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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Emotional Landscapes, Jin Young Jeong Jan 2023

Emotional Landscapes, Jin Young Jeong

Theses and Dissertations

“Emotional Landscape” delivers a sense of gravity, openness, and breathing space through oil paintings on linen of abstracted bodily forms. The imagery in the works generates an atmosphere where one can feel rooted and anxiety-free. The paintings invite a close read of the complexities of compounded affects.


A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera May 2022

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.


Head, Shoulders, Knees, And Toes, Pol Morton May 2022

Head, Shoulders, Knees, And Toes, Pol Morton

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores ideas of transness, chronic illness, and injury. Through assemblage and repetition, my larger-than-life paintings address the dissociation and fragility of a body that is unmapped by society. These autobiographical works attempt to locate the self when it is trapped, whether in a bed, in the home, or within the body itself.


Water Bearer, Whitney Harris Jan 2022

Water Bearer, Whitney Harris

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores fantasy and mythological archetypes. The exhibition features works on paper depicting mermaids, and a fountain featuring two figures submerged in water, one spitting into the other's mouth. I use black ink and glazes to create variegated surfaces. In these works, I reimagine ideas about power and intimacy.


Play Among The Shadows, Xiong Wei Jan 2022

Play Among The Shadows, Xiong Wei

Theses and Dissertations

This article elaborates Xiong Wei's inspiration and experience from different cultural, political, social systems and art environment as a Chinese artist living in the United States, and the logic and methodology of how he went from a social realist sculptor to a contemporary artist.


Water Gets Lost In The Sea, Sun Gets Lost In The Desert, Rocio Paz Guerrero May 2021

Water Gets Lost In The Sea, Sun Gets Lost In The Desert, Rocio Paz Guerrero

Theses and Dissertations

The absence of happiness, the absence of nature, the absence of justice, the absence of absence, which is presence. My desire is to make these voids visible and sensible by connecting to and with others, from our intimate and collective life experiences, with empathy, and by sharing. Through a hybrid of sculpture, installation, and performance, I move within this tense in-between space, asking myself about that void, if it is possible for it to be filled, or if it is perhaps too big, or if it is perhaps too late.


Collective Subjectivity And Utopian Desire, Stewart A. Stout May 2019

Collective Subjectivity And Utopian Desire, Stewart A. Stout

Theses and Dissertations

This project explores the conceptualization of the body as a collective. Displacing the individual subject position as the primary avenue through which we might see ourselves, the collective is offered as an alternative capable of opening up new avenues for a desire that is utopian, queer and communist.


Emotional Reverberations, Kirsten Heteji Mar 2019

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 Mar 2019

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.


My Sight's Shadow, Lili Jamail Feb 2019

My Sight's Shadow, Lili Jamail

Theses and Dissertations

The story in the photographs I am showing is not about a person, but about the span of experience and emotion presented through time. I am looking into things that stand alone, and things that stand together — the idea of sharing space and experience with something or someone or being by yourself. One thing that draws me to photography as a medium is the way that photographs are able to tell a story or explain something without words. Photographs offer a unique perspective which, by their nature, alters reality. There is always some amount of truth that lies in …


Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres Feb 2019

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

Theses and Dissertations

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.


With Monsters, Leonard J. Reibstein May 2018

With Monsters, Leonard J. Reibstein

Theses and Dissertations

These are the things I have learned about how I deal with pain. This paper includes a genealogy of immanent painting from the Renaissance to the 21st century. Through the lens of my biography I explore my relationship to toxic masculinity through expressionist distortion.


Converging Objects Of The Universe, Everett Hoffman Jan 2018

Converging Objects Of The Universe, Everett Hoffman

Theses and Dissertations

Reconfigured found objects shape scenes of everyday life, questioning the structural histories that go into defining an identity. Engaging in a multidisciplinary approach of making, my work reimagines the function of ornamentation and its relationship to the body. I approach new materials and found objects with the eye of a jeweler, highlighting and exploiting the subtle, and often invisible, links between material histories and their connection to identity. Material debris patinated with age like skillets, baseballs, and furniture are used to penetrate normative structures around identity, gender, and sexual desire. Using adornment as a support in my installations I propose …


Between, Kendal Nisson Bryan May 2016

Between, Kendal Nisson Bryan

Theses and Dissertations

I feel uncertain about my place in the world and it is necessary for me to discover how I am perceived by myself and by the world by exploring interior spaces. Interior spaces are both spaces of comfort, security, and permanence as well as vulnerability, uncertainty, and transcendence. My childhood home is an important drive in my work. It has caused me to think more about space and how the places we inhabit become more than just places we live in. They are places that hide our secrets, make their mark on us, and continue to live on with us …


Threshold, Marisa Finos May 2014

Threshold, Marisa Finos

Theses and Dissertations

Are the threshold experiences encountered between waking and sleeping similar to the liminal space between life and death? The sights, sounds, and bodily sensations experienced in the unconscious void blur the lines between the unknown and our conscious existence. Using the figure, I portray how the body might exist in these transitional moments. Through my investigations into sleep paralysis, dream states, and notions of an afterlife and the soul, I explore how we perceive the self in these altered states of consciousness.


Hissār, Sohail Abdullah May 2013

Hissār, Sohail Abdullah

Theses and Dissertations

Hissaar is a noun and a verb, it is the periphery and the extremities, and the walls and the fortress. And it is to encircle, to wrap and to contain. This paper is an inexhaustive account of thoughts, experiences and lessons learned, of varying forms that influence my aesthetic sensibilities, my art-value system, and my art- ethical concerns. They provide for my art the impetus for its perpetual (and perhaps circular) journey. It is about finding connections between the fraying ends of free floating ideas. The following fragments explores how words make ideas, ideas make images, images make memory; memory …


Whiff Of Black Ice, Alina Tenser May 2012

Whiff Of Black Ice, Alina Tenser

Theses and Dissertations

This document is a concentration of thoughts, peripheral and direct, that occurred around the making of my thesis exhibition at the Anderson Gallery, Whiff Of Black Ice. While these thoughts meekly occupy space on the following pages, I assure the reader that they are quite physical, even extending three-dimensionality to them. My awareness of their form and their containment within the inner space of the mind, which also extends to the body, becomes central to understanding their meaning and, finally, knowing them.


Reflections Of Self, Melissa Athey May 2012

Reflections Of Self, Melissa Athey

Theses and Dissertations

I vacillate between all extremes, beauty vs. ugly, internal vs. external, micro vs. macro. It is these disparate notions that inspire what I make. We cannot ever see ourselves objectively, but does that mean we shouldn’t try? This thesis is my attempt to dissect what I created in my 2 years at Virginia Commonwealth University, my exploration of the illness within and the psychological nature of how we go about hiding our insecurities.