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- School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work (16)
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Articles 1 - 20 of 20
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
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 …
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, …
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 …
Ecological Art Exhibition As Transformative Pedagogy, Stacey Skold
Ecological Art Exhibition As Transformative Pedagogy, Stacey Skold
College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Environmental degradation is considered one of the biggest issues facing humankind. The problem is deep and global with fast fashion playing a significant, yet underrealized role. Scholars have established that developing the sustainable behaviors necessary to mitigate the effects of environmental degradation is a complex process, that knowledge of environmental degradation alone is insufficient to develop sustainable behaviors, and that both attitudinal and behavioral transformations are necessary for global environmental action and stewardship. As a result, researchers have called for new approaches to environmental education to promote transformative learning.
Art experiences can function as a powerful tool in learning and …
Entangled, Katherine Cox
Entangled, Katherine Cox
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
I create objects to incite wonder through their exuberance, inviting one to explore the beauty found in the strange and offering the viewer a way to interact with the discomfort of the unknown. Mysculptures are an assembly of engaging surfaces and forms revealing varying texturesandvibrant colors referencing natural and fabricated worlds. Each sculpture is entangled within its own environment or narrative and each is adorned for its own role, finding a balance between discord and harmony, captivation and repulsion.
Each is an individual exploration of the distinct qualities inherent within each object. They are precious in scale and stimulate …
The Rug's Topography, Rana Young
The Rug's Topography, Rana Young
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
My complex relationship with photographs began when I was young. I remember tearing images out of publications and bringing them to my dad prepared with questions. Where I grew up, normative values defined by anatomy at birth impacted an individual’s gender perception and performance. Raised by a single father, I experienced a non-traditional family structure in my home. Seeing photographs portraying the “wholeness” of family contradicted my reality. Those psychological impressions provoked my curiosity and propelled me to solve the mystery of what existed beyond the scene depicted.
In retrospect, my search for missing context stems from an interest in …
Whitetail, Michael Steven Villarreal
Whitetail, Michael Steven Villarreal
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
When I was growing up, both my parents worked at a U-Haul from which they brought home discarded objects to the house my dad built with his own hands. This home, interior and exterior, was not designed to fit an explicit aesthetic, but all aspects of the house were in harmony and completed by the objects brought into each space. The house became a repository for abandoned domestic American culture— beds, window blinds, couches, appliances, and other products made it into the home in irregular but frequent intervals. For me, each item was an opportunity to have something new to …
Ephemeral Permanence, Emily Reason
Ephemeral Permanence, Emily Reason
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
Traditional pottery forms and images of flora, fauna and rural architecture in Ephemeral Permanence awaken memory through the sensations and associations they suggest. These works are memorials to beauty, craft, culture and nature. I capture what is fleeting, make it tangible and endow it with longevity. Graceful movement paired with an element of danger reveals the complicated nature of beauty, waning culture is depicted with meticulous stability to conjure nostalgia, and form and surface celebrate craft and beauty. Icons of nature and culture in this work play a metaphoric role and serve to ignite memories.
I am fascinated with the …
Ceramic Apprenticeship With Professor Eddie Dominguez, Victoria E. Norton
Ceramic Apprenticeship With Professor Eddie Dominguez, Victoria E. Norton
UCARE Research Products
The purpose of this research is to explore specific techniques and processes as employed by Eddie Dominguez through an apprenticeship in ceramic art in which I will be intimately involved in both the critical thinking and process of Professor Dominguez’ work. Topics of focus include building upon my skills of testing glazes and clays in order to discover which glaze and clay combinations cater best to the work. I also plan to investigate idea generation and art concept, an element of Eddie Dominguez’s work that is very important.
Many other vital studio practices were implemented during the apprenticeship. Skills such …
Land/People, Amanda R. Breitbach
Land/People, Amanda R. Breitbach
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
Through my project, Land/People, I investigate the decline of family farming and the emotional and spiritual issues that underly the human relationship to land. The exhibition combines aerial and large-scale panoramic photographs of my family’s farmland in eastern Montana with more intimate images of family members and domestic spaces. Through the use of multiple images, visual grids, and a repeated motif of windows, I tell a complicated story about history and land use, as well as the changing face of American agriculture. The installation is meant to be immersive, inviting viewers to experience this landscape for themselves and to …
Code Of Best Practices In Fair Use For The Visual Arts, College Art Association, Patricia Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi
Code Of Best Practices In Fair Use For The Visual Arts, College Art Association, Patricia Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi
Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.
The mission of the College Art Association (CAA) is to promote the visual arts and their understanding through advocacy, intellectual engagement, and a commitment to the diversity of practices and practitioners. CAA contributes to the visual arts profession as a whole through scholarly publications, advocacy, exchange of research and new work, and the development of standards and guidelines that reflect the best practices of the field. The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts is based on a consensus of professionals in the visual arts who use copyrighted images, texts, and other materials in their creative …
Iterations, Thomas Lowell Edwards
Iterations, Thomas Lowell Edwards
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
For millennia, pottery has facilitated the communal activities of eating and drinking. I use pottery as a placeholder, a metaphor for human interaction. The central core, the initial inspiration, of my sculpture is the diminishing level of connection our culture actively pursues.
