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Ripe Spoils, Yan Cynthia Chen

Theses and Dissertations

Chen’s practice primarily focus on sculptures and installation. She explores the interplay between the idea of nature and the constructed environment, by examining how language informs what we know. The central thesis, "Ripe Spoils", employs citrus fruits as symbols for bodily experiences and personal identity, investigating their cultural and historical significance. Her sculptures summon the qualities and embedded meanings in materials like paper pulp and clay, wax and citrus fruits, often resulting in abstracted forms evocative of the human body. This thesis paper and exhibition reflect on themes like mortality and the essence of self.

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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.

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.

Memories As Old As Outer Space, Nicholas Benfey

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings draw from personal memory, as well as the nostalgic longing and nightmarish foreboding of the irrational psyche. Cosmic ruptures, cliffs, cemeteries, and parking lots appear alongside snowglobes and canopy beds. I aim to suggest things to be wary of, while giving space for optimistic fantasy and reflective wonder.

The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.

Needle And Thread, Caitlin Carvalho

Theses and Dissertations

Needle and Thread is an expanded cinema performance that involves the projection of 16mm film, archival footage, video, 35mm slide projection, soundscape and liquid light projection. It explores the fibers of connection, the thread that ties together my matriarchy, utilizing the language of cinema to piece together the memories.

Maybe That's What It Means, Anael Berkovitz

Theses and Dissertations

Anael Berkovitz explores personal and collective memory through the use of storytelling and interpretation. Focusing on how identity is shaped by stories, her three part video details the nomadic nature of her own family, the obfuscation of language in translation and the incorporation of an invasive species into a culture.

A Chair In The Woods, Victoria Dolloff

Theses and Dissertations

Victoria Dolloff's MFA Thesis considers traces of play and perception in the development of her artwork, exploring the idea of reorientation through subtleties of the absurd. Her installation Untitled (Landscape) questions object as place and place as memory utilizing fragmentation as reconstruction.

Fear And Nostalgia In Immigration, Daniel A. Matthews

Theses and Dissertations

Fear and Nostalgia in Immigration is a project that uses re-occuring memory and experiential memory to help us understand our common histories. The projects asks individuals to first share a re-occuring memory by writing it on a chalkboard. The next step is to then write an experiential memory about immigration, this can be a story you might have heard or it could be something from your own family history. These two tasks are done on a communal table where several individuals are engage in the same task at the same time. This aim of this exercise is to have something …