Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Entities: A Field Of Imaginary Games, Thrasyvoulos Ioannis Kalaitzidis

LSU Master's Theses

With this body of work, I am looking for visual symbols that help communicate unuttered meanings through storytelling and stimulate an affectual response to the viewer. This exploration is presented in two different forms: a surreal sculptural installation and a board game. The installation consists of large-scale sculptures made from light and soft materials (polyurethane foam, plastic waste, paper) that are available to move inside the gallery, while the board game is presented as a set of 3D prints with instructions on how the participants can play it. The materials used in the installation suggest a way to transform waste …

The Undiscovered Country, Luke A. Atkinson

LSU Master's Theses

The Undiscovered Country is a compendium of paintings, prose, and poetry that defines the place of creation. This work is a response to life as I find it, in as honest and truthful a way as my ability allows. Sergei Prokofiev said, “The more the sea rages, the more precious a hard rock among the waves becomes.” My paintings are solid rocks that I cling to. Hopefully, someone else can too.

Hello Again يا اهلا A Study Of Grief, Diana Abouchacra

LSU Master's Theses

Grief is an unwanted visitor who we all come to know throughout our lifetime. Although every person reacts differently to bereavement of a loved one, almost always the lost other becomes etched into our being for the remainder of our lives (McClocklin & Lengelle, 2017). In today’s society, we are encouraged to say “Good-bye”, but what if instead, we allow ourselves to keep those who have passed on close to our hearts and say hello again? Hello Again يا اهلا is a body of work that explores my experience with grief. The artworks made for this exhibition investigate my process …

Exhibition "Louisiana's Natural Treasure: Margaret Stones, Botanical Artist", Leah Wood Jewett, John D. Miles, Christina Riquelmy

Special Collections

In 2020, LSU Libraries Special Collections presented the exhibition “Louisiana’s Natural Treasure: Margaret Stones, Botanical Artist” at Hill Memorial Library, featuring selected original watercolor paintings and archival materials related to the Native Flora of Louisiana project.

A native of Australia, Margaret Stones (1920-2018) achieved an acclaimed international career that spanned three continents. Commissioned by LSU and funded by private donations, more than 200 watercolor drawings of Louisiana plants produced by Stones during the 1970s and 1980s are among the most treasured holdings of LSU Libraries Special Collections.

The Native Flora of Louisiana project was grounded in a long historical tradition …

In-Between: The Spaces Of Modernity, Elisa Fabris Valenti

LSU Master's Theses

During the past three years as a graduate student, I have experienced loneliness. Having recently emigrated from Italy, I have often asked myself why I am experiencing such hard times adjusting to a different country. My thesis explores this question. Referring to Marc Augé’s idea of non-place, I have chosen a geographical and spatial starting point to approach my work. Italian cities are built around the central piazza where social, political, and economic life revolves. In my thesis, I depict American spaces that lack specific location and create solitude within the urban corridors. Private feelings, such as loneliness, are paradoxes …

One Two One, Brianna Morgan Ozanne

LSU Master's Theses

These things, they speak in whispers. Come close, lean in, listen up. Whisper back. Tell me everything. I know you’ve been here, too. I know you’ll understand. I know you have a shoebox full of memories just like these hidden deep inside your closet. I know.

A Crow And A Hanger, Kelsey Ann-Morgan Livingston

LSU Master's Theses

A Crow and A Hanger is a body of work that explores and illustrates the nature of life and death through the use of mixed-media drawing and printmaking techniques. My intention for this work, and this thesis paper, is to explain my thought process and how the imagery came to be. For me it is not at all important for every viewer to fully understand each image and the thoughts that went into the body as a whole. I let the images and their titles lead the viewer in a general direction and allow for their personal history and biases …

She Pricked Her Finger, Veronica Kay Hallock

LSU Master's Theses

She Pricked Her Finger transports the viewer into a landscape of the bucolic and the macabre. Large scale sculptures and drawings create a panorama-environment which explores ideas of familial and geographical identity through themes of mortality and loss. Her work utilizes a self-generated folktale as a vehicle for expressing her experiences with new landscapes and many family deaths. Ultimately Veronica’s work reconciles the transition of home; the journey we take from our childhood home to the new homes we build.

A Storied Surface, Courtney Wilburn Marse

LSU Master's Theses

A Storied Surface is an exploration of narrative based graphic design engineered for textile surfaces. Beginning with an experiment involving the characters of the novel Matilda, I developed a design system. My process involves creating narratives and illustrating the characters. Then the illustration is abstracted. The abstraction is used to create prints. Finally, all of the elements including the original illustration, abstraction, and print are used to create engineered designs for three-dimensional surfaces. Advances in digital textile printing and the increasing implementation of graphic textiles in the fashion industry led me to experiment with applying my own design to textiles …

Built To Play, Forrest Sincoff Gard

LSU Master's Theses

Built to Play is an interactive art exhibition featuring four participatory installations. Each installation transforms non-playful objects and activities into handmade porcelain replicas used for exciting gallery made games. Focusing on the carry over from child’s play to adult play the exhibition emphasizes the importance of play in our adult lives. As gallery visitors risk breaking handmade ceramic objects for a moment of fun and a chance to win art as a prize, their interaction completes the exhibition.

