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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Homage To Everyday People, Sang Ja Chun Aug 2011

Homage To Everyday People, Sang Ja Chun

Theses and Dissertations

Influenced by an ever-growing sense of alienation with my homeland, I have been determined to discover through my art practice an ability to challenge conventional notions of home, identity, communication and miscommunication. Exploring these themes, I became increasingly aware of the parallels between everyday life and art practice. By creatively connecting with a diverse amount of local people and their communities, I fulfilled desires to discover a sense of belonging and generated opportunities for others to break through traditional social boundaries and roles.


Alghe Mist, Jeffrey Kenney Aug 2011

Alghe Mist, Jeffrey Kenney

Theses and Dissertations

This is an overview of the source material, methodologies, artistic influences, and conceptual decisions that inform the sculptural and the photographic means of production that characterize my art practice. Research topics include model-making, the indexical relationship of the photograph and object, and a brief phenomenology of accidents, alchemy, and ambivalence in relation to specific artworks.


A Sequence Of Gaps, Oscar Santillan May 2011

A Sequence Of Gaps, Oscar Santillan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis unfolds some theories and reflections on specific works I developed during my MFA. It is a map of the past and present of my art practice, and speculates about its future.


Melancholy And The Infant, Wesley Friedrich May 2011

Melancholy And The Infant, Wesley Friedrich

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis contains descriptions of works I have made over the last two years. These descriptions have been applied to support themes of melancholia, restraint, and indeterminacy, which serve as prevalent strains connecting recent work. A few stories are also shared in the way pieces come about through thinking and making.


Quick Xlthlx Fish, Andrew Brehm May 2011

Quick Xlthlx Fish, Andrew Brehm

Theses and Dissertations

A sequence of short stories both fact and fiction leading to, resulting from, or having nothing to do with the three sculptures that comprise The Crescent Club, an installation for the Anderson Gallery.


A Voice From The Dust, Gian Pierotti May 2011

A Voice From The Dust, Gian Pierotti

Theses and Dissertations

We shall not starve. We shall not lack shelter. We shall have a hearth. Awake self reliance! Our art is for feeding, warmth, protection. Ceramics– our temporal salvation. Clay– our material life-force. Transformed by fire we arise with the skills of the ancients! No longer will we live in obscurity. To the deskilled, your fate is at hand! You have chosen alienation, distraction, banality, and sloth. Embrace your digital false Gods and die or be reborn to the natural physical world. Now, together we complete our reason for being. We create a new world of kinship. A hope for the …


An Artless Dream, Lauren Abrams May 2011

An Artless Dream, Lauren Abrams

Theses and Dissertations

The brain begins collecting and categorizing information from the moment we are born. It can identify patterns and direct our choices long before we are consciously aware of it. Even when we become aware of the deliberate choice we often don’t know why we are making it. It is striking how much of what we do is dictated subconsciously by our brains. While I am not a scientist and I don’t aim to research the brain, I think it is interesting to think about how this effects what I do in the studio. I am a product of the world …


Plex, Jon-Phillip Sheridan May 2011

Plex, Jon-Phillip Sheridan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the evolution of my practice as it developed over my two years of graduate school. I entered school interested in the built environment and how structures helped create subjectivity and provided sites for material and phenomenological transformations. Early in graduate school, I developed a photography series that investigated these issues. However, an awareness of a conversation occurring in the larger art world that questioned the efficacy of photography drove me to consider ways to extend my practice into sculpture and installation. Over the next two semesters, I developed my ideas of light, form and structure into video …


I Wanna Rock!, Amanda Briede May 2011

I Wanna Rock!, Amanda Briede

Theses and Dissertations

Do you know that feeling? That feeling when the music you are listening to a concert or a new record and it just seems right? When you think, that’s it! That’s what music should sound like! When the music seems to touch your soul or mirror it, or…. something. And when you feel that, nothing else seems to exist and you are purely experiencing the music. My thesis work explores the way in which we try to capture this ephemeral moment of pure experience in order to keep it with us to revisit at our leisure. This, however, is a …


The Absent Artist: Muteness And Fiction In Recent Painting, Costa Michael Kennedy May 2011

The Absent Artist: Muteness And Fiction In Recent Painting, Costa Michael Kennedy

