Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Humidifier, George Bowles

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

A discussion of the painter’s position in relation to visual culture as organized by collage. The role of abstraction is described, the correlative possibilities for gestural and textual reference of which are entailed. Models for the translation of art-historical source material provide the painter with a path forward and justify the non-verbal art experience.

Light On, Baby. No Future, Shane Dollinger

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This project is a realistic depiction of the circularity of experience. As Images of ourselves and our experiences become increasingly inescapable, the repetitive and nonlinear nature of those experiences is amplified. This issue is explored in looking at contemporary artists/filmmakers whose handling of inundation in representation and narrative distinctly embraces multiplicity. Queering structures of representation, the work holds a mirror to the way that we experience living, encountering images, narrative structures and memories.

One Epic Φf Stardusts, Y∞N Irene Hong

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

A long time ago in a far away galaxy,

there was a star shining alone in the deep darkness.

The beautiful star aged and exploded into a supernova,

where her golden light scattered into the tiniest sparkles of dust,

pouring down to Earth.

Made of Stardust,

humans naturally have responded to the divine light that they carry inside their souls,

through diverse acts of enlightenment such as art, religion, and science.

.

.

.

As a Stardust, an artist, a Korean, and a woman,

I keep walking in between opposing forces and varying perspectives

until I transcend their boundaries and …

( )* *This Smells Familiar, Sachi Nagase

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Fragments from quotidian sensory experience conjure memories from personal history. Vague manifestations of feelings become interpretations of memories, which are investigated through immersive installation, sculpture, and video. Imagined scenarios are constructed to expose moments of cultural disconnect and reveal states of inbetweenness, which settle within territories amongst imagination and reality, adult and childhood, and loss and comfort. Within the works, sensory experiences including smell, sound and taste develop to relay meaning and affect. Haptic, olfactory, and auditory stimulation allow active participation, while subjectivity inherent in taste and smell generate space for new meaning. Color is used to immerse, to delineate …

Open To The Public: The Political Zoo, Mary Brown

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Open to the Public: The Political Zoo is a two-part project that began as an experiment, a creative curiosity into the intersections of co-authorship, political censorship, and mail art. Spurred in a moment when the news media is being challenged by those in the highest offices, the analog nature of this project explores the potential of a world in which online self-expression is hindered. Mail art projects, while out of the box in this digital era, are situated in a history of 20th century artistic practices. Used as a tool for creative exploration and community in Western countries, in Eastern …

[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 …

Cat Metamorfosis: Becoming Animal And The Freedom Of Non-Identity, Hannah Becker

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

A large number of modern and contemporary female artists have employed the state of becoming to either free themselves of or challenge the social norms that come with being a woman. Kara Walker frees the Mammy of her expectation by combining her with a sphinx in her monumental sugar sculpture, A Subtlety. The Guerilla Girls have an impenetrable and unidentifiable voice when they speak from behind gorilla masks. Lucy Gunning’s The Horse Impressionists depicts women mimicking the behavior of horses to lose their human consciousness, and more specifically, female identity. Looking beyond the art world and into recent consumerist …

"Collaborating With Chance", Alyse Gellis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Have you ever felt a desire to get lost on a journey much larger than yourself or experience the thrill of the unknown? Think about a time you intentionally swam further out in a lake or the sea than you have before, or drove down a road without knowing where it would take you, or wandered around a new city without a map. Think about how you made the decision to push those boundaries. Remember how taking that risk in pursuit of an unknown made you feel, because it is that thrill that drives my artistic practice. Through my thesis …

A Hazy Bliss, Anna Joo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

There were tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk, some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones. These last she had bought to tone in with the new dining-room carpet. Yes, that did sound rather far-fetched and absurd, but it was really why she had bought them. She had thought in the shop: "I must have some purple ones to bring the carpet up to the table." And it had seemed quite sense at the time.