Intermix: Traditional Pre-Columbian Art Meets Contemporary Design, Luisa Fernanda Restrepo

LSU Master's Theses

Cultural identity is something that impacts the individual, shaping and influencing them, during their lifetime journey. Each person chooses to embrace that identity differently. For my thesis, I investigated pre-Columbian culture and it’s rich history, specifically source visuals of faces as symbolic forms integrated into my visual study. Exploring: various media, elements that are expressive of national identity, image-making techniques, and my graphic design knowledge as vehicles in my work to uncover a different point of view of my own cultural heritage. The process of finding new graphic representations of traditional pre-Columbian faces, while deconstructing and reconstructing their structure and …

Domestic/Terror, Charles Russell Durio

LSU Master's Theses

The focus of my studio work is an exploration of my interest in the physical and mental dynamics that take place within the confines of my home versus the world outside. The home, spatial arrangements (architecture, passageways), maritime disasters, and the ambiguity of abstract expressionism all have an identifiable impact on my images. Abstraction allows me to maintain a visual ambiguity that often reflects the ambiguity of the real-life situations on which they are based. My drawings are rooted in remembrances of events and interior architecture culled from childhood memories. It also explores the juxtaposition of domesticity and fear, both …

From Here To There, Dana Statton

LSU Master's Theses

The photographs in the series From Here to There are not a description of a place; instead, the images are about engaging in a particular type of looking. Elements of “here” and “time” are included in the work; by photographing a moment that will never exist again, transitory objects are imbued with importance. A tree branch drifts, a puddle evaporates, and light shifts, slowly, but immediately. In the midst of this change, my photographs represent specific moments. Integral to the work is the act of finding the photograph, as is the act of framing, taking, and making the photograph. Each …

Peacocking, Margaux Hymel

LSU Master's Theses

My work attempts to express personal experiences and external observations of the present day western female ethos. Through visual depictions of forms with mixed media, my paintings convey females exposing themselves as sexual beings yet displaced in reality, as the illusion of their character is a projection based on environment and other people. Dressed in intimate garments with different hairstyles or wigs, I reference myself and create various extensions of my persona. Through these facades I investigate aspects of womanhood dictated by a cultural paradigm. I aim to create sexually charged scenes and explore the concept of perception, the internal …

Designing Graphic Design History: Teaching For The 21st Century Classroom, Phillip Peter Winfield

LSU Master's Theses

Designing Graphic Design History: Teaching for the 21st Century Classroom undertakes the development of a web-based Graphic Design History interactive timeline (GDHit), intended as a user-generated online database for potentially all graphic design enthusiasts, but specifically faculty and students within the traditional graphic design history course. GDHit seeks to continue the implementation of new media and emerging digital technologies in a traditional, lecture-oriented environment by inviting the user (or audience) to contribute the content for the timeline, while fostering new forms of course engagement for students in this digital age. In keeping with the tenets of the digital age and …

Believing Is Seeing, Robin Akkerman

LSU Master's Theses

Fantasy art is often described as being connected to the imagination. My work defines fantasy themes in combination with modern culture and real life experiences. During the creative process I have overcome a struggle with composition development and color relationships. Paintings mimic a puzzle strategy. I come up with a basic idea by inserting and taking away imagery in order for the whole image to be cohesive. Subject matter includes women of different cultures in dress, animals, pattern, sweets, and childhood experiences from the 80’s. My characters are a personification of myself as I often dream of being dressed up …

Inspire: The Confluence Of Art & Design, John Mark Lawler

LSU Master's Theses

Inspire: The Confluence of Art & Design seeks to untangle the inextricable link between graphic design and art. Graphic design has always been seen simply as an informational or sales tool; rarely is it seen as art. The work presented in this show illustrates that works created with typography can, in fact, be one and the same.

Pensively, Kenneth L. Lantz

LSU Master's Theses

Pensively, uses toys and solar powered drawing machines to present elements of movement, time, and scale. Each of the works in this exhibition invites or implies action through automation or viewer interaction. The works in this exhibit creates an environment of wonder and excitement that triggers memories of childhood and the pleasure of learning. The works investigate and discuss the responsibilities attained through maturation that keep us from recovering the sense of accomplishment we achieved with play.

