Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Hidden In Humor: Redefining Abjection Through Implication, Maddy Kish

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Abjection can whisper. It lies beneath the joke; you will find it there if you spend the time. Look at me. Come closer. Are you willing to discover? If you listen, I will confess, I will air out my dirty laundry, I will show you the inside of my body and its evidence.

My thesis is a consideration of my waste, an analysis of the bodily trail I leave behind. I explore indecency as a persistent feature of my art practice and a tactic I use to stimulate interest. My overarching unladylike sensibility is broken down into three categories – …

Omnipresence And An Outlier, Cheyenne Monk

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In this thesis, I explore the possibility of existence outside the confines of labeled identity through the lens of art, drawing inspiration from personal experiences of racial alienation and the desire to transcend societal labels. Through figurations and world-building, I challenge the notion that one's identity must be defined by categories such as race and gender. By removing categorical physicalities and portraying violence as a means to confront bias-motivated aggression, I aim to provoke dialogue on prejudice without further alienation. Through a blend of surrealism, abstraction, and neo-expressionism, I create tense yet playful presentations of bodies to communicate themes of …

Melting, Dripping, Becoming: The Operations Of Memory From The Perspective Of Wax, Naomi Yu

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my thesis, I explore how different compositional and material techniques are used to re-create a memory. Looking at artists such as Kiki Smith, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Anselm Keifer, I investigate the ways in which they utilize 2D and 3D materials to re-create feelings of memory.

I argue that the art object can conserve and portray memory through metaphorical acts of preservation. I will be specifically studying the acts of encasing and layering as a means to simulate the feelings of memory. I argue that these metaphorical actions create an artificial sense of time that imbues these objects with created …

A Meditation On Loneliness And The Mind's Limits: Combining Buddhism And Art To Better Understand Our Relationship To The Unknown, William Masters

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In this essay, I explain how my art practice instigates inquiry into uncomfortable subjects such as loneliness and how our limits of perception and cognition prevent us from understanding and connecting fully with our environments. I begin by illustrating how I make such subjects more approachable by exploiting the inherent capacity of art to be both pleasurable and painful: a work's pleasing aesthetic can make one more receptive to its disquieting content. I then describe how eastern philosophy and western art have influenced my practice. I highlight how Buddhist insights into the relationship between calmness, security and clarity have informed …

Hysteria, Fear, And/Or Delight, Alessandra Ferrari-Wong

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My Bachelor of Fine Arts thesis statement, Hysteria, Fear, and/or Delight, establishes the forms and concepts of my art practice as it stands as of May, 2020: performance-based and interdisciplinary. My practice implies narrative while acknowledging the audience. Physical language, in both dance and gesture, can be a means of communication or subversion. Pieces exist as ephemeral, often private, performances and then separately in archival forms ranging from video, to photography, to installation. The body of the statement details my thesis project, a remaking of Giselle, a 19th century Romantic-era ballet, into a performance series and video trilogy. …

Modeling Disability: Softly Making The Invisible Visible, Libby Evan

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

“I am not asking for pity. I am telling you about my disability.” -Eli Clare

In the following Bachelor of Fine Arts thesis statement, you will not find someone overcoming their disability. You will not find a tale of inspiration. You will not find a cure for ableism. You simply will find an individual's experience of disability— my experience of disability.

My invisible disability puts the medical model and social model of disability in constant tension as I navigate everyday life living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and severe arthritis. Both models seek to find blame for disability, whether in searching …

A Vestige Of The Ultimate Force Of Time And Space, Jiyoung Megan Lee

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This art statement is rooted in an idea that the existential quality is independent of absence and presence (synonymous to appearing and disappearing, and real and recognition) and distilled physicality of human body creates a parallel relationship between the two. In search of a proof and logic for articulating the central idea, –that the absence does not define evanescence of existence— the application of physical interactivity in my art, also known as relational aesthetic, enables the work to invite viewers in a way that the interactors leave their traces by physically interacting with the work. These individual traces are eventually …

Skin, Bones + Bags: Investigating The Death Of Marine Ecosystems, Rylie Walter

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Plastic has become ubiquitous in the oceans. Although a convenient and cheap way to distribute goods around the world, plastic is also a leading cause for the death of many marine ecosystems. Walter explores her personal connection to the ocean, researches the relationship between plastic pollution and the ocean, and examines art as a means for inciting social change to protect and restore ocean environments. By using plastic as her main material for making art, Walter transforms the material from one that harms into one that can be calming and peaceful, while still representing the destruction it causes.

