight works that highlight nature and its transformative quality. The video, photos, and sculptural objects, contained in the show, call attention to different materials and how they undergo growth and decay. Using various resources ranging from Kinect to video projection I incorporate the unnatural in order to depict a natural narrative involving the viewer. In order to emulate these natural processes, a cause and effect system had been developed where nature completes the final object. These systems activate the material providing for behaviors to be visible through their tactile qualities and allowing for their …

The Collaged Practice : (Un)Familiar, Raina Beth Wirta

LSU Master's Theses

My thesis exhibition is an installation of works including sculpture, video, paintings, a hand made book, sound, and drawings that emanated from a series of two-dimensional collages: self-contained forms that evoke the surreal, (un)familiar, and/or grotesque. Infused with a sort of mysterious being-hood and intended to inspire curiosity (at the least), they are unfamiliar in relation to a particular biological thing, but (mostly) recognizable in the autonomous bits and pieces. I seek to question where our physicality ends and the next form of biological life begins, and our responses to that physicality. With childlike inquisitiveness and wonder, and a healthy …