Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Light Leaf: Observations Of Leaves In Light, Paul Kelley

The STEAM Journal

For me, spending time in isolation yielded some interesting findings, as I began to closely observe the various leaves that engulf my backyard. Every new day brought with it a new detail, a subtlety with every shift in light, revealing an endless array of abstractions, textures and colors. I was seeing the hidden life of leaves dancing in the sunlight. Naturally, I began documenting my observations.

Women's Work With Wool In Fairy Tales: From Baroque Text To Textile Craft, Sophia Frye

Scripps Senior Theses

Fiber art has a complex, long-standing history; the relationship between the craft and the craftsman is intimate and goes beyond the commodification of the product. Business records from Florentine guilds give insight into the wool industry, but are unable to capture the social history of wool crafts in Renaissance-Baroque era Italy. In response, this project turns to Italian Baroque fairy tales: Giambattista Basile’s The Pentamerone (1634-36) and Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s Le Piacevoli Notti (1555). These fairy tales depict scenes of women engaging in fiber crafts, which reveal the poverty of the women textile laborers, the women’s relationship to textile work, …

Fracture Patterns: Communicating The Surreal Through Dance Film, Chloe C. Lesh

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis project and its associated dance film were created in a surrealistic time period initiated by the pandemic. The resulting everyday surrealism ignited my interest within dreams, nightmares, and surreality[1], and how these cerebral and psychological experiences translate to physiological responses and movement. My dance film fracture is the manifestation of these themes. The film presents surrealistic imagery in an abstracted narrative and connects to personal struggles with surreality brought on by the pandemic. The movement, as well as the rationale for the choreographic, filming, and editing choices are explained. Dance films by Neels Castillon and …

Deconstructing Social Anxiety: Through Gifs And The Inspiration Of Artists' Books, Ashley Hsieh

Scripps Senior Theses

My project deconstructs social anxiety through the form of gifs. This is an important issue to address especially now, as it is one the most current stressors for my peers and myself upon returning to school after over a year in quarantine. Although not everyone has had the same experience, there is a large concern for students’ mental health and well-being post-pandemic. Learning how to re-navigate socializing after a year in isolation has been exhausting, physically and mentally, adjusting to places and new faces on campus. My work is composed of a series of three digital gifs that depict different …

What You Save: Cultures Of Collecting In The Digital Era, Sophia Davirro

Scripps Senior Theses

As children, we may have collected items around us such as a box of rocks, insects, stuffed animals, stolen items from a sibling’s room, or crayon drawings on sticky pieces of paper. As our curiosity grows, so do our collections, kept in the closet, soon forgotten but forever representative of a specific time in our life. While the types of objects we collect (and the way we collect them) may change, the desire to leave traces of ourselves behind doesn’t.

This project explores cultures of collecting through a digital media lens and examines how digital technology and our culture of …

The Marriage Of Art And Science, Mike Doyle

The STEAM Journal

Art work that shows how the viewer translates visual cues into meaning

Lightwave: Visualizing The Wind, Jacqueline M. Bell Johnson

The STEAM Journal

No abstract provided.

Tenacity, Order & Disorder, Lucy Manalo

CGU MFA Theses

My work is about empowerment. The idea of using metal comes from my past experience as a welder/machinist in the Air Force. Metal is a tough medium and I believe it conveys the themes of strength and tenacity through it’s materiality.

Forest For The Trees, Anthony Prud'homme

CGU MFA Theses

These paintings show life’s swarming energy coalescing into form. They are propositions to make space for connection.

Capacity, Rachel Baydian

CGU MFA Theses

This Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition by Rachel Baydian is an installation of ceramic sculptures that function as a stand-in for the human body, touching on relationship, interconnectivity, and imperfection. Using abstracted forms that derive from the earth, these art objects are sculpted to mimic nature and its processes. The work highlights our human connection to nature as integrative and vital. Through experience and tactility, there is more of an awareness of space and heightened senses. The work taps into the awe and seduction of the mystery of nature through seemingly ordinary elements of the physical world.