When she had finished with them and had made two pyramids …

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 …

Interspace Suit, Moriah Okun

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My thesis work investigates the transformative possibility of mediating the space between ourselves and others, the tension between solitude and loneliness, and the disconnects between mind and body, personal and shared experience, and artist and viewer. The basis of my process is stitching and coiling — a practical and symbolic act of joining together material that serves as structure and surface. I am inspired by work that explores this middle space, like that of Archigram, Lucy Orta, Lygia Clark, and Ernesto Neto. These artists first showed me what it was possible to create when the viewer’s body becomes the site …

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 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 …

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 …

On Assemblage And Erasure, Dante Migone-Ojeda

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Through textual and visual research, I assert that the root cause of the injustice that drives my work and the work of the artists within my thesis paper is erasure. I attribute this erasure in large part to the role of neoliberalism upon the world stage, and it’s pervasive global influence. While neoliberalism did not create inequality, it has codified it and through its relentless push for “progress” it has propped up a dynamic of oppressor and oppressed. This in turn leads to simple categorization and ultimately erasure. I posit that my work not only makes this erasure visible, but …

Exercises On Overcoming Perfectionist Tendencies, Jake Yoo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my latest series, I investigate my neurotic perfectionist tendency through repetition of phrases that I understand to be true in my head, but have a problem with accepting it in my heart. This way, I am studying my personal biases and the way I perceive the world in order to break free from unwanted behaviors and process negative emotions. Louise Bourgeois is a historical precedence to my practice as whole, while the series functions similarly to Yayoi Kusama’s dot and net paintings—a psychological portrait achieved through continuous repetition of a few elements.

Rewriting History: The Press As A Tool For Destruction And Preservation, Emily L. Mogavero

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This statement describes my two bodies of work, Aufheben and Artist-Hero/Squish, in which I use printmaking processes to rewrite history. In Artist-Hero/Squish I mimic canonical paintings of women by modernist male painters and run my quotations of these paintings through the press while the paint is still wet on the canvas. Through this process, I examine, confront, and change the male-dominated history of art. Aufheben currently includes one hundred drypoint prints that catalogue the personal history of my mark. This series represents a process of constant change, with individual prints suggesting stages of my process including moments of growth …

Changing Human Relationships Through Interactive Art, Daniel Shieh

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In our current society, there is a constant endeavor to reconcile our differences while respecting our individuality. Since the 1990s, a large amount of artworks begin focusing on human relationships. In this essay, I discuss the question: how can interactive artworks create common ground between people while respecting their individual identity? Through creating a sequence of interactive artworks, I determine the three factors that are necessary for connecting people of different backgrounds—mutual vulnerability, anonymity, and the leveling of power dynamics. Mutual vulnerability entails an interaction where two people reveal themselves to each other, and connect through this reciprocal action. Anonymity …

Abstraction As A Form Of Redaction, Alex P. Derosa

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Abstraction as a Form of Redaction acts as an explanation of the personal and conceptual basis of my three bodies of work titled the dimension of intimacy, notations of the mind, and medical signifiers. Examining contemporary art through the lens of the self, I have created work that is present in conversations about intimacy, abstraction, self-portraiture, and feminism. Though my work does not directly address contemporary feminism, I am using this work to reclaim my body, my mind, and my space as an act of agency. The work, when looked at as a compilation, functions as an autobiography. …

Zeitgeist: An Artist's Present Perspective, Danielle Leventhal

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This statement is an analysis of my process in creating a zeitgeist collection of painted portraits. The pieces in this collection began with a live, in-person session with each of my subjects, all of whom are my friends: females ages 18-22 at Wash.U. An interest in the brain and mirror neurons, as well as Susan Stewart’s idea that the face is a “text” that must be read in order to exist, is what enabled these portraits to become a psychological examination of the spirit of our time. The material process of collapsing layers of time, emotions, and thoughts on the …

