Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Delightful Scars, Shahrbanoo Hamzeh

Theses and Dissertations

At the door of the house who will come knocking? / An open door, we enter / A closed door, a den / The world pulse beats beyond my door (Bachelard, 25).Border is a dichotomous concept. Within a border exists both the potential for protection and alienation. By exploring the closure in borders around people in both a family and a country setting I am exploring communication on both an interpersonal and intrapersonal level; how our understanding of ourselves and others can affect us; how we can be close to each other and help each other. I suggest that our …

Searching: Waves, Spencer Molnar

Theses and Dissertations

This supportive statement examines a philosophical conception of the self and how it can be identified through experience, consciousness, and perception by focusing on a human inclination to rationalize, or concretize, that which is everchanging. The methods of exploring this concept were achieved by examining the formal structure of composition and materials through the process of visual art. By pushing against historical traditions of creating spatial illusions in visual art, we can conclude that the legibility of an artwork is equally dependent on the experiential world as it is the social construction of image making. The question that is left …

Soy Nadie ( I'M Nobody ), Jenny V. Castañon

Theses and Dissertations

In my past paintings, I tried to figure out why my subjects had me empathizing with strangers. Looking back on my Mexican-American upbringing, I realized how society and my communal culture are influencing the way I think and process information. So, for this body of work, the physical fragmentation of the figure alludes to a psychological fragmentation. In this case, it is as if the figure cannot withstand the tension and is barely able to remain whole and recognizable. What remains of the person is trying to repair itself. The pressure in my mind is between the values of general …

Running From The Touch On My Back: Affect And Technology In A Studio Practice, Anthony Noel Hamilton

Theses and Dissertations

I rediscovered a family photo box two years ago. An image of my grandfather sat on the top of the piles in the Tupperware box. The photo created an immediate intensity and infected the entire family photobox. My grandfather committed suicide twenty years before I was born. From the point of this discovery I have needed to explore why vernacular photographs can create haunting resonances. There seem to be limits to the information we can glean from photographs like this one. Photographs like this one activate our desires to fill in unknown details. They also encourage personal hauntings and lingering …

The Water Is Always Running: Vaporwave, Fluxus, And The Role Of Defamiliarization In Music-Led Virtual Realities, Zachary William Buckley

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how a Fluxus approach to participatory music can leverage environmental metaphors and affordances, heighten user awareness of their interactions through a making-strange approach to musical interaction, and balance functional and creative user experiences in a meaningful and participatory musical interaction. This research has been conducted using the virtual reality experience The Water Is Always Running. This work presents an unusual music-making environment, a 3D kitchen with dishwashing simulation, to explore how a making-strange approach to musical interaction and participation can heighten the awareness of process for the user. To create this work, ideas have been leveraged from …

Interface Of Glass And Topology, Travis Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Interface of Glass and Topology is a supportive statement for a collection of blown glass sculptures that employ principles of continuous surface topology along with line and color applications to create a perceptual visual experience. These forms address issues of balance and continuity as well as space relationships of both inside to outside and object to self. This supportive statement will discuss topology as a basis for composition and larger questions of interconnectivity with our environment that serves as a guiding theme of my work.

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.

Bits And Piecing, Emily Lehman

Theses and Dissertations

My work questions the ways we consider and value materials in our everyday experience. I question by collecting, viewing, sorting, and enabling their performance both in the studio and by the making of works. Through such the works enact the enchantment of castoff materials, causing us to call into question the agency of materials we tend to ignore.

Conscious Light, Jeremy Y. Langston

Theses and Dissertations

Conscious Light is a supportive statement for an exhibition of paintings that employ reflective color, object placement, and imagined movement to create a phenomenological experience for the viewer. Color and light become actors on the world stage that is the painting surface.

The Third Coast, Catherine Jane Davis

Theses and Dissertations

The Third Coast is a photographic exploration of the vernacular landscape of the US Gulf Coast. Stretching some 1,600 miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande in Texas to the Florida Everglades, America's southernmost shore is vast and complex. The region is a patchwork of both the natural and built environments, a tangled combination of history and geography, culture and ecology that reflects an intimate and ever-evolving relationship between man, land and sea. The Gulf Coast resists tidy hierarchies or easy classification. Rather, the rhythms of the region comprise its own syntax, a way in which seemingly dissimilar locations …

Sunday Dinner, George Dominic Barreca

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Archeology often evaluates social class through the symbolism and refinement of ceramic pottery. Recording undecorated and decorated vessels placed within a spectrum, determines a social economy through the Ceramic Value Index. Austere, robust earthenware is usually considered peasantry or lower class whereas fine, opulent porcelain is categorized under the vessels of aristocracy or affluence. I am interested in utilizing this historical method to consider use, decoration, and value through the lens of the contemporary working class.

