Digital Commons Network^™

A Renaissance Of The Visual Arts In Worship For Churches Of Christ, Heather Heflin Hodges

Doctor of Ministry Theses

This Doctor of Ministry thesis presents the results of a project in which a group of four artists from across the United States met via video conference to create liturgical art activities that can be integrated into the Sunday morning worship for Churches of Christ. The problem identified at the beginning of the project was a lack of integration of the visual arts in worship in Churches of Christ. I understood this lack to be due in part to an iconoclastic heritage in Protestantism as well as a focus on rational intellectualism and desire for simplicity in worship as a …

A Critical Exploration Of Costume Design Possibilities In Tolkien’S Legendarium, M. Grace Costello

Apparel Merchandising and Product Development Undergraduate Honors Theses

Tolkien’s Legendarium has in many ways codified modern fantasy. Illustrations and film adaptations of it have had far-reaching consequences on popular culture, building an 80-year tradition of visual depictions of Tolkienesque fantasy. Particularly, Elven characters are usually depicted wearing costume inspired by Victorian notions of Western medieval costume. In this paper I seek to approach the design of original costume for the Ñoldor from a different perspective, free from the established traditions of other designers’ and illustrators’ work.

The preliminary research focuses on searching the source materials of the Silmarillion and select texts from the Histories of Middle Earth. I …

The A.H. Kotz Unnatural History Exhibit, Marian R. Trainor

Honors College Theses

An exploration in two parts into the development of a narrative through manufactured evidence designed specifically to encourage the suspense of disbelief. The physical work exists within a faux anthropological museum exhibition focused around a human whose history and existence is entirely fabricated. The structural work is the layers of historical and practical research used to develop the suggestion of reality. The exhibit contains samples of the research, artifacts, and specimens collected by the deceased naturalist August Hermann Kotz, along with his falsified history. The second part consists of an overview of the research process and techniques needed to successfully …

A Queer Politics Of Imperceptibility: A Philosophy Of Resistance To Contemporary Sexual Surveillance, Andie Shabbar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis journeys through a series of events to develop a concept of “imperceptibility” as a mode of resistance to contemporary sexual surveillance. The events I examine include biometric recognition of gender and race at airport security checkpoints, the heteropatriarchal colonial surveillance of Indigenous peoples at Standing Rock, various protest actions, and the political potentials of glitch art. Exploring their unexpected points of connection, my goal is to bring into view acts of resistance against sexual surveillance that already operate below and above the threshold of everyday perception.

The project advocates for a philosophy of resistance that underscores the political …

Creating Coping Mechanism: An Anatomy Of A Gallery-Based Installation And Performance Work, Jamie M. Kutner

LSU Master's Theses

The project described in this paper is an exhibition of gallery-based durational performance art, and resulting three-dimensional artifacts, that was created through a tangled process of relapse and recovery from mental illness. The first section of this paper peers into the parameters of ephemeral artistic practice. I discuss the process of merging my recovery and creative practice through performance art, and then parse the discussion of the work into the categories of performer, audience, site, and time. Section II details various aspects of spectator experience through a second-person narrative tracing the crowd flow of the exhibition. I conclude with an …

Transit, Christopher Janke

Masters Theses

This written thesis, transit, accompanies an exhibition by the same name and serves to contextualize the exhibit. The written portion begins with an inquiry into the nature of the contextualization itself, questioning the nature of the relationship between the written thesis, the exhibit, and the University which explicitly requires and connects the two, especially the ways that the written word as granted authority through an institution of higher education might undermine the exhibit’s intent to provoke thought into other forms of knowledge and other avenues of legitimacy than those presented by this institution.

The thesis discusses the philosophic question sometimes …

Strange Fruit: Black Female Body Politics In Contemporary American Culture, Eleanor Kipping

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The African American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s was an organized effort by and for Black American populations to receive equal treatment by law. Its legacy has much reason to be celebrated: not only for its accomplishments and successes in unifying the Black community but also in bringing issues of segregation, violence, and racial discrimination to the forefront of the public’s attention. The decade was a pivotal point in contemporary race relations, and served as an apex in attempts to bridge America’s past and what America is striving to become. Today however, the social and political climate …

Creative ‘Class’: Leading Innovation With Digital Pedagogy In Cultural And Creative Industry (Cci) Programs, Dana Morningstar

The Dissertation-in-Practice at Western University

Leaders of cultural and creative programs (CCIs) in Ontario community colleges are key to realizing potential in higher education related to digital pedagogy, creativity, industry partnerships, entrepreneurship and innovation. In this Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP), the role of an academic leadership group is considered from Ontario-centric creative industry and innovation policies and college processes. The problem of practice is the gap of harmonized leadership strategy between higher education classroom practices and regional and provincial overarching educational strategy to increase innovation through digital pedagogy. Colleges have collective capacities in innovating with digital pedagogy in creative industry programs and providing graduates with …

