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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Sometimes Windows Break, Samantha Snyder
Sometimes Windows Break, Samantha Snyder
Theses and Dissertations
The sensation of detachment and reclusion frequently gives rise to an uncanny and dreamlike space. Enveloped within this dimension, the quirks of memory become a fragile lifeline to bygone, intangible ideas of reality. Fixated on this threshold, my artistic explorations in print, collage, and assemblage navigates these elusive realms, rendering fragmented and distant shapes and figures in stark contrast to elements that evoke an eerie sense of familiarity. In this manner, my work invites viewers to embrace the disconcerting and unsettling aspects of the in-between, all the while establishing an unsettling connection to reality through the lens of nostalgic objects …
Hózhó + Art Heals, Eugene Tapahe
Hózhó + Art Heals, Eugene Tapahe
Theses and Dissertations
The land where I grew up gives me a sense of purpose and belonging. It embodies the Navajo concept of hózhó, which represents harmony, beauty, and balance. Being in tune with this spiritual connection inspires me to bring people together through art and healing. I use natural materials like sand, sage, cedar, tree twigs, and yellow and blue cornmeal to create my art. To maintain the spirituality of my work, I employ traditional and ritualistic harvesting methods passed down from generation to generation. These techniques are deeply connected to the land and are essential to my identity as an artist …
As If It Were One Day, Megan Rowley Stern
As If It Were One Day, Megan Rowley Stern
Theses and Dissertations
As If It Were One Day is a multimedia art installation that chronicles patterns of light, movement, and sound, channeling the fluidity of time within the newborn phase of familial living. After giving birth to my daughter, I spent the next seven weeks observing these elements and recording them via video. The resulting art installation acknowledges my efforts to navigate my current life as an artist and a mother, my past battle with postpartum depression, and my consequent gravitation toward light.
Still Life Happens, Mary Ann Crabtree
Still Life Happens, Mary Ann Crabtree
Theses and Dissertations
After dedicating over two years to pursuing an MFA degree focused on ceramics and sculpture, I find myself transported back to a familiar setting from my past: a tableau reminiscent of what remained in the dining space after four young children finished a meal and exited the room. Revisiting the scene recalls happy times despite the disorder. What helped maintain my sanity during the relentless repetition of the every-day-long task was the realization that every day, innocents are learning to become aware of the world around them. For my thesis exhibition, I created a tableau as a loud reminder of …
Validating Boyness: How Art Education Allows Male Adolescent Students A Space For Authenticity, Vulnerability, Empathy, And Connection, Stephanie Behlke-Mcfarland
Validating Boyness: How Art Education Allows Male Adolescent Students A Space For Authenticity, Vulnerability, Empathy, And Connection, Stephanie Behlke-Mcfarland
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines societal norms and unwritten rules for boys as they mature. It is hypothesized that most boys deal with emotional suppression or dissociation in varying degrees of severity due to traumas during their developmental years. This dissociation creates an inability to express their own emotions adequately and therefore affects their ability to empathize with others. A lack of vulnerability may also be a common challenge among boys society still considers vulnerability weakness. This pattern continues into adulthood and is then perpetuated through posterity and future generations. This thesis explores through a qualitative case study how using art integration …
The Invisible Box, Rafael Yaluff
The Invisible Box, Rafael Yaluff
Theses and Dissertations
A work of art is something so simple that it puts you in front of it. And through its simplicity it makes you aware of yourself in front of it, it gives you yourself. This paper explores the creative process from a structural perspective
Return, Leilani Bascom
Return, Leilani Bascom
Theses and Dissertations
Return is a video-based installation which includes sound, performance, and textile elements. Leilani Bascom is the lone actor navigating the water and where the water meets the land in this personal project exploring concepts of the life cycle from birth to death and rebirth. Life's paradox of struggle and release unfolds with imagery of battling through waves to swim deep underwater, fighting a river current and then surrendering to the flow, and carving a hole in the sand to climb into and be held. Viewers are immersed in the movement and sounds of water to witness the power and meaning …
Between The Garden And The Gardener, Sara Lynne Lindsay
Between The Garden And The Gardener, Sara Lynne Lindsay
Theses and Dissertations
My work uses plant material and soil as a record of personal, cultural, and ecological history. History is not only held in the buildings and monuments, but in the soil itself. I gather this soil and foliage from both cultivated and uncultivated locations for my artwork. Using traditional domestic techniques of drying and canning, I preserve the materials that I have gathered. These will then be sewn together, cooked, and encrusted into objects. Despite my labor of preserving, these organic art supplies are transient. When made into works of art, they can be viewed in their vulnerable state, fighting against …
Break Time, Quinlan Maggio
Break Time, Quinlan Maggio
Theses and Dissertations
In this graduate thesis artist Quinlan Maggio describes their two-part art project in which they create site-specific private/public spaces and encounters within a larger public, specifically, that of the Hunter MFA community and its art-viewing audience.
