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University of Nebraska - Lincoln
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
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Articles 1 - 30 of 131
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
4:44, Matthew Meyer
4:44, Matthew Meyer
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
As a multimedia artist, I create using practices of painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, and digital methods. The conceptual basis of my work explores the specific relationship between material, process, and idea. 4:44, the title of my thesis exhibition, refers to Jay-Z’s 2017 critically acclaimed album. This album has a lot of influential moments within it; however, one song embodied the ideas that I was researching while at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. “The Story of O.J.” contains different aspects of Blackness, whether how we treat each other, think about the future or just the different skin tones within the …
Softly And Tenderly Calling, Jewelya Coffey
Softly And Tenderly Calling, Jewelya Coffey
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,
Calling for you and for me;
See, on the portals He’s waiting and watching,
Watching for you and for me.
Come home, come home,
You who are weary, come home;
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling, O sinner, come home!
Why should we tarry when Jesus is pleading,
Pleading for you and for me?
Why should we linger and heed not His mercies,
Mercies for you and for me?
Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
Passing from you and from me;
Shadows are gathering, deathbeds are coming,
Coming for you and for …
Permutations, Casey Beck
Permutations, Casey Beck
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
I make pottery not only out of a passion for my material, clay, and for the complex processes of wheel throwing and atmospheric firing, but also out of a passion for living with, using, and sharing handmade objects. For me, using pottery daily is an act of celebration. My philosophy of making pots comes in part from the particular history of utilitarian pottery that has developed over the last sixty years in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin, where I went to school and began my career as a potter. More recently, the form language that I employ in my work has …
Or To Be Eaten Alive, Christopher Williams
Or To Be Eaten Alive, Christopher Williams
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
“or to be eaten alive'' is a multimedia exhibition in which I merge my own coming of age story with a mythological ecology. In this work I reclaim my queer identity by communing with my past selves in a fantasy world created through the lens of Queer Ecology and Queer Eco-Futurism. The visuals in this exhibition obscure reality. They are abstractions of the landscapes I occupy—particularly the Tallgrass prairie and Ozark ecoregions. Through a speculative, fantasy world the exhibition introduces moments of adoration, death, fracturing, growth, joy, and failure. I form, draw, color and arrange the work embracing mistakes and …
Is It Gonna Be Fun?, Kim Tomlinson
Is It Gonna Be Fun?, Kim Tomlinson
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
I am a multidisciplinary artist working across digital and analog forms of printmaking, installation, playing, drawing, and writing. I incorporate elements of humor, autobiography, and nostalgic pop culture references to tell stories and facilitate connections.
At the heart of my work is the desire to be seen and feel connected. This starts with self reflection and building a personal archive of important references and symbols. Through recurring characters rooted in personal and historical pop culture references, I incorporate layers of complexity and inside jokes into the work. Humor is an essential tool to maintain levity, engage participants, and challenge traditional …
In This Time And Place, Christy Aggens
In This Time And Place, Christy Aggens
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
I seek out and spend time in relatively wild outdoor locations and create art based on my observations. The resulting work explores time and place, while the creation of the work increases my engagement with the environment. This process serves as a reminder that time is relative and life itself is continuous.
