Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Defiantly Childlike: Using Aesthetic Resistance To Heal, Sarah K. Reagan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines an alternative processing mechanism surrounding the act of healing after traumatic experiences in life. Using a methodology of iterative patterning and tool-pathing, a collection of inflatable garments and wooden mannequins analyzes defense mechanisms learned in early childhood development. This work highlights an essential body of recent scholarship that takes cuteification seriously to restore a childlike approach to mastering fear. This paper will review the definitions of cuteness and childlike humor and then describe how visual culture has implemented these components to subvert established power.

Straight Through My Heart, Raul A. Aguilar Canela

Theses and Dissertations

Straight through my heart is an exhibition that explores the concept of heartbreak as a socio-political phenomenon. Through the affect of sadness the thesis analyses the way in which subjects are formed under cognitive capitalism. Paying particular interest to the collateral effects of neoliberal culture —hyper-stimulation, self-exploitation, competition, and obsession with productivity—and the pathologies they create —depression, anxiety, body aches, fatigue— this work shifts the burden of sadness from the individual to the community. By doing so it proposes heartbreak as a public feeling.

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …

Path, Evan Galbicka

Theses and Dissertations

Path is a collaborative system that developed over the course of five months of studio activity and continued through the duration of the exhibition. The system’s main collaborators were a land snail native to eastern North America (Neohelix albolabris), myself, and a digital cellular automaton. These prime agents interwove processes and exchanges between one another into a complex network of folded fractal feedback loops. Cyclic processes produced artifacts and infrastructures to support communication between the components and agents of Path. As a whole, Path spoke to the possibilities for interspecies, cyber-physical, and ecological collaboration to create an …

New Patriarchies: A Turbulence Of Source And Subject, Stephen Fuller

Theses and Dissertations

Experiencing a turbulence of source and subject in the variable inversions and supports of one source to another--the wreck of the U-352, Carpeaux’s Ugolino and his Sons, a movie poster for J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible, and Cassiopeia mythology--these four sources as sons, in sacrifice to and surviving by way of “daddy” documentation, are here refigured to reenact and critique the patriarchally recreational, monumental, cinematic, and mythological infrastructures supporting the sources of this work and thereby serving to critique the newer patriarchies to which these sources and their subjectifications here seek to cross consumptively dead end. Following three public …

Postcession, Evan D. Pomerantz

Theses and Dissertations

This is a series of daily writings. Each day consists of a new topic and is closed at the end of the day. The ideas presented are philosophical, humorous, rambling, lamentations, incantations, doubt-ridden, aesthetic pep talks which combine into an affective representation of my studio practice’s becoming. There will be little congruency, some stories, and a lot of parallels because that is who I am.

Reviving Project:A Chinese-American Culture Exchange Project, Yushan Cassie Sun

Undergraduate Research Posters

Through art exhibitions in Beijing, China and Richmond, Virginia, Reviving project 01 aims to help promote/ revive a craft technique in Qinghai, China that is disappearing due to the urbanized surroundings.

American artist were invited to collaborate with people from Qinghai to make new pieces incorporating original crafted pieces.

The Artist In The Library: Research Services For Creators, Kristina Keogh, John Glover

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

At Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries we serve a variety of disciplines. This poster session focuses on outreach initiatives by the Visual Arts Research Librarian and the Humanities Research Librarian to provide research services to a unique group: students and faculty who create new and unique objects and texts. The needs of artistic researchers in such diverse areas as interior design, painting, and creative writing overlap in many ways, both expected and unexpected.

Our efforts to reach out to creators and offer support for their distinctive research needs have included such activities as taking classes within particular programs and embedding ourselves …