Always Running At Sunset, Amelia O'Neill
Always Running At Sunset, Amelia O'Neill
Theses and Dissertations
My thesis show includes paintings that depict scenes of the trails that my dog and I frequent in Utah. These paintings are a response to experiences I have in nature and explore my relationship with my dog and the surrounding flora and fauna along the local trails. The paintings include images of rocks, sticks, dirt, trails, dogs, clouds, and dried sunflowers in the wind. In addition to realistic depictions of nature, my paintings reflect on the psychological and emotional state of being in nature. The title of the show is Always Running at Sunset, which is meant to be taken …
The Materials Of Traditions, Victoria Jensen
The Materials Of Traditions, Victoria Jensen
Theses and Dissertations
The homes we grow up in have a great impact on the homes we create as adults. Many of the traditions I saw in my childhood home were expressions of love within our family. These everyday traditions helped not only to build bonds within my nuclear family, but also with the chosen family I have formed as an adult. Repeating these traditions, or at least my best memory of them, has helped me in building my own home now. The ways I interact with my friends often reflects those same traditions I learned from home. I brought a few of …
Defiantly Childlike: Using Aesthetic Resistance To Heal, Sarah K. Reagan
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.
Water Gets Lost In The Sea, Sun Gets Lost In The Desert, Rocio Paz Guerrero
Water Gets Lost In The Sea, Sun Gets Lost In The Desert, Rocio Paz Guerrero
Theses and Dissertations
The absence of happiness, the absence of nature, the absence of justice, the absence of absence, which is presence. My desire is to make these voids visible and sensible by connecting to and with others, from our intimate and collective life experiences, with empathy, and by sharing. Through a hybrid of sculpture, installation, and performance, I move within this tense in-between space, asking myself about that void, if it is possible for it to be filled, or if it is perhaps too big, or if it is perhaps too late.
Memories As Old As Outer Space, Nicholas Benfey
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.
Beauty And Decay, Chiung-Ling Jyan Siebert
Beauty And Decay, Chiung-Ling Jyan Siebert
Theses and Dissertations
The intention of the project is to create an environment where the viewer can explore and form a personal narrative in the process of organic interaction with the work. At first glance, the scale of the installation will attract the viewer to the exhibition, however, upon close investigation he will discover there is deterioration, decay, and mutation. The ideas of time, beauty, decay, mortality, and interdependence will be discussed in this paper. The visitors are invited to interact with the work. I hope through spontaneous interaction the arrangements from the viewer will result in evolution of the work. The balance …
Yo, Mi Persona Y México, Jaime Trinidad
Yo, Mi Persona Y México, Jaime Trinidad
Theses and Dissertations
For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with understanding who I am. What makes me is something I try to make sense of through art. When I started working on this my graduation show, the idea behind it was to make a portrait of the Mexico I know, but when the pandemic hit, I found myself locked down at home, completely alone in a new country for the first time. This led me to question my existence and the belief systems I espoused and prompted me to try to understand myself better in the context of a …
Searching: Waves, Spencer Molnar
Searching: Waves, Spencer Molnar
Theses and Dissertations
This supportive statement examines a philosophical conception of the self and how it can be identified through experience, consciousness, and perception by focusing on a human inclination to rationalize, or concretize, that which is everchanging. The methods of exploring this concept were achieved by examining the formal structure of composition and materials through the process of visual art. By pushing against historical traditions of creating spatial illusions in visual art, we can conclude that the legibility of an artwork is equally dependent on the experiential world as it is the social construction of image making. The question that is left …
From Here And Now: Monuments Of Today And Everyday, Adam Shaw
From Here And Now: Monuments Of Today And Everyday, Adam Shaw
Theses and Dissertations
The arc of my educational narrative was drawing to a close. I was a month out from my thesis exhibition, the culmination of a three-year experience. The studio was full of an energy I had been longing to feel. I was just beginning. Then came the Pause.