I start by finding time in locations where nature has been given a chance to thrive and where the sound of human activity is at a minimum. During these retreats, I use my senses to absorb information and document the experience by journaling, making recordings, taking photographs, drawing, …
Silhouette, Andy Bissonnette
Silhouette, Andy Bissonnette
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
As a potter, I am deeply interested in the union between form, surface, and function. I believe these elements are intrinsically connected and the most successful pots are able to balance all three in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and practical. From the proportional relationship between the foot and rim, to the way a glaze breaks or pools across an articulated surface, each detail is crafted with intention and care. Silhouette is a metaphor for how I conceptualize and conceive each of my pieces. It’s a way to explore form through both an aesthetic and practical approach. My …
Spit Brimming With Futures, Penny Molesso
Spit Brimming With Futures, Penny Molesso
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
SPIT BRIMMING WITH FUTURES is an immersive video and audio installation that uses ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) to investigate the intersection of transgender and neurodivergent identity, expressing an urgent need to imagine stories about transgender, autistic people that affirm our agency and autonomy amidst a political climate that weaponizes neurodivergence to delegitimize trans experiences. The American political right’s vilification of transgender people is used to uphold structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy that become destabilized when rigid binary gender categories are challenged. The political right has a vested interest in keeping trans people out of public view, thus weaponizing …
Magic Mirrors, Jamie Ho
Magic Mirrors, Jamie Ho
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
When a beam of bright light hits the convex and polished surface, an image is reflected back onto the wall. This is a description of a magic mirror, an object from the Han Dynasty (206 BC -24 AD), that embodies how Euro-America views China: both technically advanced and shrouded in mystery. The magic mirror also points to the history of photography, as this term was often used in the Victorian era to describe a camera. The image created by a camera is a mimic of reality, both all too familiar and unfamiliar.[1] Like magic mirrors, the GIFs I create …
Qualia, Maxwell Henderson
Qualia, Maxwell Henderson
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
In this thesis, I examine the transformative potential of pottery through the lens of "qualia," the subjective experiences, emotions, and perceptions that shape our conscious lives. Stemming from my personal journey, which includes a childhood of poverty in Arizona and a biracial identity, I advocate for inclusivity and diversity in art and society by challenging material hierarchies and conventional artistic practices.
I delve into the vibrant aesthetics of Japanese Kutani porcelain, the fluidity and balance in ceramic vessels, and the impact of my background on my artistic approach. My experiences foster a rejection of painterly language and arbitrary hierarchies, prompting …
Am I Another You?, Laura Diane Cobb
Am I Another You?, Laura Diane Cobb
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
On my birth certificate are the names of my parents, though the name of my father stands in opposition to my genealogy. The script of his signature conceals my birth as donor conceived (DC). The truth of my origin would lay dormant for years behind his scrawl, burying my true heritage beneath the stories of my social father’s ancestry.
Learning the truth, I began to reevaluate my identity. Searching for myself along waterways, I explored the shores of the Platte River as if by knowing its sandbars, flora, and fauna, I would come to know myself. In searching the land, …
Bound By Matter, Carlie Antes
Bound By Matter, Carlie Antes
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
I view most aspects of life as being made up of tiny particles of matter that come together and synthesize to shape both our individual and collective human existence. Delicate threads are intricately woven together forming textiles and fabric. Tiny cellular particles shape all living species. Devices of human invention are mapped and constructed to aid in making sense of situations and surroundings. An accumulation of day-to-day moments coalesce to form complex memories and emotions. Each of these compositions are comprised of physical and/or emotional matter. This body of work utilizes the physical matter of my own lived experiences to …
Qualia, Maxwell Henderson
Qualia, Maxwell Henderson
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
As an artist, my work is a conduit for the exploration of "qualia" – the personal, deeply subjective experiences, emotions, and perceptions that shape our conscious lives. My artistic journey, born from a childhood in Arizona poverty and my biracial identity, has ignited a passion for inclusivity and diversity in art and society, guiding me to challenge traditional material hierarchies and conventional artistic norms.
