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The Old One And La Mer, Karter Tod Bernhardt

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

No abstract provided.

Critical Exhibition Methods In Museums, Jaimie Davis Ms

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Art and anthropology are intimately intertwined as art is an extension of culture which falls under the purview of anthropology. Utilizing interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates both anthropology's considerations for culture and art's consideration of aesthetic creates the best possible methodology for exhibition in museums. Art museums have enough aesthetic and could benefit from the considerations an anthropology's school of thought.

A Renaissance: The Absurd Retelling Of Mostly True Events, Erica R. Hitzman

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Throughout the following you will be taken on a fantastical retelling of the exhibition A Renaissance, and some of what lead up to it. Through the eyes of various shifting perspectives you will explore the relationships between the artist, her art, and the viewer in the hopes of unveiling how the work plays into feminist theory, its place in the Zeitgeist, and the motivations behind it. Each perspective is formatted differently, to visually mirror the shift in perspective. Presented in the first person and aligned to the right, the account of the artist discusses the process, emotion, and inspiration behind …

Lost In Translation, Amanda Barr

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Lost in Translation addresses the issues that trauma can create in communication; whether that be a physical trauma that damages ability to speak, think, or understand language, or mental and emotional trauma that significantly effects abilities to process, connect, and manage interpersonal relationships. My work is my voice, and a way to help others connect, to feel heard, and to even help them begin to communicate.

Permutation, Ryan K. Caldwell

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Caldwell, Ryan, M.F.A, Spring 2020 Ceramics

Abstract:

Chairperson: Trey Hill

Permutation, is an exploitation of utilitarian pottery and domesticity within the gallery setting through the use of handmade tables and cabinetry. The gallery is transformed into a more comfortable environment and exhibits a casual essence. This paper explores the thoughts, interpretations, influences, reflections, and definitions of his most recent work created for his Masters of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition. Caldwell presents his work as an ongoing continuum of conceptual research and physical exploration of form and surface.

Building A Dragon, Bethany C. Down

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

No abstract provided.

What Comes After Longing, Richard Zachary Williams

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

What Comes After Longing is a collection of artifacts from my research exploring the desires and haunting motivations of the human experience. Is all life longing for something, some place, somebody, some time? That is the question I pose.

What is the purpose of longing? Is it meaningless to long for something if you’re longing for something that’s not real? We filter our experience of the world through this longing. Longing is the filter through which we survive, and my research and work explores whether we can get past this, or whether all life is a series of these longings. …

All Hat & No Cow, Jesse Blumenthal

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

My thesis work, All Hat & No Cowhas been an exploration of End Stage Capitalism and Art/life in the American post-industrial Intermountain West. The research has been presented in one suite with three parts; a Sonic Ecosystem, Community Collaborative Foundry, and Mobile Blacksmithing School. Each of these activities present windows into ongoing (some career long) projects that comprise a diverse practice; different tracks on the same album. The three parts in the suite include technological progressions via the materials and process as the narrative arcs of societal “progression”. Structural welding, architectural blacksmithing, andcommercial foundry work emerged out of industrial …

Narratives Of Place: Reasons To Look Up, Dean Justice Leeper, Dean J. Leeper

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Narratives of Place: Reasons to Look Up, is and exploration and reflection of Dean Leeper's personal interaction and relationship to the landscape of Missoula Montana, while as a graduate student at the University of Montana. This paper explores his thoughts, definitions, influences, reflections and descriptions of his most recent work created for his Masters of Fine Art Thesis Exhibition. Leeper presents his work and ideas as a small part of a lager ongoing dialog of how humans understand ideas of place as they relate to finding a sense of self identity.

Agency Panic: A Reckoning Of Place, Brock M. Mickelsen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Agency Panic: A Reckoning of Place may be best described as a type of documentation of a conversation between the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness and myself, one where a mutual language is not spoken but one where some understanding can be reached none-the-less. By moving through the landscape without goals or intentions a physical exchange ensues, a push and pull, a call and response, intimacy is gained through tactile experience. Through the use of wet-plate collodion photography I am able to create imagery that engages directly with the place. Its vulnerability records a conversation between two acting powers, artist …

Lit, Tyler Brumfield

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

LIT investigates the power of our daily visual interactions with commercial signage. The exhibition is comprised of ten individual illuminated constructions that appropriate the aesthetic strategies and design elements from commercial signage. The work offers the viewer a new aesthetic experience by nullifying the communicative and directional agendas that would normally accompany commercial signage. The viewer is free to see and experience the captivating nature of formal elements such as shape, color and light. The work explores the intersection of appropriation, minimal aesthetics and everyday experiences.

