Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Irene Cox, Lindsey Arturo

Theses and Dissertations

This document explores the question of “Who is Irene Cox?” as a jumping off point for creating an artwork which navigates online information landscapes and their logics circa 2023. By using thirteen unique but similar found paintings of the same floral still life by an artist named “Irene Cox” I create a visually meandering, absurd, haunting, and comical pathway for thinking through who exactly is Irene Cox via the internet. How such a question is even asked becomes the art in which a myriad of visual techniques are used to explore the nature of the question. Included in this paper …

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, …

Hamburger Helper Recipes, John Alex Goss

Theses and Dissertations

Hamburger Helper Recipes is a collection of essays and public addresses that aim to recuperate castoff and misfit material surrounding industries and tools which produce science-fiction fantasies, specifically videogames and television shows. The following essays confront the normative violence of capitalism, whiteness, and hetero-patriarchy that socially and technologically haunt these imaginary worlds and build hegemonic idealogy into their audiences. This collection takes industrial materials and software from their intended commercial purposes of production and “success” into places of abjection and quiet breakdown. The author’s own proximity to masculine and often toxic "work cultures'' within industrial spaces of coding and manufacturing …

Humans Aren't Boxes, Art Isn't Finite, Brianne Alta Humphreys

Theses and Dissertations

I am bored. All around me are systems that perpetuate repetitive, reductive, and mundane modes of living. In an attempt to counter a culture obsessed with singular ways of existence and bite-sized perfection, I utilize moving mediums of video and performance to dive head first into a vast array of sloppy sincerity. The crisp, white-washed, analytical, and restrictive is loudly replaced with the empirical, haphazard, and instinctual. My intention is to create and encourage raw, performative-based work that is as multifaceted as unbridled life itself. This alive and physical practice hosts a conglomeration of sweat, memories, heartbreaks, hymn singing, line …

Graphic Content Warning; Personal And Political Traumas, Emily K. Wardell

Theses and Dissertations

The written portion of this thesis work is meant to address and further investigate the visual work created using mediums of print and found video. This artistic research has been interested in examining varying associations with truth, recollection, and evidence. This includes the recollection of public histories and news-media narratives as well as my own history and trauma. Through this work my aim was to create a deconstruction and revolt against how associations are formed, and how to understand imagery as information. This thesis first discusses my relationship to appropriated imagery, then connects and examines it through the addition of …

She Inches Glass To Break: Conversations Between Friends, Liang Xia Luscombe

Theses and Dissertations

She inches glass to break: conversations between friends is a project that aims to manifest, through research and practice, my own feminist language within the videos I have produced in my final year of my Masters of Fine Arts. My feminist language is Australian and intersectional, invested in combating sexism, racism and in deepening language and representation around sexuality in relation to Asian women. This project discusses my video She inches glass to break (2018) in length, which created intersectional feminist dialogue in response to feminist filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger’s film Ticket of No Return (1979) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). …

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 …

A Window The Color Of Her Sunburn, Joana Stillwell

Theses and Dissertations

I use video and material fragments to investigate the collapse of virtual and physical spaces as memories, lived environments, and digital interfaces become overlaid and interchangeable. I am interested in the capacity for technology to propose alternative strategies in which to engage with the world as we continue to extend ourselves in new and enduring methods. Seemingly unremarkable fragments offer new potentials in questioning meaning, worth, and care within spaces of downtime, boredom, and play.

This document accompanies my thesis exhibition a window the color of her sunburn. It provides background information on selected fragments and residues from my own …

Dispersal: A Multidisciplinary Investigation Of Plant Life, Alexandra E. Arzt

Theses and Dissertations

Using plants as a basis for exploring the interstices between the human and nonhuman, this thesis investigates ideas of awareness, intelligence, deep time, animism, and the fluctuating human perception of the agency of Nature. It outlines environmental art practices since the 1950s involving vegetal life. In addition, the paper provides a critical analysis of plant perception of Jakob von Uexküll’s work and theories of vital materialism and “critical plant studies” while noting recent studies in plant neurobiology. In my work, plants become active participants via their movement, seeding, and smell. This study takes the form of imitation, purposeful symbiosis, anthropomorphism, …

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.

Locus, Claire Krueger

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores my practice as it has progressed into video and video installation. I detail my use of cinematic tropes and mechanisms as they function within a spatial installation. I discuss the relationship of my work to other artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and Kevin Cooley who also deal with themes of landscape, spatial displacement, and video viewing. My work has evolved to video installation from a need to experience the traditionally flat viewing plane of photography in a more experiential way. The Locus installation is multi sensory, in that it addresses smell, …

Warm Compression – Damp Gestures, Melanie Mclain

Theses and Dissertations

Thoughts on vulnerability, emotions, social interaction, self-awareness, skin, touching, bodily functions, and the combination of all these ideas into a confined space filled with heat and humidity just enough to leave you feeling damp and perhaps a bit sore.

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.

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 …

Finding Myself Here, Cari Freno

Theses and Dissertations

Both the natural and civilized worlds establish a context within which I may understand my own existence. My search for “self” and the emotive qualities of life within these contexts provides the impetus for my work. I create juxtapositions: from found art assemblages to, more recently, intimate experiences in public park environments. Within these curated experiences I challenge myself to open up to unknown experiences derived from my relationship to the landscape and the life forms found within. My videos are a kind of self-surveillance fostering absurdly promiscuous behavior when I am alone, in front of a camera. These conjured …