Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Tenacity, Angela Stevenson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Creating my exhibition, Tenacity, was a labor of love that took place over the year and a half that I was a student in Stephen F. Austin State University of Texas’s Graduate Program. I explored new processes in painting, including the use of transfers, and did extensive research into the lives of female historical figures. This exhibition was born of a wish to share knowledge with others as well as to remind society that anyone can elicit change.

.Pause., Richelle M. Dorris

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

.Pause. is a series of fifteen abstract oil paintings that represent a visual inspection of changing mental/emotional states of being as we navigate life. My subject matter consists of natural and organic forms that twist, contort, overlap, and flow. These aspects—combined with dramatic and gradual shifts in color, movement, layering and lighting—create a bizarre environment of conflict and growth as well as a space for contemplation.

This series is a mixture of stylistic directions, including abstract representation, gestural, and nonobjective work. Perception is called into question as the visual information becomes more obscure. Outside elements, such as lighting and the …

Blaze, Meg Roussos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The photographer discusses her work in “BLAZE,” a Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibit held at the Tipton Gallery from September 16th through October 4th, 2019. The exhibition consists of 11 archival inkjet prints, two photographic artist books, a nine-channel video installation, representing the artist’s exploration of how to experience the landscape. Using non-traditional approaches to photographic imagery, experimental exhibition layout, the artist forms questions around themes of walking and landscape. The artist investigates sculptural land art installations represented through photographic documentation. A catalog of the exhibit is included at the end of this thesis.

Roussos examines formal and conceptual …

Mom's Money: A Dark Comedy, Buddy Ketelle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will recount the making of the feature film Mom’s Money which I produced, edited, wrote and directed. My influences on the story and visual style of the film will be discussed as well as my prior work and the way those combined forces drew me to make this film. Breaking this into the three stages of filmmaking- Production, Pre-Production and Post Production- I will explore the film from its conception to its completion. The collaborative nature of filmmaking and the way the particular collaborators I had on this film gave me an advantage (while still providing an occasional …

North Of Ourselves: Identity And Place In Jim Wayne Miller’S Poetry, Micah Mccrotty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jim Wayne Miller’s poetry examines how human history and topography join to create place. His work often incorporates images of land and ecology; it deliberately questions the delineation between place and self. This thesis explores how Miller presents images of water to describe the relationship between inhabitants and their location, both with the positive image of the spring and the negative image of the flood. Additionally, this thesis examines how the Brier, Miller’s most prominent persona character, grieves his separation from home and ultimately finds healing and reunification of the self through his return to the hills. In his poetry, …

Thinging : Powerful Objects., Tammy M. Burke

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The works in "Thinging” are inspired by desire, the genuine and the false, systems of real and perceived values, the quest for immortality, the allure of things, our use of them to make ourselves, and imagining pasts and futures via objects. The following concepts are threaded through the work: cathexis, ritual as a value builder, collections, hoarding, display, object history, exchange, use, and sign values, and vibrant materiality. At the heart of my investigation is the quest to examine the origins of object power, and by what measures it can be evaluated: value from belief, market value, and something perhaps …

Send Nudes : Art On Social Anxiety And Human Connection In An Internet Driven Society., Lauren A Bader

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My social anxiety is the driving force behind my thesis work. Sufferers of social anxiety often have a hard time forming relationships because their fear of social interaction causes them to refrain from self-disclosure. Self-disclosure is the act of telling others personal details about yourself. This can be hard for people with social anxiety because of their intense fear of judgement. It is quite common for people with this type of anxiety to seek out opportunities to self-disclose online because they have the advantage of anonymity and time to construct thoughtful responses. In my work I seek out participants online …

Waiting Room., Helen Payne

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Waiting Room is an installation of drawings and monotypes that re-envision everyday printed materials common in medical offices. The brochures, poster, bulletin board and children’s ABC book in this Waiting Room offer guidance suggest invasive and dysfunctional policy. A door opens onto a further room, where a hundred ultrasound images cascade onto the floor. This work, called Transducer Phosphene is the product of a fictional character’s encounter with a cruel (and not fictive) abortion policy. Waiting Room is the fruit of an inquiry that spanned my three years of study at the Hite Art Institute, a probing into the politics …