I Wasn't There, Lily Wong
I Wasn't There, Lily Wong
Theses and Dissertations
My work reimagines personhood at the moment it becomes undone and investigates how an amplification of visibility can also function as a severing of humanity. A personal navigation of fracture and the forging of self through artificial extensions and distensions of the body.
Straight Through My Heart, Raul A. Aguilar Canela
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.
L, M, N, O, P, Matt Jones
L, M, N, O, P, Matt Jones
Theses and Dissertations
A meditation on my painting and drawing practice in relation to the work of Philip Guston, Nancy Spero, and Frank Moore, among others, just before and during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Pedestrian, Marissa Albrecht
Pedestrian, Marissa Albrecht
Theses and Dissertations
My feet are my transportation while living in the college town of Provo, Utah. When walking, I am drawn to designs found at construction sites and office workplaces, methods of labor that are executed sequentially. These designs lead me to think about laborious jobs that I have had and time performing mundane, repetitive tasks. Walking, photographing, gathering, and transporting used material to a workspace are the preliminary actions for my art practice. Creation emerges by relating material from varying environments through their inherent patterns, sizes, and shapes. I organize elements of the everyday in a new harmonious context with each …
Entropy's Child, Brandon Reed Boulton
Entropy's Child, Brandon Reed Boulton
Theses and Dissertations
Art, process, and materials offer me an escape from the sometimes-crushing realities of my personal struggle with chronic mental illness. Escape is often my primary motivator for making art. However, personal meaning and understanding sometimes come while I'm working in the studio. Sometimes the meanings of the work only become clear years later. Personal experience and experimenting with materials and processes have led me to an appreciation and awareness of entropy--the second law of thermodynamics. My sculptures use spontaneity, abstraction, and process to dialogue with entropy.
Collective Subjectivity And Utopian Desire, Stewart A. Stout
Collective Subjectivity And Utopian Desire, Stewart A. Stout
Theses and Dissertations
This project explores the conceptualization of the body as a collective. Displacing the individual subject position as the primary avenue through which we might see ourselves, the collective is offered as an alternative capable of opening up new avenues for a desire that is utopian, queer and communist.
Trackable Painting, Jisoo Hur
Trackable Painting, Jisoo Hur
Theses and Dissertations
This paper describes how I suggest a way to read images in painting by supposing that the gap between paintings can have a new role in the reading. This process consists of three parts that go through references and titles of my paintings.
Aviary Of The Reverend William J. Long, Shae Lewis Warnick
Aviary Of The Reverend William J. Long, Shae Lewis Warnick
Theses and Dissertations
Humans perceive the natural world in a subjective and sensual way, yet over time science has turned the study of nature into a progressively objective pursuit. The Aviary of the Reverend William J. Long is an installation of anthropomorphic bird dolls that examines the roles of science and sentiment in our interactions with the natural world.
Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres
Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres
Theses and Dissertations
I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.
North American Data, Joseph A. Burwell
North American Data, Joseph A. Burwell
Theses and Dissertations
North American Data fractures and reconfigures pre-existing narratives into new, unauthorized forms of storytelling. Core samples extracted from various narrative sources are reassigned new roles according to their proximity to each other. This paper functions as an introduction to the essential actors and their dramatic inclinations within fluctuating scenarios.
Generative Movements, Cabbage Juice, & Habitats Of Selfhood, Jason Michael Rondinelli
Generative Movements, Cabbage Juice, & Habitats Of Selfhood, Jason Michael Rondinelli
Theses and Dissertations
The content of this essay is a reflection on my practice as an artist. A summary of text includes an analysis of my attraction to certain materials such as drywall, cabbage juice and coconut oil, all materials are the extensions of my memory, intention and pleasure. From warm memories of bathhouses and the flesh of others to managing illness at home, my artwork distills a lived experience into material reality. These materials take the shape of sculptural networks that serve as biographical biomes. The architectural and organic components of the work are sourced from my own experience and the surreal …
Words Are A Pipe, Kyle Michael Utter
Words Are A Pipe, Kyle Michael Utter
Theses and Dissertations
A painter retraces the steps he took in making one of his paintings from beginning to end. Rather than explicitly ascribing a series of concerns or goals to his studio practice in general, he recounts the material choices he made over an 8 month period of making a specific painting of an interior landscape. The essay begins with a consideration of the written word and its potential shortcomings in describing the creative process. Warned of writing’s pitfalls, the reader proceeds onto a meandering path of written introspection as the painter reflects on his art-historical references, his sources of imagery, his …