Matrix Of Community, Shelby A. Hanson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

ma·trix noun

Origin: Latin

Matter - Matrix - Matrix

Matr- Breeding Female Womb

1. An environment or material in which something develops,

a surrounding medium or structure.

2. A mold in which something is cast or shaped.

3. A rectangular array of quantities or expressions in rows and

columns that is treated as a single entity and manipulated according to particular

rules.

Median, Amy Petit

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Median reflects my observation of changing forms of communication in the digital age and how that affects personal interaction, expression, and the value that we assign to objects. The sculptural objects in this exhibit stem from my formative experiences of frequent relocation, as well as a professional background in the fast-paced technological world. These factors, combined with contemplative and repetitive sculptural practices, help illustrate the anxiety and discomfort that can accompany rapid advances in communication practices. My research situates my work within contemporary art by drawing on the relevance of indexical signs, reliquaries, current discussions of communication in the digital …

Anxiety Through Art, Brianna Mclean

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Artists Louise Bourgeois, Salvador Dalí, and Francisco de Goya were all successful artists who used their varying degrees of anxiety or fear to aid their work. In a survey of their lives, and a brief exploration of their work, one will come to understand the personal events that contributed to the fear-inducing tones of their art. Their willingness to air their personal grievances has given them credibility in the art world to this day.

Old Wet Paint, Michael G. Hansen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Contemporary living can cause stress that is detrimental to creativity. Most of the world’s population has grown dependent on technology to connect us to, and keep track of daily, monthly, and hourly actions. Our plans fill us with the illusion of control over random events. I do not trust technology to help me find my way in the world. I want to find my way in life using limited technology. My art practice is an example of this trajectory and has become my way of embracing random events. The logic I use to employ order in the pandemonium of everyday …

More Is The Same, Tyler Reeves Nansen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Nansen, Tyler, M.F.A. Spring 2015

More Is The Same

Chairperson: Associate Professor Trey Hill

More is the Same is the result of my examination of the perception of space in relation to architecture and landscape. By embracing modern concepts of the grid, formalism and design, this compilation of personal experiences and memories, manifests as post-minimal sculptures. However, when considering the hierarchy of importance in my work this involves pure visual perception over any specific narrative. The final product is an exhibition which elicits a perceptual experience for its viewer.

My work is about space and the creation of visual interactions, …

"Art Should Comfort The Disturbed And Disturb The Comfortable:" Examining Twenty-First Century Aesthetics Through Banksy's Socially Engaged Art, Margaret Henry

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Taking Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization as its starting point, this paper considers two twenty-first century aesthetic shifts resulting from the conditions of post-Fordist capitalism: the appearance of socially engaged art practices as delineated by Nato Thompson in Living as Form and the prevalence of what Sianne Ngai refers to as “minor aesthetic categories” within those practices. This project explores the political efficacy and theoretical possibilities of socially engaged art practices--practices which necessarily utilize minor aesthetic categories due to their ubiquity--through close examination of the graffiti artist Banksy’s exhibit, Better Out Than In. Graffiti is associated with the destruction of …

Do Families Inspire, Joel Davison

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Does having children or being married inspire an artist to create more valuable works? This question stemmed from a recent article which suggests that when artists travel, they create more valuable art. After researching how having children or being married affects professions similar to artists, either in work process or wage type (like published researchers or the self-employed), it seems there is a connection. I then decided to apply economic models to evaluate art with regard to families. I gathered biographical data regarding artists, corresponding art auctions from 2013, and connected them on a yearly basis to determine if they …

Once Achieved, What Is It Worth?, James Paul Louks

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Once Achieved, What is it Worth? examines the contemporary social, political and physical landscape of the American West. My research for the past three years has been exploring the myths and misconceptions associated with this region and how these illusions inform, misinform, distort and taint the cultural norms of the region. My intention is to create a more factual representation of the American West relative to my own experience. The American West is a region that has been marauded for its resources, historically to the present day. There is little difference between the fracking boom that North Dakota is currently …

Mountain Roots: Artistic Inquiry Into The Science And Spirit Of Mountains, Celeste Bickford

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The future of mountain landscapes will be shaped by the landscape-related decisions we make today. These decisions are influenced by two major factors: what we know and how we feel. The interplay between emotional and analytical information is what motivates the decisions we make related to mountain environments and landscapes. Taking this into consideration, a partnership between art and science and a conversation between emotion and analysis can be instrumental in forming a holistic view of how humans relate to particular landforms such as mountains. This interplay between emotional and analytical information manifests in the decisions people make in relation …

Historic Inscriptions Of The Northern Plains: Identity And Influence In The Residual Communication Record, Timothy Rostov Urbaniak