Eclectic: A Recording Project Of Original Crossover Compositions, Chance Moore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Music makers have always borrowed one another’s influences, across philosophies, across culture, and thus, across genres. Since the 1950’s, a time when classical music was at its farthest reach from popular music, the rift between these two “worlds” has shrunk, and music crafters from each category are free to take from the other as they please. As a figure who stands between the cultivated and vernacular traditions, my aim for this thesis is to give an introduction to some of the ways genre hybridization has been achieved since 1950, present a collection of my own compositions (along with recordings) that …

Trace., Kcj Szwedzinski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Trace utilizes autoethnography to investigate aspects of Judaism to discover how one decides what to embrace, embody, or deny from inherited legacies. Autoethnography attempts to combine quantitative and qualitative data in order to systematically analyze and describe personal experience. The artist acting as Ba’alei Kushiah, or question bearer, uses Talmudic philosophy as a methodology and approach to art making. This research is self-referential; using Jewish thought to ask questions about Judaism. Judaism, often existing in an in between place with outward characteristics that reflect regional influences, facilitates a dialogue about whether there are relative or absolute delineations within and between …

Remaking Identities, Reworking Graduate Study : Stories From First-Generation-To-College Rhetoric And Composition Phd Students On Navigating The Doctorate., Ashanka Kumari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation responds to the decreasing number of first-generation-to-college doctorates in the humanities and the limited scholarship on graduate students in Rhetoric and Composition. Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have long been invested in discussions of academic and/or disciplinary enculturation, yet these discussions primarily focus on undergraduate students, with few studies on graduate students and far fewer on the doctoral students training to become the next wave of a profession. In this dissertation, I argue that if we engage intersectional identities as assets in the design of doctoral programs, access to higher education and academic enculturation can become more manageable …

Transdisciplinary Creative Ecologies In Contemporary Art Within Emergent Processes, Siglinde Langholz Villarreal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research is composing in the moving with affective speeds and rhythms, instead of unfolding direct and in linear ways. It is important to come across different planes of composition in movement. There are so many planes of voices spinning around in relation. Research-creation seems as forms of relations and an invitation to appreciate the collectivity at the heart of thinking. The many entering-into relation within a differential thought in the making of its own.

Emergent properties in non-human interactions, such as those presented in Steven Shaviro ́s Against Self-Organization (2009) and Brain Massumi, are symptomatic of how individualities relate …

Connecting Thread, Christen Parker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Up until about the 1960’s, sculpture was dominated by work made with metal, wood, or stone. These materials would be described as “hard” or “masculine,” while materials such as fabric or yarn are described as “soft” or “feminine.” Fabric is known for its softness and malleability and is commonly used to cover the human body for objects such as clothing or bedding. The materials that I have selected are generally considered soft, yet protective, but are also thought of as insubstantial and fragile. As a child, I would see quilts and hear stories about how my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother …

Un-Earthed, William Austin Mckinney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With this exhibition, I strive to create sculptures that reveal beauty and act as a visual reminder of the destruction we have caused by decades of industrial negligence and greed. Using the principles and elements of design I hope to create visually stimulating objects that resembles the beauty found in the hills of Appalachia. A dialogue is fostered that influences future generations by bringing to light the reality of our past transgressions.

A Fiction Of Fragmented Falsehoods: Curriculum Of Unwanted Roads Traveled, Katherine Wyatt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is an inquiry centered on lived ‘otherness’ in different social experiences. Fiction and illustrations are both creative outlets that provide opportunities of curriculum growth by offering the viewer realistic portrayals dealing with truth and factors that make us fundamentally human. “Fiction elicits an interpretation of the world by being itself a worldlike object for interpretation” (Dillard, 1988, p. 155). This study uses fiction and illustrations as vehicles of communication to provide an awareness regarding social issues in everyday lived experiences, exposing the reader to the social, cultural and historical realities persistently impeding the shared constructs of human experiences. Structuring …

Neo_Fluxus & Dragons, Zachary A. Kelley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What is a viewer? Who can be a viewer? What is the purpose of a viewer? Is viewing an artwork a process? How does a viewer interact with an artwork? What is an artist? Are the formal elements or conceptual natures more important in art making? Why is that art? These questions and more direct me in how and why I make my art.

I will be discussing the relationship between the viewer and the artwork in an artwork experience. I will define an artwork experience using an analysis of Michael Fried’s notion of theatricality, relating the viewer to the …