A Document That Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction And Reality, Seth Lewis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In A Document that Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction and Reality, I first present a historical analysis of photography that complicates traditional assumptions of how photographs operate in the world. Rather than functioning as merely an objective record, the photograph takes on a dual status as both a document and an abstraction from reality. The photograph’s ability to selectively decontextualize the origins from which it came from and present itself as something other than what it simply records becomes the core of my artistic practice. This paper will also discuss my conceptual investigations into how we perceive photographs when they …

In The Margins, Savannah Bustillo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

A margin is defined relative to something else. A ruled line. A body of text on a page. The margins are the excess, outside of the value we can qualify or quantify. Our understandings of the habitability of the margins are too often framed as fundamental differences between those that inhabit value and the rest that do not. What would happen if we reframed the margins beyond a simple dichotomy? What could we gain if the margins were a habitable space around and between the things we prioritize in defining? By analyzing a body of my own art, I …

Overlapping Entities: Visualizing The Space Between Nature And Culture, Zoie Brown

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my work I generate forms that occupy the space between our false conceptions of nature and culture. I subvert binaries–both between nature and culture and between women and men–through the physical conflation of microscopic and macroscopic spaces. Nature itself is a cultural concept; the notion that we are separate from nature at all is a fallacy. The body of work discussed uses ideas from Environmental Sociology and my definition of intersectional Ecofeminism to visualize the intersection of these cultural binaries within physical space. The pieces included utilize light responsive technology as a means of mediating our experiences with the …

On Remembrance, Ashley Lee

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My works are inspired by autobiographical memories — especially those that are traumatic. However, the works rather discuss the nature of how memories are recalled, stored forgotten, remembered, manipulated, constructed, reconstructed, and destructed. Memory is a pseudo reality, that grounds on past events but is different from the objective truth. Memory is one’s own creation, which is formed by the body and mind through time, space, and experience. Then it is stored in the mind, within the infinite void of dimensional space. In my writing, I’ll explore John Sutton’s Philosophy and Memory Traces, Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida, Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed …

Art And Science: Blurring The Poetic And The Analytical, Caitlin M. David

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Abstract: Despite a modern conception of art and science as being fundamentally opposed, both have at their core a desire to explain the inexplicable. Their investigations and the communication of the results of these investigations can be blurred at both poetic and analytical junctions. Vivified abstract thought, or the poetic, can be thought of as instigating the ubiquitous desire to explain the inexplicable. Fruitful analysis of resulting data and representation of that data must consider the idiom of both art and science if it is to successfully cross between them, and special emphasis must be placed on the diagram as …

The Representation Of Non-Traditional Bodies, Elizabeth J. Perkins

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

My work largely addresses the close-minded Western ideals of the human body, particularly those related to females. Stemming from struggles with my own sense of security, I strive to create accessible works of art that both challenge and expand these ideals by representing figural imagery beyond such social constraints. Though my works may seem to serve the purpose of mockery at first, the urgency of the issues portrayed becomes apparent as the pieces are studied more carefully. I explore how exposure, vulnerability, grotesqueness, and intimacy within my work serve as a means to expand our cultural ideals for the human …

Mfa15 (Mfa 2015), Sam Fox School Of Design & Visual Arts, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Heather Corcoran, Patricia Olynyk, Andrea Coates, Margaux Crump, Brandon Daniels, Addoley Dzegede, Vita Eruhimovitz, Carling Hale, Amanda C F Helman, Michael A. Helms, Ming Y. Hong, Sea A Joung, Stephanie E. Kang, Dayna J. Kriz, Thomas C. Moore, Jacob Muldowney, Laurel Panella, Caitlin Penny, Eric Lyle Schultz, Jeremy Shipley, Emmeline Solomon, Kellie Spano, Michael A. Williams, Austin R. Wolf

Books and Monographs

Catalogue of a culminating student exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, May 1 - August 2, 2015 . Introduction / Heather Corcoran and Patricia Olynyk -- Diana Casanova / Emily J. Hanson -- Andrea M. Coates : in the operating theater / Stephanie Dering -- Margaux Crump -- Brandon Daniels -- Addoley Dzegede : do you prefer answers or truth? / Aaron Coleman -- Vita Eruhimovitz -- Carling Hale -- Amanda Helman -- Mike Helms / Ming Ying Hong -- Ming Ying Hong / Emily J. Hanson -- Sea A Joung / Ervin Malakaj -- Stephanie Kang …