Indominable, Kathleen A. Fox

CGU MFA Theses

INDOMINABLE, Kathleen A Fox

The reformation of the feminine portrait from that of idealistic sexual beauty into a portrait of strength, community, longevity, transformation, and inane human foundational essence of societal value. This collection of portraits illustrates the uniqueness that is often overlooked for the fast, idealistic and instantly read images of women hailed as beautiful. These women contain a space they have earned with their strength of character, spirit, and unwillingness to be moved from their places of significance. Created with an expressive abstractive edge to traditional portraiture, these female portraits refuse to be easily glossed over, for their …

Visual Teaching Of Geometry And The Origins Of 20th Century Abstract Art, Stephen Luecking

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

As a group, the artists educated near the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries possessed greater mathematical knowledge than expected of artists today, especially regarding constructive skills in Euclidean geometry. Educational theory of the time stressed such skills for students in general, who needed these to enter the workplace of the time. Mathematics teaching then stressed the use of manipulatives, i.e., visual and interactive aids thought to better fix the student’s acquisition of mathematical skills. This visual training, especially in geometry, significantly affected the early development of abstraction in art. This paper presents examples of this visual …

Quiet Moments, Deitra Charles

CGU MFA Theses

I am a figurative artist who focuses on ordinary people and everyday objects. I paint moments. A moment of peace, a moment of tranquility, a moment of contemplation. It is my hope that my paintings will incite a feeling of warmth, presenting the possibility of thoughts that take you away from the stresses of day-to-day life – that they give you the opportunity to experience life differently, stirring within you some sense of peace.

It is my hope that my paintings will incite a feeling of warmth, presenting the possibility of thoughts that take you away from the stresses of …

Carbon 碳, Mengyuan Li

CGU MFA Theses

Death is the one certainty in life. This fascinates me and I cannot stop thinking about it. When it comes to life and death, the cemetery is a more realistic place than heaven and hell, and it is also a place to feel life and death more directly. A simple gravestone separates life from death. Cemeteries let people come face to face with life, death, and even love.

In a cemetery, there is a tranquility that is different from the city or nature. In a cemetery, people take off their masks and face their emotions. I believe that when we …

Para Ti, Ashley Lothyan

CGU MFA Theses

This group of work draws from family photos that are over 15 years old, chosen from when I was born to the age of ten. Torn, wrinkled, and discolored, these photographs influence how I paint immediate family members, locations I grew up in, and myself.

Threaded, Madeline Arnault

CGU MFA Theses

This group of works is taken from my drawing practice. I have always been fascinated by the variety of line and color you can play with on fabric. For that reason each piece in this exhibition is image and line centric. I love the way a fabric can blend from color to color in the weave and yet contrast so sharply with a line placed on top. These works are a testament to that love.

Parametric Natura Morta, Maria C. Mannone

The STEAM Journal

Parametric equations can also be used to draw fruits, shells, and a cornucopia of a mathematical still life. Simple mathematics allows the creation of a variety of shapes and visual artworks, and it can also constitute a pedagogical tool for students.

Cartegory Theory: Framing Aesthetics Of Mathematics, Maria Mannone

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mathematics can help investigate hidden patterns and structures in music and visual arts. Also, math in and of itself possesses an intrinsic beauty. We can explore such a specific beauty through the comparison of objects and processes in math with objects and processes in the arts. Recent experimental studies investigate the aesthetics of mathematical proofs compared to those of music. We can contextualize these studies within the framework of category theory applied to the arts (cARTegory theory), thanks to the helpfulness of categories for the analysis of transformations and transformations of transformations. This approach can be effective for the pedagogy …

Written In Bone: Damage Patterns In Agonopsis Vulsa Armor, Morgan Stewart

Scripps Senior Theses

Naturally occurring armor has evolved in many different classes of organisms, often in response to predation, although other factors may play a part. In this study, the scales of the benthic armored fish Agonopsis vulsa were examined for damage patterns in order to illuminate the life history and environmental interactions of the fish. Scales from the fish were systematically destroyed in the lab, and observations made from the damaged scales were used to create a categorical damage rating, which was applied to 34 specimens ranging in trunk length from 2.3 cm to 14.2 cm. The specimens were rendered as three-dimensional …

Classically Formal, Biotic Subjectivity: Moderating Plastic's Relation To The Viewer, Tirza Jo Ochrach-Konradi

Scripps Senior Theses

Due to its cheap, pervasive, and disposable nature, post-consumer plastic has no subjectivity in its relation to the consumer. My thesis project examines the material’s inherent destructive narrative and question its ability to have extrinsic value beyond the assumptions of trash. In my research, I found that humans instinctually seek to conserve and treat biotic material with care. This fact has become a catalyst for the works in this project, which aim to not only increase the material’s value through animate biomorphic transformation, but also counter our disposable tendencies.