My art interweaves the vivid aesthetics of Japanese Kutani porcelain and the natural, raw beauty of Icelandic landscapes with the fluidity and balance found in ceramic vessels. Through this fusion, I strive to redefine the role …
Why Sweep The Cinders…, Gretchen Larsen
Why Sweep The Cinders…, Gretchen Larsen
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
In my creative practice I climb down the ladder, put the glass slipper on my own foot, and build the ball for myself (and everyone I know, of course). What I mean is, instead of waiting for the prince and his kingdom to come, I have learned to pursue my own dreams. I do this by dreaming up and building objects using a mixture of traditional and new media. I work with wood, acrylic, LEDs, microcontrollers, lamp parts, and other materials including fabric and projectors. I create, live with, and create again, objects of my own design. The objects I …
Until Morning, Asher Berard
Until Morning, Asher Berard
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
Until Morning is an installation-based body of work that is rooted in fantasy through storytelling. It’s focused on a narrative about processing trauma through the self at their various stages of recovery. This exhibition consists of paintings, sculptures, audio, and videos reflecting a world built to regain authorship over unsettling memories that demand closure. The films are performative extensions of self in familiar southern Louisiana landscapes. The viewer shares perspective through the point of view of Memory, the main character depicted with pink hair. The fictional scenes all toy with notions of remembering, forgetting, and coping, while also provoking reactions …
Brick Collage, Dehmie Dehmlow
Brick Collage, Dehmie Dehmlow
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
bricolage: construction or creation from a diverse range of available things
I create abstracted modular sculptures, assemblages, and collages that playfully reference utility, using salvaged materials and carefully fabricated objects. My sculptures are considerately composed, elevating the materials with a determined focus on how each disparate part connects to the next to become a meaningful whole. I have a reverence for all of the objects and materials I use, no matter their origin, and thoroughly consider how each of their forms, textures, colors, weights and other formal and physical qualities integrate into a whole. With the use of recognizable utilitarian …
I Want To Go Home, Amber Boris
I Want To Go Home, Amber Boris
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
The significance of a home lies within the memories of the space. I Want to Go Home is a body of work that explores this idea through a collection of sculptures and drawings depicting my childhood home. This house holds meaning to me not only because it is where I grew up, but because it was also my mother’s childhood home. Six generations of our family have passed through the house, creating a long history of associated stories, memories, and emotions.
I have constructed scaled down sculptures of rooms for these memories to live in. The spaces are left empty, …
The Ghosts Shed Tears, Sarah Jentsch
The Ghosts Shed Tears, Sarah Jentsch
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
Before I was taught what made us different, I thought my brother and I were the same. The only difference between a doe and a buck was the antlers. As I grew, I noticed differences—in the way people spoke to us, in what was expected of us, in the questions we were asked. In what our futures were supposed to look like. The difference between the doe and the buck was still the antlers, but those antlers made one a trophy and the other venison.
Many of my formative experiences I came to understand through animals. My family home, cradled …
It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush
It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. In It Won’t Be Easy, Arkush places and piles her multimedia sculptures throughout the gallery to create installations that overlap with her writing and poetry, sometimes layering in (or extending out to) audio and video components. This approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate—though no less lively. Her work meditates on and ‘vendiagrams’ things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic. The exhibition title acknowledges that the …
Idylls, Madison Aunger
Idylls, Madison Aunger
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
An “Idyll” is defined as a happy, peaceful, or picturesque scene. The term references poetry that describes a small intimate world, and scenes from everyday life.
This exhibition, Idylls, showcases the little world of my home here in Lincoln, Nebraska. The paintings mirror my experience of the domestic spaces in my life, and the peaceful moments I encounter. In Idylls you are encouraged to be idle. We do ourselves a disservice when we don’t take the time to slow down.
My work begins as an excitement about a specific formal quality, a shape of light, a hint of color, repetition …
Devastation Experienced When Two Individuals Stop Kissing One Another, Isaiah Jones
Devastation Experienced When Two Individuals Stop Kissing One Another, Isaiah Jones
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
The work in Devastation Experienced When Two Individuals Stop Kissing One Another is an excavation of the private self in relation to love and desire and an exploration of the chaos that ensues in their passage. Desire describes a state of attachment to a person, an object, or an idea. It produces a cloud of optimism between that which is desired and she who is full of desire . It presses against need, the obsessive 1 phenomena of all amorous sentiment, and in its dissolution, total devastation ensues2. With this work, I explore my own desires, observations, uncertainty, and anger, …
Growth, Taylor Sijan
Growth, Taylor Sijan
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
I craft functional pottery that is richly decorated with layers of abstracted botanical imagery. While working within the parameters of function, I explore the possibilities for expressing and evoking beauty through altered porcelain forms and lush surfaces. As a potter, I create forms that inspire curiosity and interaction through a balance of originality and suggested function. I connect myself to others through the intermediary of the vessel, conveying my reverence for plants, nourishment and beauty. People then interpret how to use my work, adding their own sentiments as it becomes part of their lives. Pots live in the home, bridging …
Tomorrow Is The Worst Day Since Yesterday, Matthew Carlson
Tomorrow Is The Worst Day Since Yesterday, Matthew Carlson
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
Susan Sontag wrote: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other space”.