I began to notice a trend of increasing disengagement in American culture after spending time abroad and observing the amount of time other cultures allotted for meals, coffee, etc. with companions. I make sculptures that comment on growing American disengagement using various formal principles of art (line, mass, scale, rhythm, and repetition). I am generally unsatisfied with a …
Closely Distant, Crisha Yantis
Closely Distant, Crisha Yantis
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
Drawing upon my own experiences and observations of the world around me I use the figure to explore what it means to be human. This body of work addresses the universal experience of anxiety through the dynamics of both personal and interpersonal relationships, specifically focusing on fear of the unknown or what subconsciously lies just out of our comfort or understanding.
Often what is unknown is also what brings about questions of our own power and what we can or cannot control. In my work, I address ideas of power and powerlessness formally through what the figures lack. Their control …
Carrying Water: A M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition By Aaron Sober, Aaron M. Sober
Carrying Water: A M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition By Aaron Sober, Aaron M. Sober
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
For all of us, everyday life is punctuated by moments of victory, defeat, pride, and vulnerability. The process of welcoming gain and tolerating loss is a basic lesson in proportionality. My work is a personal reckoning with the contradictions that define this very human experience. Through animal imagery, symbol, and metaphor I explore the unpredictable circumstances that form a life lived.
We engage with, and understand our own place in the world through stories. By doing so, the avatars we create reflect the scope of our experiences, both sublime and damaged. The animal protagonists who inhabit my work are placeholders …
Many Worlds Converge Here: Vision And Identity In American Indian Photography, Alicia L. Harris
Many Worlds Converge Here: Vision And Identity In American Indian Photography, Alicia L. Harris
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
Photographs of Native Americans taken by Frank A. Rinehart at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898 were then and continue to be part of the construction of indigenous identities, both by Anglo-Americans and Natives. This thesis analyzes the ramifications of Rinehart’s portraits and those of his peers as well as Native American artists in the 20th and 21st centuries who have sought to re-appropriate these images to make them empowering icons of individual or tribal identity rather than erasure of culture.
This thesis comprises two sections. In the first section, the analysis is focused on the historical …
Path - Loss, Gregory S. Cook
Path - Loss, Gregory S. Cook
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
The term “path loss” could be considered somewhat idiomatic – it refers at once to a very specific technical definition and an easily relatable conceptualization, but perhaps its most immediate read is one of defeat, literally “a path, lost.” I find this beautifully problematic. In its original end as a term in radio-engineering, it’s used to describe the attenuation of a signal through physical space on its way to a receiver – that is, “path loss” describes some kind of thin-ness of intensity, the parts of something snagged along the way; parts caught in bedrock, lost in soil, or tangled …
When The World Went Quiet, Megan E. Mcleay
When The World Went Quiet, Megan E. Mcleay
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
The basis of my work is a consciousness of the presence of the soul and the choices that compose our reality. I use light to illuminate space and manipulate human emotion. The landscapes are mirror images of my mind, dreams both light and dark, of beauty and brutality, the expression of my invisible world. My practice uses destructive drawing actions to produce creation and suggest emotional trials. My images represent this deeper bond when all emotions are felt and experienced together. The figures are not saints, but are meant to generate the idea of divinity within the restraints of the …
Threshold, Alexandria Knipe
Threshold, Alexandria Knipe
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
My decisions in the studio are tied to my experiences outside of the studio, intertwining the complex relationship of memory and sentience. Each work precariously balances between softness and rigidity, vessel and sculpture, monumentality and intimacy. These tensions transform the familiar into the enigmatic and are an integral part of my philosophical approach to making.
Soft curves and billowing planes are punctuated by the structure of defined edges, hard angles, and areas of dark shadows. This duality suggests two worlds, one of feeling, intuition, sensuality, and dreams, the other of intellect, reason, structure, form, rhythm, and geometry.
By contradicting the …
All That We See(M), Alison H. Vanvolkenburgh
All That We See(M), Alison H. Vanvolkenburgh
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work
Born open-eyed, ready to take stock of our surroundings from the first breath, no other sense so largely informs our understanding of the world as sight. The ability to visually process our environment may seem extremely straightforward to those long accustomed to its instinctive use. However, there is more to seeing than the pure mechanics of visual perception. Since we live, not in a static environment, but one of constant change and motion, our knowledge of the world around us comes in fragments, shifting flashes of color, shape, and movement that coalesce through the active process of vision. In these …
Stitching As Knowing: Mapping Nebraska With Textiles And Thread, Elizabeth Ingraham
Stitching As Knowing: Mapping Nebraska With Textiles And Thread, Elizabeth Ingraham
School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity
Mapping Nebraska is a drawn, stitched and digitally imaged cartography of the state (physical, social, cultural, sociological) where I live. The interrelated components of this on-going project are:
- A 15 foot wide hand-drawn “Locator Map” of Nebraska, with every city, town, park, railroad, river, lake and creek drawn to scale on 95 Tyvek sections which were then stitched together.
- Terrain Squares, quilted and embroidered fabric relief forms of the physical topography of selected locations, using software to be able to see the terrain at a much larger scale (1 inch = 596 feet) than the Locator Map.
- Surveys, or on-the-ground …