At the onset of this project, I was fixated solely on …

Facing The World: The Unapparent Merits Of Makeup, Ishbel A. Mccann

Scripps Senior Theses

The act of applying makeup is a ritual shared by many, often beginning at an early age. Though makeup is presented as a final product in the public sphere, the process of applying makeup can be just as, if not more important. This thesis acts as the theoretical basis for my digital art project, Facing the World. My work gives insight into the lesser understood motivations behind wearing makeup while shedding the stigma that wearing it is merely a superficial act or sign of vanity. The project Facing the World presents the makeup routines and personal narratives of seven …

Field Guide, Madeline Helland

Scripps Senior Theses

Field Guide is a mixed-media artist book detailing the exploration of a fictitious culture through cartography, narrative, and illustration. It is presented through the lens of an amateur archaeologist, navigating a chain of islands to search for ruins and artifacts. In part, the project is focused on the fantasy of an imagined world. The island chain is a place entirely of my own creation. By creating the viewpoint of an outside explorer, it was possible to navigate through this world. Although I, as the artist, can know everything about this fictitious world, adopting the perspective of someone distanced by time …

Waterways - Soon Dry, Aiyanna Cameron-Lewis

CMC Senior Theses

This paper explores the historical and contemporary situation of waterways in Los Angeles. It examines the birth and growth of metropolitan LA and contrasts this narrative with the current and pressing issues of drought and gentrification. This contrast raises the question of the sustainability of human growth in resource-scarce regions. From this analysis it forwards a nuanced perspective of the hypothesis that the dynamics of environmental degradation in the LA region threaten human growth. It suggests that this degradation comes as a result of egocentric human development projects by the elite. This paper examines all of this through the lens …

Syncretic Souvenirs: An Investigation Of Two Modern Indian Manuscripts, Madeline Helland

Scripps Senior Theses

The objective of this project was to establish a provenance for two Indian manuscripts that were recently discovered in the collections at Scripps College. Based on their illuminations, script, and binding structure, I was able to conclude that these two manuscripts are Hindu religious texts created around the 19^th or 20^th century. To determine an approximate origin and the significance of these volumes, my research focused on the syncretism of religion, material history, and power dynamics in India. Their context was specifically framed within the history of manuscript construction and conservation.

Stumbling Into The Spiral: A Serendipitous Steam Exploration, David Rufo

The STEAM Journal

An artist-educator discovers how a STEAM-based approach to making art brings together a variety of subject areas in surprising ways.

Passing, Paul Kelley

The STEAM Journal

Passing is a Site-specific public installation assembled with plastic and an iPad. At its center, the iPad displays a video loop of a human image repeatedly walking in and out of the frame. The work maintains my foundational interest in having the viewer slow down to have a more thoughtful and absorptive experience with the work and surrounding space – continuing my practice of challenging viewer’s expectations and putting them in a position to stop and question.

Combining An Intuitive Art Workshop And Neuroscience Rituals To Make Us Happy, Audrey Gran Weinberg

The STEAM Journal

One might wonder how intuitive art can connect to neuroscience and how this could be accomplished. In this descriptive article, research connecting art therapy and neuroscience has been collected and a workshop on Intuitive Painting has been described in detail. The connection was made by the author based on an article by Barker (2017), ‘4 Rituals to be more Happy,’ who writes a popular science blog. The rituals: gratefulness, expressing negative emotions, decision making and human touch were combined with Dr. Pinkie Feinstein’s method of Intuitive Painting in a small group setting. Although subjective, it would seem that at least …

On Capturing The Ineffable: A Moment From Experimental Film "59.10", Henry Leslie Foster Ii

The STEAM Journal

This artwork is a still from “59,” an experimental film installation I created with the following restrictions: I had to direct eleven 59-second films in eleven months with eleven collaborating artists, none of whom could be cis men.In the resulting project, we used film and those eleven short moments to capture our unique, fragile experiences. We explored everything from the way in which facets of personality drift in and out of the subconscious to the beautiful, mercurial nature of gender.

Elements Of Art, Mike Doyle

The STEAM Journal

Through these paintings and my writing I share how elements of art and science overlap in the strokes of paint that create the perceptions of something familiar in our minds.

Using Steam To Increase Engagement And Literacy Across Disciplines, Robert L. Long Ii, Stephen S. Davis

The STEAM Journal

This paper explores STEAM as a solution to improving student engagement and helping students improve functional literacy across the curriculum. While STEM is a fairly established approach to curriculum, researchers and practitioners are continuing to develop and understand STEAM and its place in school curriculum. It is important that educators foster this holistic approach to education and strive to participate in active research associated with STEAM. It is also most advantageous for stakeholders to understand the importance of arts integration and its use to support collaboration, innovation, and creativity within students. Key strategies can be used to support arts integration …