Theses and Dissertations

For the written component of my thesis, I am attempting to make sense of a current strain in contemporary painting which, generally speaking, tends towards reduction, humble materiality, lack of overt, didactic critique, and a scholarly interest in outmoded or overlooked art historical movements and figures. These are tendencies with which, as a painter, I feel both affinities and differences. Rather than rigidly define a “movement,” I will identify prevalent modes but also highlight individual strategies. I will begin by outlining some of the basic, underlying problems in painting today. I will then examine, as case studies, three young painters—Josephine …


Live Attitude, Keith Jason Varadi May 2011

Live Attitude, Keith Jason Varadi

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis serves as an open-ended document of a young artist attempting to sift through his accumulated opinions in order to figure out what it means to accept complicity in the face of auspicious authority, rapid turnover, and paper-thin irony and nihilism, while still striving to stake a claim at something worth making and defending.


Producto Centro Americano : Made In Honduras, Alma Leiva May 2011

Producto Centro Americano : Made In Honduras, Alma Leiva

Theses and Dissertations

PRODUCTO CENTRO AMERICANO: MADE IN HONDURAS By Alma Leiva Master of Fine Arts A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2011. Thesis Director: Robert Paris, Professor Kinetic Imaging / Photography and Film I was born in 1973 in Honduras, a country under military regime. In 1982 after 20 years of military rule, Honduras finally had democratic elections. During that decade, and as a consequence of the cold war, the kidnapping, torturing, murder and disappearance of civilians became common practices among the Honduran military. …


Dig, Spencer Neale Iii May 2011

Dig, Spencer Neale Iii

Theses and Dissertations

DIG Spencer Kellogg Neale III MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2011 BA, The College of Santa Fe, 2009 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Commonwealth University, 2011 Major Director: Bob Paris Associate Professor, Department of Kinetic Imaging This paper is an outline to various creative pursuits in the Graduate school of arts at Virginia Commonwealth University in leading to my MFA Thesis Exhibition. I have been focused on the works of artists exploring audio/visual textures and overall conceptuality behind a Lo Fidelity sensibility. In my …


Every Night At 8pm, Jennifer Lauren Smith May 2011

Every Night At 8pm, Jennifer Lauren Smith

Theses and Dissertations

An experiential thesis, this document begins at dawn, travels through storms and calm air and ends at night in Argentina. It details the circumstances and influences leading to my thesis exhibition at the Anderson Gallery, including an artist’s statement told through a creative reading of Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” and the excitement I found in an out-of-print text on scuba diving.


A Subversive Socialist Craftsperson In The Post-Post Modern World (The Conspiratorial Ranting Of Kristoff Kamrath), Kristoffer Kamrath May 2011

A Subversive Socialist Craftsperson In The Post-Post Modern World (The Conspiratorial Ranting Of Kristoff Kamrath), Kristoffer Kamrath

Theses and Dissertations

My research in this thesis delves into the corruption of American culture and my personal experience with the academic institution of art school. I delineate my symbolic representation of a social agenda through images and objects that reference the absurdity of institutionalized art and the decay of socialist idealism in the realm of crafts and contemporary culture at large.


Outside Things, Jacob Sorenson May 2011

Outside Things, Jacob Sorenson

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis is a description of the issues encountered during the process of research and construction of the objects leading to, and consisting of, the work shown in Outside Things. The work is my attempt to gain personal insight into the complicated relationship between nature and culture. Through abstract furniture objects, floral patterns, and robots I explore the relationship between actual landscape and the constructed man-made bio-mimicry that convolutes the definition of Nature.


Craft Cyborg, Laina Seay May 2011

Craft Cyborg, Laina Seay

Theses and Dissertations

By merging the ancient associations that clay has with the human form and prosthetic science I question the relevancy and role of the human body in the future. As prosthetics heighten the awareness of the body through absence these additive limbs further this relevancy by presence. With greater advances in genetic engineering and plastic surgery biology will no longer dominate and these ridged clay extensions could become flesh.


Feet Touching The Floor, Ashley Lyon May 2011

Feet Touching The Floor, Ashley Lyon

Theses and Dissertations

Realism, the uncanny, the figure, empathy, humanism, sculpture, feet, architecture, photography, oscillation, tin, installation, material, form, Herzog, projection, tactility, subject, haptics, sensibility, wax, portraits, space, embodied perception, rendering, duplication, thing, object, fragment, body, gaze, clay, god, man.


