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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Still Life Happens, Mary Ann Crabtree
Still Life Happens, Mary Ann Crabtree
Theses and Dissertations
After dedicating over two years to pursuing an MFA degree focused on ceramics and sculpture, I find myself transported back to a familiar setting from my past: a tableau reminiscent of what remained in the dining space after four young children finished a meal and exited the room. Revisiting the scene recalls happy times despite the disorder. What helped maintain my sanity during the relentless repetition of the every-day-long task was the realization that every day, innocents are learning to become aware of the world around them. For my thesis exhibition, I created a tableau as a loud reminder of …
As If It Were One Day, Megan Rowley Stern
As If It Were One Day, Megan Rowley Stern
Theses and Dissertations
As If It Were One Day is a multimedia art installation that chronicles patterns of light, movement, and sound, channeling the fluidity of time within the newborn phase of familial living. After giving birth to my daughter, I spent the next seven weeks observing these elements and recording them via video. The resulting art installation acknowledges my efforts to navigate my current life as an artist and a mother, my past battle with postpartum depression, and my consequent gravitation toward light.
Tied Together, Eiko Nishida
Tied Together, Eiko Nishida
Theses and Dissertations
The paper is about a site-specific installation that questions a viewer’s norms and perspectives, through the use of multilingual newspapers as a sculptural material.
Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana
Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana
Theses and Dissertations
Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.
Future Trash, Xinan Ran
Future Trash, Xinan Ran
Theses and Dissertations
Xinan Ran explores the politically different, yet similar cultural habits that China and the US share under the influence of late-stage capitalism. Through her handmade, speculative products inspired by novelty gadgets, or “Unitaskers,” she examines the heightened prevalence of the contemporary wellness market. The project “Future Trash” encompasses soft sculptures, printed materials, performance, and installation.
Every Force Evolves A Form, Nicholas Fusaro
Every Force Evolves A Form, Nicholas Fusaro
Theses and Dissertations
Every Force Evolves A Form is a process-orientated, sculptural body of work that incorporates Shaker-inspired design as an all-encompassing system of display. Historical and contemporary methods of production are merged with the personal, the American past, and folklore, emphasizing scale, movement, play, and iteration.
Between The Garden And The Gardener, Sara Lynne Lindsay
Between The Garden And The Gardener, Sara Lynne Lindsay
Theses and Dissertations
My work uses plant material and soil as a record of personal, cultural, and ecological history. History is not only held in the buildings and monuments, but in the soil itself. I gather this soil and foliage from both cultivated and uncultivated locations for my artwork. Using traditional domestic techniques of drying and canning, I preserve the materials that I have gathered. These will then be sewn together, cooked, and encrusted into objects. Despite my labor of preserving, these organic art supplies are transient. When made into works of art, they can be viewed in their vulnerable state, fighting against …
The Materials Of Traditions, Victoria Jensen
The Materials Of Traditions, Victoria Jensen
Theses and Dissertations
The homes we grow up in have a great impact on the homes we create as adults. Many of the traditions I saw in my childhood home were expressions of love within our family. These everyday traditions helped not only to build bonds within my nuclear family, but also with the chosen family I have formed as an adult. Repeating these traditions, or at least my best memory of them, has helped me in building my own home now. The ways I interact with my friends often reflects those same traditions I learned from home. I brought a few of …
Until Its Calmness Can Claim You, Gabrielle Mchugh
Until Its Calmness Can Claim You, Gabrielle Mchugh
Theses and Dissertations
This is an invitation to pause //
This is an externalization of my inner landscape, a highlight of what I value in my everyday and what comprises my lexicon of a sacred space. The following is a journey of nets, quiet, the sacred, space, and the in-between; where I share research and questions that are the foundation for my thesis work, Until Its calmness can claim you.
// This is an invitation to find moments of quiet in the noise
Interview, Elizabeth Naiden
Interview, Elizabeth Naiden
Theses and Dissertations
An exploration of work by Liz Naiden in the form of a conversation discussing light and dark, attention and proprioception, and design and architectural theories of space in installation works. Addresses the role of voice, speech, and reading and speaking aloud, performing for oneself, and performing for others.
Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry
Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry
Theses and Dissertations
Situating Topher Lineberry's work, this paper offers a primer on institutional critique, preliminary developments of "kinstitutional critique," and the cultivation of family-derived art history through the work of the artist's grandmother, Helen Lineberry. Feeding into a working understanding of family-and-kin-as-institution, the paper ultimately locates Topher Lineberry's work between relations to place, historical archives, and speculative proposals.
Beauty And Decay, Chiung-Ling Jyan Siebert
Beauty And Decay, Chiung-Ling Jyan Siebert
Theses and Dissertations
The intention of the project is to create an environment where the viewer can explore and form a personal narrative in the process of organic interaction with the work. At first glance, the scale of the installation will attract the viewer to the exhibition, however, upon close investigation he will discover there is deterioration, decay, and mutation. The ideas of time, beauty, decay, mortality, and interdependence will be discussed in this paper. The visitors are invited to interact with the work. I hope through spontaneous interaction the arrangements from the viewer will result in evolution of the work. The balance …
Be Coming - Transcendence Born From The Concrete, Kathryn Alter
Be Coming - Transcendence Born From The Concrete, Kathryn Alter
Theses and Dissertations
My interactive virtual world, be coming, is a response to the question, “what happens when art that is made to be performed cannot be shared in a live performance?” In answering this question, I also use as theoretical tools certain works of Benjamin, Deleuze, Guattari and Peter Zumthor.
Cloaca Palace, Connor Marie Stankard
Cloaca Palace, Connor Marie Stankard
Theses and Dissertations
In this thesis, I trace the compulsive fear of holes, known as trypophobia, from an uncontrollable obsession to a pleasurable preoccupation. The body’s physical porousness makes us receptive to our surroundings, allowing external matter in and destabilizing the boundaries of self and other. Matter invades us, encoding itself into our DNA and transforming humans into chimeric creatures.
Through paintings and multi-media installations, I encourage viewers to reflect on their own bodies as a series of holes, vulnerable receptors to the world. I use the figure of a woman to personify a human hole which has been infected by the outside, …
Pedestrian, Marissa Albrecht
Pedestrian, Marissa Albrecht
Theses and Dissertations
My feet are my transportation while living in the college town of Provo, Utah. When walking, I am drawn to designs found at construction sites and office workplaces, methods of labor that are executed sequentially. These designs lead me to think about laborious jobs that I have had and time performing mundane, repetitive tasks. Walking, photographing, gathering, and transporting used material to a workspace are the preliminary actions for my art practice. Creation emerges by relating material from varying environments through their inherent patterns, sizes, and shapes. I organize elements of the everyday in a new harmonious context with each …
Beyond The Threshold, Kathleen Granados
Beyond The Threshold, Kathleen Granados
Theses and Dissertations
Crossing through spaces of memory, generational dialogues, and the domestic psyche, Beyond the Threshold investigates the precarious nature of home. Spanning installation, sculpture, and sound, these explorations underscore patterns and materializations of the ever-present past.
The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic
The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic
Theses and Dissertations
I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.
North American Data, Joseph A. Burwell
North American Data, Joseph A. Burwell
Theses and Dissertations
North American Data fractures and reconfigures pre-existing narratives into new, unauthorized forms of storytelling. Core samples extracted from various narrative sources are reassigned new roles according to their proximity to each other. This paper functions as an introduction to the essential actors and their dramatic inclinations within fluctuating scenarios.
Generative Movements, Cabbage Juice, & Habitats Of Selfhood, Jason Michael Rondinelli
Generative Movements, Cabbage Juice, & Habitats Of Selfhood, Jason Michael Rondinelli
Theses and Dissertations
The content of this essay is a reflection on my practice as an artist. A summary of text includes an analysis of my attraction to certain materials such as drywall, cabbage juice and coconut oil, all materials are the extensions of my memory, intention and pleasure. From warm memories of bathhouses and the flesh of others to managing illness at home, my artwork distills a lived experience into material reality. These materials take the shape of sculptural networks that serve as biographical biomes. The architectural and organic components of the work are sourced from my own experience and the surreal …
I Thought The Earth Remembered Me, Hannah Bates
I Thought The Earth Remembered Me, Hannah Bates
Theses and Dissertations
The forest is teeming with activity: fungi transform dead logs into nutrients, roots entangle themselves with the earth, and strong winds break resilient boughs. Like the forest, the human body functions according to a complex system of agents - from the micro bacteria in the gut to the pores of the skin. The built world has often been rendered in opposition to these processes of nature. As a vessel through which the world is experienced, the body is an intermediary between raw matter and fabricated things. The planet is suffused with human life, and there is a critical tension between …
...An Already Dreamed State Already Dreaming State Already…, Francheska Alcantara
...An Already Dreamed State Already Dreaming State Already…, Francheska Alcantara
Theses and Dissertations
A compendium of horizontality through the means of theory, facts, fictions, questions and other ruminations on the Caribbean and the diasporic experience.