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

During the 19th and 20th centuries, emigrants on the Northern American Plains engaged in a communication behavior that left messages carved, incised, and painted onto the physical landscape. Often mingling with indigenous pictographs and petroglyphs known as "rock art," the emigrants' messages are called "historic inscriptions" and exist in the form of names, dates, text, and ideographs. This information referred to here as "residual communication" represents archaeological evidence of individuals and groups who influenced and transformed environments and histories in the American West. The goal of this dissertation is to examine historic inscriptions on the Northern Plains to explore how …

A Synthetic Spring, John Metcalf

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

i. A Synthetic Spring will be to serve the public as an encounter rather than an art object. ii. The actual event will be free and open to the public, and will only last two hours. iii. The aim is to create something precious and rare. This exclusiveness is a reaction to the twenty-first century’s fascination with identity through the online appearance, the viral video, the text message, the twitter posting, the sound byte, the Internet meme, binge online shopping, etc. iv. In the greater scope, the event will technically begin with the use of promotion several months before the …

Authorship Of The Ghost, Nathan Ronald Tonning

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Authorship of the Ghost

Dysfunction, Anna Kirsten Lemnitzer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

dysfunction examines how we perceive normalcy and in turn, differentiate those who are abnormal through visual metaphors of the interior structures and features of the home. My thesis exhibition explores psychological disorders through installation, painting, drawing, sculpture and performance. The viewer’s interaction with the installation, which references an individual’s domestic and very personal spaces, allows a physical awareness and appreciation of another’s personality and psychological characteristics. This is done in order to create a more in-depth understanding or empathy of abnormal psychology and various mental states, such as intense anxiety or anger, which exist within all of us.

American Indian Artist Angel Decora: Aesthetics, Power, And Transcultural Pedagogy In The Progressive Era, Suzanne Alene Shope

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This study looks at Angel DeCora, Winnebago artist and teacher (1871-1918) with regard to her visionary influence as an Indian school art teacher. By exploring interactions among DeCora, policy makers, and American Indians, this chronological study addresses: how DeCora's Indian arts curriculum and aesthetics influenced her American Indian students at Carlisle; how DeCora used elements of her Winnebago culture, the Pan-Indian culture, and the Euro-American viewpoints to serve her purposes as an arts educator and activist; and what her aesthetic motivations were as embodied by her art, curriculum design, and students' work. Educated on the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska until …

Materiality As The Basis For The Aesthetic Experience In Contemporary Art, Christina Murdoch Mills

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

A number of historical philosophical theories relate to materiality in contemporary art and the role of art objects as an extension of ontology, or the study of the nature of being. The Kantian idea of the “aesthetic experience” is the point of departure, tracing philosophical discourse of how art functions via its materiality through the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Maritain to the post-modern considerations of David Hickey and Arthur Danto. The research for this thesis focuses on how contemporary art, in all its various forms, functions via art’s material qualities or materiality. The objective …

Past Periphery, Lisa Nicole Jarrett

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Past Periphery examines a contemporary manifestation of the mammy archetype. The common threads between the works presented in the thesis exhibition are erasure, invisibility, and projection. The flattening of a person into icon is the equivalent of the One standing in for the Many. The One embodies surface qualities only and ultimately provides and inadequate summary of the individual or the group. This misrepresentation is the face offered up for public consumption and becomes the foundation for commodity as well as identity. We label, package, sell, and consume this icon as true and correct. But it becomes impossible to define …

The Extravaganza Awaits, Kathryn Lorraine Rodriguez

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Abstract The Extravaganza Awaits This paper addresses ideas in my thesis work, consisting of a series of paintings which evolved into installation. My ideas concern notions of spectacle, consumption of information, and self-gratifying selection. I lighten these ideas with humor and treat them with a carnivalesque aesthetic, appropriate to the absurdity that I see characteristic of them. Painting places the issues in a narrative context, but the story remains open- ended to allow the viewer to bring personal associations to the work. I specifically selected images of friends and family unfamiliar to the viewer and a lexicon of personal symbols …

New Romanticism, Kendall Anne Mingey

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No Abstract.

Essential Understandings: Exploring My Personal Relationship With The Multiple Intelligences Through Art, Jeffrey Wardlaw Brown

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The theory of Multiple Intelligences holds that there are an array of different kinds of intelligences in human beings. Howard Gardner has identified 8 multiple intelligences: Verbal/Linguistic, Logical/Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily/Kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Naturalist. This project was designed to explore the practical applications of the theory through personal experience. A series of five artworks were produced using the artistic mediums of oil and acrylic paints, clay, natural found objects, songwriting and musical performance. The artworks served as external documentation of the inner processes through which the eight intelligences were manifested. A public lecture was held describing the artworks and …