Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Body Finding Freedom Within Itself, Malda Smadi

Masters Theses

When a dislocation of any type occurs, whether geographical, emotional, or spiritual, the disorder pushes the self to retreat to safety. For me, that safety is in my body. It is in this place of retreat where I locate my original home.

In this space of translocation, I forage for materials from my surroundings and places that I belong to. Moving between Dubai, Damascus, Beirut, and Providence, I shape a reality dependent on what is available. I then transform these materials, searching for the forms and relationships that emerge while meditating on home and the body as a moving vessel …

Emotional Landscapes, Jin Young Jeong

Theses and Dissertations

“Emotional Landscape” delivers a sense of gravity, openness, and breathing space through oil paintings on linen of abstracted bodily forms. The imagery in the works generates an atmosphere where one can feel rooted and anxiety-free. The paintings invite a close read of the complexities of compounded affects.

The Mind Vs The Body, Sarthak Parikh

be Still

No abstract provided.

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.

Head, Shoulders, Knees, And Toes, Pol Morton

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores ideas of transness, chronic illness, and injury. Through assemblage and repetition, my larger-than-life paintings address the dissociation and fragility of a body that is unmapped by society. These autobiographical works attempt to locate the self when it is trapped, whether in a bed, in the home, or within the body itself.

Water Bearer, Whitney Harris

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores fantasy and mythological archetypes. The exhibition features works on paper depicting mermaids, and a fountain featuring two figures submerged in water, one spitting into the other's mouth. I use black ink and glazes to create variegated surfaces. In these works, I reimagine ideas about power and intimacy.

Play Among The Shadows, Xiong Wei

Theses and Dissertations

This article elaborates Xiong Wei's inspiration and experience from different cultural, political, social systems and art environment as a Chinese artist living in the United States, and the logic and methodology of how he went from a social realist sculptor to a contemporary artist.

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.

Pharmakon: From Body To Being, Jérôme Y. C. Conquy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis dossier is separated into the following distinct sections: an extended artist statement; a portfolio documenting artworks made during my MFA candidacy and my exhibit Pharmakon: Acts, Traces, and Maps; and a case study of artist Tony Oursler, whose video and multimedia installations explore the psychological and social relationships between individuals and technologies. Together, they present my exploration of the body’s ‘power of acting,’ or potentia agendi, in relation to the modificatory capacity of technology, or affectus, on the human body. In particular, I investigate the body’s habits, or capacity for habit-building, what Bourdieu calls habitus, and the interconnection …

Gut Feeling, Shelby Fleming

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Through curated space and abstracted sculptures that reference the viewer’s body, Gut Feeling, acknowledges the viewer’s experience as the focal point of the exhibition. I designed the whole gallery as an art object using both positive and negative space. The sculptures act as one unified system that guides the viewer through the exhibition in a counterclockwise rotation inward. The viewer follows the forms as they puncture through the walls of the gallery, while considering their own body’s relationship to the forms being seen. The viewer directly engages with the scale of the forms, sculptural placement, and sensory experience; these elements …

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.

Between And Beyond, Noah F. Heil

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Between and Beyond is a series of handbuilt and wheel-thrown ceramic objects which explore intimate queer relationships through the human figure. I assemble slabs of clay to create openings and negative spaces within the sculptures, implying the ways in which the human form also acts as a vessel. The sculptures as well as the figures themselves remain open and vulnerable, literally and metaphorically. The body is depicted through fragmented sections, alluding to the ways in which society and culture break up gender and sexuality into limiting binaries. These intimate, private moments are meant to conjure an imagined future free of …

Emotional Reverberations, Kirsten Heteji

Theses and Dissertations

Projecting psychological mindscapes onto domestic objects allows for an emotive and bodily connection to the domestic realm. Body, for me, is the clay and how it holds touch and softness indexically recording the actions of making in the final forms. Pushing, pulling and pinching clay evokes sensations that connect the maker’s body as well as the observer of the work to participate. I shift expectations by experimenting between the hard and softness of bodily material like clay, giving it emotional fragility in how it contrasts the original structure it imitates. I think about creating objects and the arrangement them of …

Innie / Outie, Josh Roach

Theses and Dissertations

My practice is focused around the characters that I become through the wearing of things that I have made, and the subsequent performances that I do in both constructed and real-world spaces. This paper outlines how my practice is framed by own experience of coming out as a queer person, how that experience relates to my love of play and materials, and how they both inform the strategies I use to relate the ideas surrounding queerness, sexuality, and gender to my audience.

My Sight's Shadow, Lili Jamail

Theses and Dissertations

The story in the photographs I am showing is not about a person, but about the span of experience and emotion presented through time. I am looking into things that stand alone, and things that stand together — the idea of sharing space and experience with something or someone or being by yourself. One thing that draws me to photography as a medium is the way that photographs are able to tell a story or explain something without words. Photographs offer a unique perspective which, by their nature, alters reality. There is always some amount of truth that lies in …

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.

The Alchemical Vessel, River Soma

MFA Statements

My work comes from a place of deep feeling on a bodily level. Amidst the decorative play, there is a sense of the primitive and primordial, and also a certain humanity and clumsiness through struggle. Through the hermetic tradition I relate the alchemical vessel and its symbolic process of interior development to my artistic practice. Focusing in mixed media sculpture, I discovered a concentrated accumulation of symbolism specific to my practice, but also the full recognition of my practice as a ritualized psychological undertaking.

Body; Broken Things, Seohyung Kay Lee

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Our bodies are the first of everything. They’re the first thing we encounter, and first space that we inhibit. Life ends when we leave the body behind. They’re our only means to reach with the world, with everything. From the beginning of time, we have strived to interpret the body and the its place in the world. However, the female body was never fully appreciated nor acknowledged. It is impossible to understand the body of women without considering the pain and violence they encounter, which is often easily overlooked.