The Resemblance Of Condensation, An Unstable Love Affair With The Past And Present, Courtney Dodd Apr 2011

The Resemblance Of Condensation, An Unstable Love Affair With The Past And Present, Courtney Dodd

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis, Condensation, is centered on seeing and the limits of our perceptions. I’m interested in the psychological and emotional effects of visual phenomena and am exploring this area through glass’s ability to reflect and obscure. I’m also experimenting with photography because it’s simply documentation of reflection. The solidity of reflection whether on glass, photography, or water is something that I’m questioning. The viewer assumes its physicality, but what we accept as conclusive is at times a construct. The palpability of reflection then disintegrates into the residue of sight. I’ve been contemplating our eyes perceptual limits and what our mind …


Resolution, Jason Robinson Apr 2011

Resolution, Jason Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is an exploration of the concepts and motivations behind the video installation and performance that made up my MFA Thesis Exhibition. My primary interest as a filmmaker is in the “invisible art” of editing. In my practice I employ iconic imagery such as old home movies and classic Hollywood films, as my source material. This “found footage” is deconstructed, drastically altered, and reassembled into a new movie that tells my story while still maintaining the memory of the original images. My process and philosophy concerning the salvage and repurposing of video is analyzed and discussed. I also examine …


Embody - Encode, Mary Catherine Brooks Apr 2011

Embody - Encode, Mary Catherine Brooks

Theses and Dissertations

According to Walter Murch, sound designer, “The clearest example of encoded sound is speech. The clearest example of embodied sound is music.” In image, object and performance I have been exploring the embodiment of the encoded through the graphic representation of symbols (illustrate), the manifestation of symbols through material construction (embody), the activation of symbolized meaning though performance (enact), and the dematerialization of form and democratic dispersal of information through shared experience (engage). This methodological approach aims to transform metaphysics into physical being as a mode for researching energetics and abstract communication by bringing theory into practice where it can …


Mapping The Distant, Llorens Ana Esteve Apr 2011

Mapping The Distant, Llorens Ana Esteve

Theses and Dissertations

This Thesis presents several approaches through art making to deal with light and space and other things, and the relations that their interaction may generate


Based On A True Story, Mary Elkins Apr 2011

Based On A True Story, Mary Elkins

Theses and Dissertations

Trying to remember is a form of forgetting. Memory fades, changes meaning, and disappears over time. While trying to find other ways to preserve stories about my family, it occurred to me that I could recreate what I remember in clay. I am creating collections of physical mementos of the memories that fill my head, focusing mainly on my childhood. Remembering is in itself an act of forgetting, and thus this is my memory preservation kit. I am recording memories of my family for posterity in clay before I have a chance to forget.


On Things And Margins, Will Machin Apr 2011

On Things And Margins, Will Machin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an exploration into an alternate ground for discourse. It is an exploration of the edges of the possibilities of words, the centers of margins, and the question of the lives of objects in this time of abundant cast-offs. The truths and limits of an emerging globalized multi-polarity of culture, are put in play. The secret lives of things are brought into the same room as words. The potential for radical landscape is considered.


The Anxious Fields Of Play, Luther Kroman Apr 2011

The Anxious Fields Of Play, Luther Kroman

Theses and Dissertations

I see myself as a maker. Most of what I do is make paintings, but to define myself as a painter puts other projects at a critical disadvantage, labeling them as “side projects.” Robert Morris once said that although visually his work may vary a great deal, he felt the ideas flowed throughout the work. I like this idea. The role of the studio and the idea of play as both diligent investigation and a way of playing a game with the viewer is part of what I will discuss. In addition, I use game spaces as a surrogate to …


Rewrite, Jamie Lawyer Apr 2011

Rewrite, Jamie Lawyer

Theses and Dissertations

“Rewrite” is a photographic project that utilizes the domesstic space as a stage for emotional projection of a traumatic memory. The work considers the relationship that exists between an individual and the rooms and objects within a home space in an attempt at understanding an individual’s mental state. “Rewrite” explores the ways in which we exist through our home and how a juxtaposition of objects and materials can create meaning. The photographs are a visual interpretation of the emotions surrounding sexual abuse/assault/rape as they have related to my own personal history and conversations I have had with women close to …