Benign Imperialists: Ethnographic (Mis)Representation By German Painter-Adventurers, 1840-1890, Sarah Hermes Griesbach

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the mid to late nineteenth century, a new group of academic painters trained in Germany emerged as self-appointed ethnographic experts who sketched and painted heroic visions of a wild American West, and a similarly wild North Africa and Middle East. This group of artists, like their literary analog, traveled to the places they depicted. Artists Adolf Hoeffler (1825-1898), Carl Wimar (1828-1862), Friedrich Frisch (1813-1886), Adolf Schreyer (1828-1899) and Eugen Bracht (1842-1921) fused their artistic personae with their subjects to present themselves as ethnographic experts depicting scenes that asserted their own empirical authority as observers. They not only exhibited their …

Mfa14 (Mfa 2014), Sam Fox School Of Design & Visual Arts, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Buzz Spector, Patricia Olynyk

Books and Monographs

Catalogue of a culminating student exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, May 9-August 3, 2014. Contents include Introduction / Buzz Spector and Patricia Olynyk -- David Baker / Katie McGinnis -- Amber bloom ; Mop cask ; Sullen fluff ; Frothy Shiraz ; Aquatic jaws ; Smoking trumpets ; Lake feigned goose flap / Steve Byrnes -- Nathan Childs : the affliction a strange weight, the weight a plume of pain, the pain a shrill desire / Aaron Coleman -- Christopher Chrome / Marianne Rosa Laury -- Shayna Cohn / Cassie Jones -- Alyse Cole / Nicholas …

Mfa13 (Mfa 2013), Sam Fox School Of Design & Visual Arts, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Buzz Spector, Patricia Olynyk, David Schuman, Lyndon Barrois Jr, Sarah Bernhardt, Hsuan Ying Chen, Serhii Chrucky, Janae Contag, Carrie Debacker, Erin M. Duhigg, José Garza, Eric Gray, Meghan Allynn Johnson, Hoa Le, Christine Eunji Lee, Lavar Munroe, Jon A. Orosco, Michael Powell, Bridget A. Purcell, Malahat Qureshi, Natalie Rodgers, Carla Fisher Schwartz, Zak Smoker, Laurencia Strauss, Lili Yang, Vivian Zapata

Books and Monographs

Catalogue of a culminating student exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, May 3-July 29, 2013. Contents include Introduction / Buzz Spector -- The collaborative turn : new models of thinking, making, and learning / Patricia Olynyk -- [Introduction] / David Schuman -- Lyndon Barrois, Jr. / Rickey Laurentiis -- Sarah Bernhardt -- Shifting Shanghais / Hsuan Ying Chen -- Serhii Chrucky / JaNae Contag -- JaNae Contag / Emily Hanson -- Carrie DeBacker / Gabriel Feldman -- Erin M. Duhigg -- José Garza / Serhii Chrucky -- Eric Gray / Ariel Lewis -- Meghan Allynn Johnson : …

Mfa12 (Mfa 2012), Sam Fox School Of Design & Visual Arts, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Buzz Spector, Patricia Olynyk, Ifeoma Ugonnwa Anyaeji, Je Baker, Natalie Baldeon, E. Thurston Belmer, Lauren Cardenas, Megan Sue Collins, Adrian Cox, Maya Durham, Erin Falker, Jieun Kim, Howard Krohn, Robert Long, Marie Bannerot Mcinerney, Nikki Mcmahan, Michael T. Meier, Katie Millitzer, Reid G. Norris, Kathleen Perniciaro, Emily Squires, Jamie Presson Wells, Whitney Lorene Wood, Andrew Woodard, Kelly K. Wright

Books and Monographs

Catalogue of a culminating student exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum May 4-Aug. 6, 2012. Contents include Introduction / Buzz Spector -- Think, make, show and tell / Patricia Olynyk -- Ifeoma Ugonnwa Anyaeji -- J.E. Baker / Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt -- Natalie Baldeon / Emily Hanson -- As in a turning gear : E. Thurston Belmer / Rickey Laurentiis -- Lauren Cardenas / Nicholas Tamarkin -- Megan Sue Collins / Catherine Chiodo -- Adrian Cox -- Maya Durham / Dolly Laninga -- Erin Falker / Melissa Olson -- St. Louis dreamscape : Jieun Kim / Caitlin …

