Digital Commons Network^™

Bloom: A Microbial Self-Portrait, Emily Lauren Mulvaney

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

"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 …

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

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 …

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 …

Examination Of The Iconography Of The Minoan Goddess As A Nature Goddess, Gaelen Schell Curtis

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.