Digital Commons Network^™

Examining How Artistic Expression In The Classroom Can Increase Students' Academic Performance And Understanding Of Course Material, Jake Taylor Marrazzo

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative research study examined how artistic expression in the classroom can increase students’ academic performance and understanding of course material. This study consisted of graduate students in the Masters of Arts in Higher Education program at Rowan University, during the Fall/Spring 2023-2024 semesters, enrolled in at least one of the following courses: Crisis Management, Higher Education in America, and The College Student. The study utilized an artistic expression activity, painting, in connection with participants' course material and readings to understand the benefits of artistic expression on student success in the classroom. Some findings of this study show that artistic …

Repeat After Me, Bonnie Morano

Theses and Dissertations

Bonnie Morano’s devotional abstract oil paintings are an offering of conviction reconciled with joy. Balancing spiritual zeal with geometric space, she creates mirrored compositions filled with gravitas and play. The sacred and domestic join together in maximal harmony, examining alternative arrangements of transcendental experience.

Pan Shot!, Samuel Robert Gaston Mattax

Theses and Dissertations

Sam Mattax's practice is aimed at working through what he has lived and what he is living. They are self-involved diaristic building blocks of marking time and release. The layered drawings negotiate Sam's history and his day to day, distorting one another into a place of unrecognizable space and condensed energy. It is a process of attaining a loose understanding of his life and forgetting it all at once. Sam's work is survival.

Affectionate Facsimiles, Julio C. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

The paintings in Affectionate Facsimiles are journeys into the expansiveness of color and memory via the accumulation of gestural action. Sporadic freneticism is used to archive desire and time and their relationship to identity. Thin and translucent layers are built up in bursts of intensity as palimpsests of intentioned labor.

Place-Conscious Vs. Place-Bound, Julie Avetisyan

Theses and Dissertations

Julie Avetisyan’s installation of sculptures, paintings and printmaking works are driven by an exploration of constructed identity that is not place-bound, but place-conscious. In this paper, she explores how her art practice generates world building under the context of the Armenian Diaspora – considering histories of indigeneity, migration, and assimilation.

This Life Is A Constant Rehearsal, Alex Schmidt

Theses and Dissertations

Alex Schmidt’s conceptual practice explores the artist’s precarious condition as an affective freelance worker; a utopian parasite. Schmidt employs paintings as props, performance as muse, and writing on transactional care as a metaphor for this cobbled life.

A Grid And A Shadow, Henry Glavin

Theses and Dissertations

Henry Glavin's acrylic paintings on panel of architectural interiors and facades use repetition, contrived light, unreliable shadows, photographic posture, and compressed detail to create uncanny spaces that generate an air of silence.

Art In The Age Of Algorithmic Automation And Artificial Intelligence, Milly Skellington

Theses and Dissertations

The 21st century is examined in order to understand how the artists tools have gained unprecedented autonomy.

Fear Of God: Exploring Transformative Potential, Misunderstanding, Systemic Challenges, And The Future., Jermaine Ollivierre

Theses and Dissertations

This personal journey is a testament to the transformative power of play within my practice. It is a love story between me and the institution, sparked by my fervor for communal creativity in a graduate school environment. Through creative endeavors like public art installations and silent artist talks, I confront racial dynamics and institutional reluctance to engage with complex issues like Black Lives Matter. My personal experiences of alienation are woven into the broader themes of community building, communication, and systemic change. I navigate the complexities of group mentality and exclusion by deliberately using unconventional forms of expression, such as …

The Invisible Box, Rafael Yaluff

Theses and Dissertations

A work of art is something so simple that it puts you in front of it. And through its simplicity it makes you aware of yourself in front of it, it gives you yourself. This paper explores the creative process from a structural perspective

Blueprints, Lauryn E. Welch

Theses and Dissertations

“Blueprints” is an open letter on chronic illness and its shaping of the artist’s partnership and painting practice. Through the framework of a house—foyer, kitchen, library, bedroom, garden—put in relation to the body, this paper examines the vibrant matter inside, as an alliance of parts including people, objects, and spaces.

Someone Will Remember Us / I Say / Even In Another Time, Paul Anagnostopoulos

Theses and Dissertations

Paul Anagnostopoulos’s paintings and vases use mythological melodrama in a contemporary context to portray vivid images of queer life in the wake of homophobic erasure and tragic loss. “someone will remember us / I say / even in another time” traces his aggregate interests in Greco-Roman cultures and art history.

Leonora Carrington’S "Down Below": Transgressive Renderings Of The Grotesque Female Body, Kelsey King

Theses and Dissertations

The classification of the bodily grotesque relies on the transgression of boundaries, marked by an openness to the world. Leonora Carrington’s memoir (1944) and painting (1940) that share the same name, Down Below, illustrate the grotesque body as a revisionist self-configuration, destabilizing traditional representations and eroticization of the female form.

"Those Common Everyday Things We All Know": Roger Brown's American Art, Jake Brodsky

Theses and Dissertations

Roger Brown (1941–1997) was an American artist associated with the Chicago Imagists. Borrowing elements from American visual culture to construct an idiosyncratic language of motifs, Brown’s paintings demand a mode of attention—of looking, searching, recognizing, identifying—that parallels the structures of feeling that constitute being in America.