In my work, I employ simple molds and hand-building techniques to define a process that relates to the “economy of means” found within …

Seeking The Invisible, Alexis Bragg

Theses and Dissertations

Seeking The Invisible is a photography portrait series which explores the internal context of those suffering from invisible illness. This body of work examines the interior worlds of those often stigmatized as “outsiders,” and those who seek to be acknowledged beyond their illness. When one is told of another’s physical malady with no visible indicators of a problem, skepticism or outright disbelief is an unfortunately likely response. By asking my subjects “What would a portrait of your life look like?” I sought to observe the interior world of this subset and empower my subjects as something more than their illness.

What Am I Doing Again?, Megan Coonelly

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores notions of habits, chaos and distractions; present within my painting practice. Each painting I make begins with a routine that symbolizes the daily experiences of my life. My paintings reflect the constant thought stream of my mind. They reveal the constant of societal and cultural past and present; buried as deep in our minds as a prayer or hymn ready to burst out at any moment. By referencing and exploring pop culture and pop art, I engage in a critique of commodity and commercialism. My paintings respond to cultural conditions of the digital age.

Hints Of Wholeness, Dylan Yvonne Welch

Theses and Dissertations

The fertile tension between what we know and don’t know about ourselves is the mystery that invigorates existence. In this essay, I posit that beauty is found in a knot of knowability and unknowability bound together in wholeness. This work contemplates our unique receptivity to that underlying but invisible wholeness which makes its presence known as beauty in nature immediately around us and on a cosmic scale.

Black-\`Blak\, Venise Keys

Theses and Dissertations

My studio practice explores themes of identity derived from the basic question of Langston Hughes, What does it mean to be a Black artist? My artwork draws from memory, Black Feminist literature, along with the aesthetics of the African diaspora and the Black Arts Movement. In this essay, I reexamine childhood experiences in my mother's hair salon; beauty rituals of U.S. Black women; and the consuming male gaze in Western art to explain how these influences manifest in the artwork of Black-\`BLAK\.

Arts Integration: Establishing Teacher Candidates' Self-Efficacy When Engaging With The Arts, Michael J. Vetere Iii

Theses and Dissertations

Many teacher candidates who enter teacher education programs have received altered curricula that addressed the new common core of reading, writing, and mathematics (Beveridge 2010). This new common core curriculum neglects the importance of arts education. These students who have not been exposed to arts education, are reluctant to engage in the arts and fully participate in an arts education course as part of their teacher preparation (Hallam, Gupta, & Lee, 2008). These teacher candidates exhibit a low level of arts engagement and arts teaching self-efficacy and are therefore less confident with engaging and teaching the arts (Garvis, 2009). The …

Branching Topology: The Aesthetics And Symbolism Of Glass Trees, Michael Lyn Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses my glass artwork which I make to help me understand the world. Trees, specifically bonsai trees, are used as inspirational imagery. The work explores the physical and symbolic aspects of the trees and the relationships that develop between the maker, the object, and the viewer. The series of work split into two distinct styles and the relationships of the styles as they relate to aspects of my personality are explored.

Aggregation And Satiation: Finding Meaning In Repetition, Samantha Buchanan

Theses and Dissertations

In my work, I see repetition, but also complexity and variation. This supportive

statement examines my interest in the aggregate, in forms composed of multiples, as well as the repetitive processes required in their construction. I look at the ways in which predictability, recursion, and rhythm function in my repetitive practice, as well as how the energy expended throughout the process manifests in the matter of the work. What I intend for the viewer is the perception of a holistic and simultaneous sensory experience.

Cliffdwellers: A Study In Wildness, Stoney Larkin Sasser

Theses and Dissertations

How do I find wildness? This question is a central tenant of my work and manifests psychologically and physically in my installation, video and performance work. As the diversity of non-human ecosystems wanes and wildness along with it, I am overwhelmed by idea that the human generated debris might eventually cover the earth and become our new landscape, our new wilderness. I wonder "what do we do with all of this stuff'? In my installations, I play with the materials I gather and accumulate. I construct `ecosystems' often using pedestrian materials such as nylons, fabric, lint and glitter to explore …

Firefly Song, Lasantha Rodrigo

Theses and Dissertations

Chethiya is a brown, gay, disabled (ultimately), abused young man from Sri Lanka, who comes to the U.S. on a full scholarship. His dream is to be a Broadway star, but after coming out of his first relationship with an emotionally abusive, alcoholic man, he is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a chronic, degenerative neurological disease that results in demyelination, causing progressive debilitation. The story is divided into six chapters that narrate his life under various marginalizations he is subjected to, culminating in traumatization. The story, however, ends on a positive note of redemption with the narrator looking forward to his …

Mark Twain And Critical Thinking In The Secondary Classroom, Daniel Zehr

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study will explore and evaluate the school literacy practices of high school-aged participants at the freshmen level (grade 9). It will interpret their analysis, comprehension, and critical thinking skills through an examination of confidence, abilities, and fluency through discussion and student-led dialogue. Building on previous research regarding critical thinking skills, the researcher hopes to articulate the ways in which students with varied levels of ability (grades 9-12) may be able to use their literacy learning to demonstrate critical thinking skills that will enhance their reading fluency, comprehension, and analytical skills and to foster an appreciation of literature and …