We Believe In The Systems That Keep Us Alive, Ezra Kellerman

LSU Master's Theses

ABSTRACT We Believe In the Systems That Keep Us Alive is a body of work that uses parallels identified between writing and media critique of contemporary events. The parallels are labeled as four specific systems: nutritional, administrative, life-support, and nurturing. Through a combination of interactive and object based sculpture, each system is represented with visual metaphor and allegory to place the viewer in a direct and specialized paradox. Paradoxes audience members encounter are intended to illustrate to the audience what conflicts can arise by being included in a system where governing agency of any sort does not meet with individual …

Land Alive!, Or Metamorphosis In The Sportsman's Paradise, Adam Tourek

LSU Master's Theses

"Land Alive!" is best described a multimedia work. The produce of travels to the area of the Mississippi River delta, along with text-based research, formed the materials from which two evenings of participative performance were crafted. Personal narratives were used alongside evaluations of administrative programs, and the space in the Backyard Gallery was transformed using shovels, buckets, and teamwork. Found chairs, rope, and other objects, through ritualized interaction, became an aesthetic formation; everyone present worked together in the assembly of a boat, which contained the results of these interactions between myself, six volunteers, and an audience turned participants. The evenings …

Outside Inside Out: Perspectives On Social Anxiety, Kevin Andrew Hagan

LSU Master's Theses

“Outside Inside Out” is a study of how the visual perspective of an installation design can be used to create interaction, animation, and multiple messages. Traditionally, graphic designers have tended to present their messages either as flat printed materials, such as newspapers and billboards, or as videos/animations on television and the Internet. While both of these mediums provide an adequate means to convey a message, they fall short in presenting information to the audience in a non-obtrusive, interactive form. By using a technique I developed called “Passive Interactivity,” designers can use a viewer’s visual perspective to create interaction, animation, and …

I Met You, Momoko Kimura

LSU Master's Theses

My goal for the work documented in this paper was to create and install an immersive multimedia environment, using animation and interactivity to express and communicate ideas drawn from personal experience of how people may meet, influence each other and enrich each other’s lives. With my projects over the past few years, I learned that sharing personal stories is a powerful tool for communicating with others. The I MET YOU piece provided the perfect opportunity for me to pull together all my thoughts and tell people who have made difference in my life “I’m so glad I met you.” I …

Strange Yarns, Matthew Thomas Bourgeois

LSU Master's Theses

I leave a good portion of my art up to chance or my unconscious self, this shows me how closely my prints and drawings relate to the dream world. In dreams most of the physical laws are abandoned, reason and mind are not the dictators of the dream. Dreams have their own logic and are a perfect place to explore a narrative that leaves itself open for the viewer to put any number of meanings into.

On Being There, Donald Lawrence Simmons

LSU Master's Theses

ON BEING THERE is the physical embodiment of an emotional experience. The works are responses to stories told and memories of my two grandfathers, being made of images from their possessions and sketchbooks. The object was to explore the experience of loss and to create a record of that experience. The work is an investigation of the self through the history of my grandfathers’ lives and experiences told in the media of printmaking.

The Everywhere Chronicles, Jamie Brownell Baldridge

LSU Master's Theses

The Everywhere Chronicles is a body of work that has been perambulating through my mind since the halcyon days of childhood. It is not intended as any sort of catharsis, metaphorical or otherwise, nor is it any forum of self discovery, accidental or intentional. These Chronicles are quite simply a journey into imagination, an exercise in "what ifs?". They confront the theory that Columbus was actually on a munchies run to an Indian Takeaway in Ipswich and simply took a wrong turn at the Antilles, and that the Lost City of Atlantis is alive and well somewhere outside of Duluth …

Re-Envisioning My Backyard, One Brick At A Time, Kimberly Ellen Greene

LSU Master's Theses

My work is inspired by my immediate environment. I am especially interested in places which exhibit visual evidence of history, of industrial, natural and human life and the corresponding cycles of building, abandonment, destruction and salvage. In Baton Rouge, these relationships are dramatic, the lush vegetation, birds and overwhelming presence of industry make this interplay constantly tangible. My current work began with the phenomenal concerns within the struggle of nature and industry. Newly built industry is highly ordered, the perfect symbol of not only technology, but also control. However, older industry is more chaotic, with the initial order obscured over …

The Orthographic Characters (In No Particular Order), Alison Christina Frank

LSU Master's Theses

My work focuses on the development of playful and absurd combinations of small creatures that co-exist in a state of odd logic. The creatures share a vulnerable, somewhat fragile, quality, yet are assigned vital force in their existence. This juxtaposition is metaphorical for certain aspects of human existence. The Orthographic Characters is the title of a series of prints and paintings I have created that form a non-linear narrative. Each piece is inspired by the alliteration of one alphabet character. The writings form a bizarre, feverish context for the characters.

Zinnias, Carlyle Wolfe

LSU Master's Theses

Impermanence. Quiet. Words. Unfolding. Specificity. Abundance. Pattern. Compilation. Faithfulness. Vulnerability. Obedience. Atmosphere. Begun with a coffee can full of flowers, this work is an exploration of art making, self, and nature.

Pulse, Janet L.U. Rudawsky

LSU Master's Theses

This video is an abstract audiovisual narrative. It relies heavily on its lush compositions to seduce the viewer. “Pulse” depicts humanity not as the strong rational rulers of the earth but instead as a tormented figure that struggles to find security in an uncertain world. The three characters, Blood, Lava, and Electricity, represent the human animal, the natural world, and civilization respectively. Blood struggles against both Lava and Electricity in their rivalry for control. The plot shows humanity developing a relationship with civilization, all the while being harassed by unpredictable nature. Civilization at first is a path to security. As …