Illusions Of "Blackness" In Contemporary Visual Culture, Michaël Dorn

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

My thesis begins with a primer of the historical concept of “black(ness)” and the roots of its racialization. Intertwined throughout my discussion in Section I, I will highlight a few of my research findings and discuss some of the installation images that I created as I studied the work of contemporary artists who use lexical and literal figurative “blackness” in their work—in particular, the oeuvre of Kerry James Marshall as featured in his retrospective exhibition Mastry. My discourse unfolds with a brief etymological review of both the English word “black” and its precedent conceptual forms in Section II. Section …

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

Acts Of Contrition: An Exploration Of Catholic Guilt And Sensory Pleasure In Kinetic Sculpture, Wade Warman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis outlines the formulation of a research-based practice in kinetic sculpture. The primary goal is to investigate how historical and contemporary kinetic sculpture might provide a means for exploring the notion of guilt as seen through the paradigm of the Catholic Church by way of sensory pleasure using Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth as a framework. The methodological model upon which this research is based is a hybrid model that combines elements of experimental engineering methodologies (i.e. experimentation, data collection, data analysis, etc.) as well as historical research. The primary outcome is Acts of Contrition, a series of five kinetic sculptures …

Rediscovering The Interpersonal: Models Of Networked Communication In New Media Performance, Alicia Champlin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the themes of human perception and participation within the contemporary paradigm and relates the hallmarks of the major paradigm shift which occurred in the mid-20th century from a structural view of the world to a systems view. In this context, the author’s creative practice is described, outlining a methodology for working with the communication networks and interpersonal feedback loops that help to define our relationships to each other and to media since that paradigm shift. This research is framed within a larger field of inquiry into the impact of contemporary New Media Art as we experience it. …

Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Sarah Louise Ferguson

LSU Master's Theses

Darkness on the Edge of Town focuses on a series of dioramas I created accompanied by audio and video. This thesis exhibition is based on a series of interviews I conducted with a friend who is a recovering opioid addict who has spent the majority of his life incarcerated for drug offenses. The American opioid epidemic currently looms large mostly because of the influx of drug abuse in middle class white communities. My subject is of Puerto Rican descent and represents the much harsher treatment of minority addicts by the criminal justice system. His personal story represents a deep yearning …

Professional Risk, Russell A. Perkins

Theses and Dissertations

This essay suggests a reading of Harold Rosenberg’s “American Action Painters” and John Cage’s “Experimental Music”, texts in which notions of chance and risk are mobilized to account for artistic production; I argue that this rhetoric mischaracterizes the relation between artist and material, confusing the labor involved in taking chances.

Murmur/Murmuro, Paola M. Di Tolla

Theses and Dissertations

By using repetition or misplacing intonations and accents, etc. one can imitate the slipperiness of spoken language. However, it is the accidental slippage that I find most revealing and exciting because it allows for two conversations to exist in one. Once spoken language is transcribed as text, it is put through another filter and the risk of [accidental] slippage increases by a different measure. Fingers don’t keep up or autocorrect insists on taking matters into its own hands.

Designing A World: A Foray Into Scenography And Settling, Nathan David Ynacay

LSU Master's Theses

This work examines the design process as taught and what was practiced during Louisiana State University’s production of LMNOP the Muzical.

This will examine the design process as typically taught to undergraduate theatre students in all aspects of the discipline. The collaborative nature of the design process as taught to cast members, directors, and production team will be examined. After this examination, the design process for Louisiana State University’s production of LMNOP the Muzical will be used to compare and contrast the actual process with the theory of a collaborative design process. After, there will be an evaluation of …

Painting Through Time And Space, Michelle O'Connell

Theses and Dissertations

By questioning painting-as-object, I arrive at capturing painting in time. Digital editing and projecting onto paintings and screens in space creates an overlapping of timecodes. With this environment, I aim to create an experience of painting and travel that is non-linear and multi-directional.

Private Rainbows, Mikey F. Estes

Theses and Dissertations

I make art that refers to how the self is mediated through structures, objects, and images — a kind of self-portraiture that circles around its subject, reflecting a state of simultaneous formation and disintegration. Over the past few years, I have used my iPhone as a tool to make images of everyday life. As the user of this device, I am defined by both my presence and absence. I am interested in the process of locating the self within the scattered yet ordered space of the screen.

Rror, Carter D. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Building on common definitions of terms such as machine, human, and code, this paper presents a strategy for an art practice that engages with data that has been processed and the processor as actor or character. Material is presented in such a way that rules, guidelines, logic, code, coherence may be viewed as tools to be employed for the use of obtaining and retaining power and control. Presenting digital technologies not only as a mediating force upon physical bodies but also a part of those bodies, and, furthermore, as abject and thus positioned outside an ideological structure of consumer technology, …

It's Pink And Nice But We Are Done With It, Taylor Elizabeth Yocom

Graduate School of Art Theses

My work in video, installation, performance, sound, and photography is influenced and inspired by my experience of being a woman. In my work, I draw pink flowers and create pink backdrops. I smash things, eat, drink, drop things, smile, nod, and look at you. Through these works, I explore the gender performativity of female niceness, synthesizing these two separate theories as a social condition and expectation for women. I argue that female niceness consists of bodily and linguistic patterns that women must perform in order to be perceived as feminine.