Murmur/Murmuro, Paola M. Di Tolla
Murmur/Murmuro, Paola M. Di Tolla
Theses and Dissertations
By using repetition or misplacing intonations and accents, etc. one can imitate the slipperiness of spoken language. However, it is the accidental slippage that I find most revealing and exciting because it allows for two conversations to exist in one. Once spoken language is transcribed as text, it is put through another filter and the risk of [accidental] slippage increases by a different measure. Fingers don’t keep up or autocorrect insists on taking matters into its own hands.
Profanation, Tsahi Zac H. Hacmon
Profanation, Tsahi Zac H. Hacmon
Theses and Dissertations
This paper attempts to provoke an Israeli American dialogue that comes through profanity of conventional architecture. I am creating this dialogue by displaying two main subjects in proximity to each other: border architecture from Israel and institutional architecture or non-places in New York.
A Familiar House, William Lenard
A Familiar House, William Lenard
Theses and Dissertations
The landscapes of my home in Connecticut are important to me. When I was young, I went to the woods for seclusion and comfort. While I wandered through the woods, I discovered a passion for storytelling. Now that I no longer live in New England, I miss the familiar landscapes of home. As a way to portray my sentiment, I write poetic narratives and create objects to illustrate natural landscapes.
I combine my interests of classic Americana art and literature with brutalist architecture and modern furniture to create immersive installations. I work with concrete and hardwood to materially bridge the …
The Building Breathes Together, Mckeever Donovan
The Building Breathes Together, Mckeever Donovan
Theses and Dissertations
The Building Breathes Together presents a realm of speculative, industrial habitation and alchemical production. In my instillation, I look to raise questions surrounding romantic notions of production and utility. The work introduces a surreal and haunted space of decomposition and regeneration.
The Break, Ian Gerson
The Break, Ian Gerson
Theses and Dissertations
The Break is a personal investigation into problems and possibilities of representing my specific transgender identity.
Trans as a tactic to speak about a state of forever becoming, forever in between, outside of and in opposition to dominant social norms of being.
Trans as a model for a different way of viewing and being in the world.
Can we form a different kind of horizontal shared power though a collective refusal to play into existing structures from which we have been excluded? What are the potentials for modeling other ways of being, other ways of (dis)engaging, other ways to be …
Converging Objects Of The Universe, Everett Hoffman
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 …
Lessons, Kathryn K. Murphy
Lessons, Kathryn K. Murphy
Theses and Dissertations
I am learning through these lessons.
The following document includes my convoluted musings about my work, making process, and body leading up to my thesis exhibition, Avoidance Kitchen. My struggle with my reflected image comes from my struggle with my self-perceived physical image.
What does it mean for a piece to disappear, only to find the reflection of someone else's work or body in its place? Is my craft rendered obsolete if all you want to do is take a funny selfie? Is my work unacknowledged if all you see is the sculpture across the room, in reverse? What happens …
A Chair In The Woods, Victoria Dolloff
A Chair In The Woods, Victoria Dolloff
Theses and Dissertations
Victoria Dolloff's MFA Thesis considers traces of play and perception in the development of her artwork, exploring the idea of reorientation through subtleties of the absurd. Her installation Untitled (Landscape) questions object as place and place as memory utilizing fragmentation as reconstruction.
Absence Is Presence With Distance, James Bayard
Absence Is Presence With Distance, James Bayard
Theses and Dissertations
Prompting obvious considerations for freedom and nationalism, language and race, time, and decay, the work asks not only what it means to be an American today, but also, more broadly, what it means to be human—to breathe and act, to live and die.