Wax Bodies: Candles, Queerness, & Taking Up Space, Moya Shpuntoff

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My partner and collaborator Callaway Fox and I use queer surrealist installation, craft practices, and performance in order to address queer and disabled temporality, articulating our experiences as disabled queer femme artists through abstracted and literal exploration of femme bodies in space. In performance and installation works Hospital Performance: Part I and Hospital Performance: Part II, we responded to our experience of marginalization, medical malpractice, and emotional isolation, ultimately exploring queer and disabled temporality through queer surrealism. Hand-poured scented candles became metaphors for queer and disabled bodies, and along with other craft practices used in this work, are a …

Cuba A La Yuma: In, Around, And Millennial Thoughts, Zoe Kline

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The camera phone prompted a new stylistic approach that has created an outlet for inexpensive and democratized photography, seemingly giving anyone the revolutionary ability to be called an artist. It is because of this that photojournalism, as an art practice, is losing its intrinsic ambitions — to employ visual storytelling to, more effectively than written word, foster positive social and political activism. Photographs of war and marginalized people in society have become both exploitative and dehumanizing in their treatment of both photographic style and relationship to subject and have only numbed their viewers to today’s atrocities. I look to find …

The Lifted Shadow, Xinyi Xie

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The Chinese shadow puppet tradition is one of negotiation: where the local (folktales and traditions) meets the national (“culture”?), and the national (??) meets the international (???). It is a cultural practice in which the "masses" create "entertainment," which is then intellectualized and "refined" by social (and cultural) “elites.”

In a nation that has rejected "feudalism" in the past, the shadow puppet tradition is one of many at risk of being commercialized and exported as national commodity. It offers potential cultural “heritage,” soft power to go hand-in-hand with China's economic and industrial might. When a nation has produced everything and …

To Sleep, Perchance To Dream, Carla G. Steppan

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Focusing on the devaluation of monumentality identified by architects in the mid-twentieth century, this paper examines how the reduction of form throughout the history of architecture and how such reduction affects space framed by such architecture. By applying the malleability of symbolic meaning to a closed set of symbols, the nature of the set is re-made and subsequently manipulated to theoretically set the stage for a romantic narrative. A formal interest in reproduction and repetition serves a conceptual interest in allusion of forms in the creation of the illusion of narrative and romance.

Crossing The Divide: Art As Mediation And Pilgrimage, Sophia Keskey

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Founded on my personal experiences of growing up in an interfaith household and my high school semester abroad in Israel, my artistic practice seeks to build bridges between people, connecting diverse communities across divides (cultural, religious, economic, racial, ethnic etc.). Through two process, mediation and pilgrimage to self, specifically in using myself as an active participant, I argue that the process of making can become the neutral ground in which to build relationships and begin to imagine coexistence.

Mediation is expressed by Homi Bhabha’s definition of negotiation: “The ability to articulate differences in space and time…to intervene in the forest …

“I Would Save You, But My Boobs Keep Getting In The Way”: An Examination Of My Art Through The Lens Of The Heroic Myth And Alternative Comics, Barrett Hollingsworth

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My artwork challenges the masculine, violent idea of the hero through utilizing the visual language of comic books, as well as autobiographical themes. In this examination of my work, I explore conceptual and visual precedents and relate them back to my own practice throughout. My essay establishes the idea of the contemporary American heroic myth by looking at Joseph Campbell, as well as more contemporary re-examinations and criticisms of his ideas, relating the modern myth to the superhero comic genre. Next, I explore the history of underground comics, specifically feminist autobiographical comics, and relate the works of artists such as …

Yung Ladies, Leah Nordman

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Yung Ladies began as an investigation into female representation and has expanded into a brand and even lifestyle. Founded as a space for female solidarity, Yung Ladies works to break down notions of what a young woman should be and simultaneously spreads our ideals and attitudes through our clothing line and social media presence. This paper spans the ideological movements, various forms of artistic media, and artist precedents that have inspired this project.Yung Ladies includes investigations into new media identities and notions fad ideological movements, consumerism and conspicuous consumption, and brand identity as a means of personal representation. These ideas …