In my video and installation work, I use a “sickeningly” …

Mediated: An Investigation Of Print Media's Impact Of Self, Rachel Hertzman

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In the 21^st Century print media is often overlooked for the masses of images available at everyone’s fingertips on the internet. This thesis is an exploration of the ways in which those original forms of mass produced images, specifically fashion/ beauty magazines and newspapers, alter one’s sense of self. The magazines have a proven negative effect on women consumers who internalize the singular thin beauty ideal persisted in this media. A similar internalization happens with the constant viewing of news papers, creating a sense of shared cultural memory. The Artist takes an in depth look at how these ideas …

Observance | A Passage, Charis Schneider Norell

Graduate School of Art Theses

My art practice consists of drawing with fibers within handcrafted frame looms. I position these drawings as expanded, three-dimensional “drawing spaces,” creating medium-scale installations. I wish to expand drawing’s definition beyond its traditional material limits to simply be the process of leaving marks. Fiber is my medium, and the space within the frame loom’s warp and weft becomes my support. I see the drawing process to be the gestural residue of thought, and call these works my “fiber drawings.” While I use traditional weaving methods and materials as I work, I do not call myself a weaver. I see myself, …

Unmaking As Making, Viola Bordon

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Artist Viola Bordon examines the processes of touch, unmaking, and materially dictated aesthetics regarding her studio practice. The philosophical ideas of absence are used to establish a purpose for undoing, which is then explored as a learning process. This process is complicated by the sense of touch, resulting in formal aesthetics that are materially inspired.

Slower Than Time Itself, Matthew S. Trueman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This paper is combined with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, Slower Than Time Itself. There is a significant discontinuity between how duration is measured by clocks and how it is perceived by the individual. This discontinuity generates pressure both on the individual and the environment. The concept of dualism constructs a dichotomy between people and nature, devaluing that which can not be measured. In Slower Than Time Itself the thesis, sculptural and video works aims to dissolve this dichotomy not by rejecting technology but by embracing it. Can one use clocks to escape time itself? I investigate the …

Making Sounds, Patrick Costello

Theses and Dissertations

Using collaboration and performance as tools, I situate my personal story, my body, and my skills and interests within a contemporary landscape that is intersectional, full of partialities, and rooted in evolving ecologies.

A World Of Possibilities, Austen Linder

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) has been shrouded in stigma­ – so many people afraid to even try it out due to those undesirable personas constructed around the game. It’s hardly ever looked at as the incredible creative exercise and amazing bonding experience that it presents, a surefire potential to bring a group of people closer together as they joke, problem-solve, and process both game and real life together, while learning about how very much those two realms overlap. With how much the game has meant to me and how highly I regard the potential of its power, I …

Milk, Lindsey Heiden

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My work is a composition of contemporary fairy tales of visual, written and oral forms. I examined the historical evolution of formula, from animal milk, to powder formula and now to a combination of animal milk, human milk and powder. The current scientific research being done with formula and animals, coupled with a fairy tale is the inspiration behind my current tale. The importance of women both in regards to the historical development of keeping a cultural tradition alive through oral tale-telling and the much larger role of keeping humankind alive through reproduction and birth, further build the base that …

For Wintonbury: An Expansion Of Narrative And Painting, Cassaundra Kayla Sanderson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In March 2017, I began planning the narratives of what would become my Thesis Exhibition. One year later marked my installation of the exhibit: For Wintonbury, located at the Fine Art Center Gallery at the University of Arkansas.

A merging of the visual arts and literary fiction, For Wintonbury offers a more immersive experience in storytelling. The painted scenes, drawings, three-dimensional compositions, and short stories each serve their own purposes in presenting partial glimpses into the longer narratives of Wintonbury. Through multiple media and entry points, the viewer is given the choice in which sequence and manner to take in …

Ice Cream, Richard Frank Peterson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ice Cream is a series of 2D and 3D depictions of lawn ornaments, Charlie Brown, and novelty ice cream bars, which question how White America is indoctrinated through seemingly innocuous images and objects. The exhibition unveils the white supremacy fostered within the American way of life and articulates an environment where Americans act in racist ways when they believe they are acting morally. The research found within Ice Cream attempts to dismantle the foundation these justifications are built upon. This honesty, coupled with acknowledging that these historic traditions are rooted in racial constructs, will result in a double consciousness and …

Real Goner, Nicholas Cox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis paper is to tell the story behind, and outline the theoretical and conceptual framework underlying the exhibition, Real Goner. The exhibition combines a number of elements drawn from music and art history, as well as the theoretical writings of Albert Camus, Guy Debord, and Joseph Kosuth. Together, these elements produce a cryptic exhibition that attempts to address the inherent chaos, and apparent meaninglessness of existence; and to see art as a proposition, a performance, and a practice. The exhibition addresses issues of celebrity, the production and consumption of culture, and where that cycle leaves us …