Ernesto Deira, Rogelio Polesello, And The Esso Salons Of 1964–65, Jonas Albro

Theses and Dissertations

This investigation analyzes artworks by Argentinian painters Rogelio Polesello and Ernesto Deira shown in the Argentinian Esso Salon of 1964 and the International Esso Salon the following year in Washington D.C. at the Museum of the Pan American Union (PAU), and the complex networks of internationalization represented therein.

El Cuerpo Armónico (The Body Harmonic), Luis Emilio Romero

Theses and Dissertations

L R’s process-oriented oil paintings explore tactility within harmonious and complex structures rooted in Guatemalan and Mesoamerican weaving techniques. Employing comprehensive rituals and mindfulness through an array of delicate linearity, his works reference his ancestry through a focus on progressing color, form, and space into a liminal, light-based aura.

Emotional Landscapes, Jin Young Jeong

Theses and Dissertations

“Emotional Landscape” delivers a sense of gravity, openness, and breathing space through oil paintings on linen of abstracted bodily forms. The imagery in the works generates an atmosphere where one can feel rooted and anxiety-free. The paintings invite a close read of the complexities of compounded affects.

Homeworld, Ilana Dodelson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the experience of being tied to many worlds at once, and how that can be represented through paint.

Laying Out A Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions Of The Soul, Erin D. Yerby

Theses and Dissertations

Laying out a Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions of the Soul, arises out of my artistic practice, and thoughts behind my current project and MFA exhibition, Spectral Geographies.

Linking the problem of the world ‘out there’ or external space, to inner experience through painting as both medium and practice, my work expresses what I call inner geographies, spaces where intimate immensities, folding inside and outside, find expression. I think of my paintings as beginning with this gesture of laying out a between-space where the intimacies of waking dreams and visions are opened by, and grow into, actual places, …

Through The Lens Of Glass, Paul J. Van Den Bijgaart

Theses and Dissertations

Glass is a key component of the development of the modern world and within this China has become the leading producer and consumer of the material. Through the dedication to my skilled craft as a glassblower I use my material understanding to explore eastern and western philosophical associations and artistic concepts through painting. As well as investigate the relevance of how craft contributes to the development of culture through consumables. An intuitive expressionist painting style is explored in relation to landscape painting with glass as a practice towards mindful engagement within an age of digitized globalization.

Decorated Sheds, Greg Wall

Theses and Dissertations

Industrialization changed domestic material culture and established collage as a mode of sociological critique. My practice hijacks consumer habits and design histories to better understand the space between consumption and production. Assembling contemporary readymades with play and humor points to the ridiculous pastiches our homes have become.

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Scene By Scene, Katita Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Katita Miller’s paintings and drawings depict quotidian scenes through the filter of an overactive mind. Populated by spectral figures and swirling portals, her interiors and landscapes fluctuate between the mundane and the fantastical. This paper explores the parallels between painting and theater and the context and process behind five paintings.

I Crawled Out From The Palimpsest Crater, Jessica Willittes

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is a dissection and examination of my art-making practice through the analogy of the palimpsest landscape found in Arizona’s Meteor Crater. I attempt to elucidate the process by which a “palimpsest artwork” is made through an unfixed cycle of scavenging, rupturing, joining and offering.

Dust, Mist, Haze, Michael C. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores painting through the ideas of dust, mist, and haze as specific atmospheric metaphors that could be used to describe ontologies of space, time, memory, and history.

The Screen To Desire, Joseph Parra

Theses and Dissertations

Joseph Parra reflects on our often embellished online personas and their effect on our desires. Through luscious 3-dimensional painting Parra translates the seductive desire of the hypermasculine male-presenting figure through glorification and criticality. The tactile painting also acts as a rebellion to accurately represent “real” life on the digital screen.

Buzz Buzz, Sarah Heinemann

Theses and Dissertations

Taking the form of a series of notes and notations, this document serves as an account of color in my painting practice as it intersects through personal memory, research, and my studio and professional practices.

Head, Shoulders, Knees, And Toes, Pol Morton

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores ideas of transness, chronic illness, and injury. Through assemblage and repetition, my larger-than-life paintings address the dissociation and fragility of a body that is unmapped by society. These autobiographical works attempt to locate the self when it is trapped, whether in a bed, in the home, or within the body itself.

Rethinking Watteau In The Context Of Early Eighteenth-Century Bourgeois Culture, Bronwyn C. Roe

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the work of Antoine Watteau through a social-art historical lens. Traditionally, Watteau's fêtes galantes have been closely aligned to the culture of the French nobility. However, a closer look into the artist's background, training, social milieu, and the class identity of his primary buyers reveals an alternative class alignment, inviting new interpretations for Watteau's most elusive work. This thesis challenges the close association between Watteau and the French nobility and aims to broaden the socio-visual landscape from which Watteau was drawing, namely that of a burgeoning bourgeois consumer culture. In particular, the culture of emulation, with its …

Driftbone, Noémie Jennifer Bonnet

Theses and Dissertations

My multidisciplinary work is premised on the idea that the contemplation of mortality can foster life-affirming redirections beyond the self. My explorations include ethereal abstract paintings, sculptural works hybridizing human and nonhuman forms, and meditative sound pieces. The works seek to inspire a heightened awareness of corporeal and ecological dependency.