Mfa11 (Mfa 2011), Sam Fox School Of Design & Visual Arts, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Buzz Spector, Patricia Olynyk, Marshall N. Klimasewiski, John Talbott Allen, Meghan Bean, Shira Berkowitz, Darrick Byers, Jisun Choi, Zlatko Ćosić, James R. Daniels, Kara Daving, Andrea Degener, Kristin Fleischmann, William Frank, Nicholas Mccullough, Jordan Mcgirk, Zachary Miller, Esther Murphy, Kathryn Neale, Christopher Ottinger, Maia Palmer, Nicole Petrescu, Lauren Pressler, Bryce Olen Robinson, Whitney Sage, Donna Smith

Books and Monographs

Catalogue of a culminating student exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, May 6-Aug. 1, 2011. Content includes Introduction / Buzz Spector -- Patricia Olynyk -- Marshall N. Klimasewiski -- John Talbott Allen -- Meghan Bean -- Shira Berkowitz / Maggie Stanley Majors -- Darrick Byers, Bryce Olen Robinson -- Jisun Choi -- Zlatko Ćosić -- James R. Daniels -- Kara Daving -- Andrea Degener -- Kristin Fleischmann / Randi Shapiro -- William Frank / Lawrence Ypil -- Nicholas Kania -- Katherine McCullough -- Jordan McGirk / Aditi Machado -- Zachary Miller -- Esther Murphy / Maggie Stanley …

Mfa10 (Mfa 2010), Sam Fox School Of Design & Visual Arts, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Buzz Spector, Robert Gero, Patricia J. Olynyk, Clyde Ashby, Aaron Bos-Wahl, Andrew Cozzens, John Early, Ryan James Fabel, Joel Fullerton, Mary Beth Hassan, Wenting Hsu, John Nicholas Hutchings, Dani Kantrowitz, Larry Keaty, Mamie Korpela, Paola Laterza, Mad Mohre, Emily Moorhead, Jonathan Muehlke, Jessa Richardson, Nicolette Ross, Carlie Trosclair

Books and Monographs

Catalogue of a culminating student exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in 2010. Content includes Foreword / Buzz Spector -- Thinking as making / Robert Gero -- A new set of conversations / Patricia Olynyk -- MFA 2010 graduates. Clyde Ashby / Aaron Bos-Wahl / Andrew Cozzens / John Early / Ryan James Fabel / Joel Fullerton / Mary Beth Hassan / Wenting Hsu / John Nicholas Hutchings/ Dani Kantrowitz / Larry Keaty / Mamie Korpela / Paola Laterza / Mad Mohre / Emily Moorhead / Jonathan Muehlke / Jessa Richardson / Nicolette Ross / Carlie Trosclair …

Mfa09 (Mfa 2009), Sam Fox School Of Design & Visual Arts, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Carmon Colangelo, Patricia J. Olynyk, Stephanie Barenz, Carolyn Dawn Bendel, Jacob Cruzen, Rachel Ann Dennis, Bryan Eaton, Maya Escobar, Meredith Foster, Morgan Gehris, Gina Grafos, Stephen Hoskins, Amelia Jones, Hye Young Kim, Anne Lindberg, Goran Maric, Kelda Martensen, Erica L. Millspaugh, Carianne Noga, Joel Parker, Rebecca C. Potts, Shannon Randol, Elaine Rickles, Michael Kenneth Smith, Dan Solberg, Natalie Toney, Glenn Tramantano, Kathryn Trout, J. Taylor Wallace

Books and Monographs

Catalogue of a culminating student exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in 2009. Content includes A new paradigm / Carmon Colangelo -- Evolving practices / Patricia Olynyk -- Stephanie Barenz -- Carolyn Dawn Bendel -- Jacob Cruzen -- Rachel Ann Dennis -- Bryan Eaton -- Maya Escobar -- Meredith Foster -- Morgan Gehris -- Gina Grafos -- Stephen Hoskins -- Amelia Jones -- Hye Young Kim -- Anne Lindberg -- Goran Maric -- Kelda Martensen -- Erica L. Millspaugh -- Carianne Noga -- Joel Parker -- Rebecca C. Potts -- Shannon Randol -- Elaine Rickles -- Michael …