In my body of work that I’ve produced this semester, Body; …

With Monsters, Leonard J. Reibstein

Theses and Dissertations

These are the things I have learned about how I deal with pain. This paper includes a genealogy of immanent painting from the Renaissance to the 21st century. Through the lens of my biography I explore my relationship to toxic masculinity through expressionist distortion.

It Can't Leave You The Way It Finds You, Kyle Nobles

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

There’s a beautiful innocence in childhood where, although the world is large and new, it feels as though your place in it and the roles that you play are stable and unchanging. In our youth, outside of extraordinary circumstances, we are unburdened by the awareness that everything and everyone is subject to radical change—including our own sense of self. As we grow older though, looking back it becomes clear that this was never the case. In a matter of years, you can change so dramatically that you did not even notice as you became an entirely new person. For me, …

Pretty Young Host, Maria Isabelle Filippa Olsson Skalin

Senior Projects Spring 2018

“Pretty Young Host” is largely inspired by my upbringing in a society that impresses a sense of normalcy, bordering on necessity for women to have children in order to live happily. This societal pressure has led to my fascination with the Western world’s consumption and production of women as “fertile bodies”, including pro-natalist advertising and media that specifically targets women. I was both interested in and horrified by television commercials of life-like baby dolls for young girls, teaching them from a young age to learn how to raise and care for a child, as well as some advertising in recent …

Power Suit, Clarice Cuda

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

The focus of this project began in utilizing hair as a vehicle to investigate rituals associated with mourning, grief, and the liminal space that exists between life and death. After an in depth search into the cultural, physical, spiritual, and material aspects of hair, I enacted process and labor to create a sculptural form that performs in response to grief.

I chose to work with acrylic hair, as it exists in a space between the real and unreal, and visually is absorbed as the uncanny representation of the separated body. I wanted to discuss the body, while emphasizing its absence. …

Converging Objects Of The Universe, Everett Hoffman

Theses and Dissertations

Reconfigured found objects shape scenes of everyday life, questioning the structural histories that go into defining an identity. Engaging in a multidisciplinary approach of making, my work reimagines the function of ornamentation and its relationship to the body. I approach new materials and found objects with the eye of a jeweler, highlighting and exploiting the subtle, and often invisible, links between material histories and their connection to identity. Material debris patinated with age like skillets, baseballs, and furniture are used to penetrate normative structures around identity, gender, and sexual desire. Using adornment as a support in my installations I propose …

The Classical Versus The Grotesque Body In Edith Wharton's Fiction, Joshua T. Temples

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In her landmark works The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), Edith Wharton responds to earlier depictions of the classical, pure Victorian and Edwardian woman. Wharton's "inconvenient" women overturn popular stereotypes. Subsequently, they are barred from their social groups, but they are independent, unlike the complicit and obedient women of the classical body, most of whom ascribe to the trope of the "Angel in the House." The grotesque seeks to undercut the unrealistic expectations enforced by the classical through its embodiment of progression and humanity, and Wharton is drawn to …

Discourse, Kimberly Fabio

Graduate Theses

This statement describes, analyzes and comments on my thesis work, Discourse, which explores the figure and perspectives on body image as well as voyeurism. My experience drawing and interacting with my models was the catalyst for this work, from which illuminates my evolution from strictly a two dimensional artist to an installation artist and sculptor. My thesis exhibition is composed of four works: a mirror installation piece incorporating a sound track, and three sculptures. During the course of my Master of Fine Arts degree at Winthrop University, I researched a variety of artists, art movements and techniques, which influenced me …

[Insert Body Here], Katie Yun

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The personal is political. Using humor and my individual narrative, I illustrate the main three factors that drive my work and relate them to corresponding theoretical frameworks: 1) My OCD tendencies and labor as art concept 2) Assimilation and the appeal of the White Cube 3) Reclamation of identity and Abject art. Through textual and visual research, I provide scholarly backing and precedents set by other artists to situate these personal narratives as part of a larger structural system of oppression, while being transparent of my culpability and participation in these structures. I posit that my work provides a nuanced …

The Void Between Us, Hannah D. Blumer

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My interactive thesis installation, The Void Between Us, addresses the topic of human connection in relationship to the body. The human body marks a physical barrier between one’s self and others. While we exist in the same physical sphere as one another, our minds are isolated in our own self-centered versions of reality. Our bodies allow us to perceive others and be perceived—including having verbal communications—and, therefore, could be seen as helpful or restrictive in the social world. However, our bodies also allow us to engage in physical interactions with others, such as sex, which is a means to …

On A Scale Of 1 To Ten... Ten Being The Worst, Kyle Thorne

Masters Theses

On a scale of 1 to 10… 10 being the worst is an exhibition of sculpture that attempts to visualize the struggle, anxiety, and pain that occurs when your body lets you down during the process of making. Daily chronic pain places limitations on the work that I am able to create. The work in this exhibition not only depicts those limitations, but also expresses the anxiety that takes place while making it. To accomplish this there are several objects that allegorically reference bodies. These bodies are placed in various states of struggle and tension. Ready-made objects are incorporated alongside …

Artificiality And The New Image: The Image Body, Liza H. Butts

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This paper sets up a historical argument for how images exist in the world and how artists relate to these images. The questions of the paper are concerned with defining the “Contemporary Image” and looking at how the digitization of all the images in our world affect the art object and the experience of art in the physical world. The conclusion and answer to these questions is found in a resistance to images that oversaturate our culture. This resistance occurs by looking to the painted image to function as a body in the world; aware of its existence, responsive to …

Inside Exploration, Reagan E. Long

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.