This work addresses aspects of that citizenship. I used my experiences as a person living with a disability and as a parent to a son with Autism to explore the dichotomy of this dual citizenship. The …
Short Stories, Tall Tales, Chance Lure Allen
Short Stories, Tall Tales, Chance Lure Allen
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
It is often said that the truth should never get in the way of a good story. I use painting and drawing to override truth, open a door to imagined lives, reflect on the past from a new perspective, and look to the future from my current perspective. Thedrawings and paintings in this exhibitioncombine elements of personal history, historical art references, popular culture, and music, drawing heavily from American iconography. I use the format of the still life to create idiosyncratic parings of objects and images documenting memories of growing up in Missouri. Some of the images are short stories. …
The Weight Of It All, Amythest Warrington
The Weight Of It All, Amythest Warrington
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
The impetus for this exhibition is to visualize the weight of loss and to focus attention on the need to recognize the inherent dichotomy between life’s beauty and loss. My mobile upbringing taught me that details may differ from group to group, but the core experiences of loss, empathy and belonging are a universal language that connects us. I utilize clay’s unique physical properties of malleability, recyclability and permanence once fired, to explore the dichotomy between strength and frailty associated with these universal connectors. The meticulously crafted beautiful objects draw one into serious and often taboo subjects. The work comforts …
Take Your Time, Terry A. Ratzlaff
Take Your Time, Terry A. Ratzlaff
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
I see the world not as one seamless world but as a world composed of other worlds, built on top and within one another. They exist harmoniously, bound not by space but by time. In an instant I can move from one world into another where I can exist in two worlds simultaneously—in space, I am here. In time, I am there.
Worldmaking is a conceptual process of seeing connections and making distinctions within our lived reality.1 It is a process of dividing and organizing parts into collections that represent different narratives. Only through suitable arrangements can we handle vast …
Things Change, Julia Leggent
Things Change, Julia Leggent
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
The paintings in Things Change are pieces of my life; they follow my routines, thoughts, and worries, but these topics are experienced by many. The images of flesh, knobs, and pills are painted at life scale and are meant to be widely relatable. With each of my works, I hope to bring awareness to social, political, and feminine themes while drawing the viewer in and inciting interest in the ever-changing visual aspects of everyday life.
Examining routine, ritual, and time is always fascinating to me; I work to show this through my paintings. Practices change throughout the years. Strangely, you …
Slowly But Surely, Katie Bosley
Slowly But Surely, Katie Bosley
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
I craft porcelain vessels that combine dynamic forms and dimensional surfaces to create a captivating presence. Formal components such as line, space, and color are carefully considered to create objects that are striking at first glance and reward further inspection. Constructed with an emphasis on structure, these works challenge conventional interpretations of the vessel and promote a sense of awe.
My vessels are relational objects that both affect and are affected by their surroundings. Employing positive and negative space, and light and shadow, they collaborate with the space they inhabit. They are objects designed to promote and reward active viewing. …
Eat My Quartz, Neil Celani-Morrell
Eat My Quartz, Neil Celani-Morrell
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
Pottery has a remarkable ability to tap into the human collective experience, so it is no surprise I express my own understanding of the world by working within the boundaries of “the pot”. With the capacity to communicate conceptual meaning and to serve as objects of utility, pottery not only dances in the notorious territory between art and craft, it embodies the human spirit.
My pots are totems of my existence and this work is an authentic representation of my creative journey. They are an homage to the key influences in my life which have informed and encouraged my creativity …
Cornucopia, Patrick Hargraves
Cornucopia, Patrick Hargraves
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
I navigate the uncertain times we live in by creating positive, playful sculptures because focusing on joy is not only possible in times of hardship, I believe it is necessary in order to thrive. I go through life with a watchful reverence, finding beauty and hope in the abundance of life in the natural world. Using this inspiration, I reinvent and intentionally exaggerate landscapes and plant forms in clay with a freeing sense of whimsy. My fantasized pieces are an invitation to extend imagination to the joyous moments in the world around us, and to return to an innocent sense …