Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Umbrella And Jellyfish, Yanran Bi

Masters Theses

Rainy season arrives as soon as the summer begins in Shanghai. For some reason, I rarely remember to bring an umbrella with me. I have a lot of umbrellas, most of them are transparent ones bought at subway stations. When it suddenly starts pouring rain, umbrella vendors in Shanghai gather at each crowded exit of the subway sta- tions to sell umbrellas to people like me. The cheapest umbrellas they have are always the transparent ones. The whole city is turned upside down by the rain with its reflections on every street. Then a transparent umbrella opens up, then another, …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

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.

..., Claire Alfonso

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Words are fickle, easily misunderstood, and often put us at a loss... but we all have so much we feel we need to express. This begs the question: Is there any safe way of communication? Can anything ever really be communicated how you mean it? Will you ever see the reflection of what you feel, think, and dream outside of yourself? In response to this existential dilemma, I imagine an alternative language of images, sounds, color, feelings, and non-identification. My thesis is a meditation on the issues with standard language and the idea of alternative language. In my argument I …

Dissonant Forms: Landscape, Nature-Love, And Art, Taylor F. Benoit

Masters Theses

As artists continue the long and storied lineage of Landscape, are there aesthetic responsibilities that come with representing the forces that afford you the capacity to do so? As we delineate spaces into places, endless interconnectivity into knowable “systems”, and living matter into thing based taxonomies, who do these delineations serve and with what intentions do we proceed? My studio art practice explores what it means to give form to our Former—the Former being that from which we came, the here and now, our explicit ecological reality, the stuff of what we call nature. …

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.

To Let The Shape Announce The Filling, Sydney Shavers

Theses and Dissertations

A hybrid text with reflections on confections, materiality, language, reality, virtuality, gourmand, celebrity perfume, olfaction, authenticity, cultural contamination, synesthesia, proprioception, positioning, navigating the gap, slippage, constellations, exhaustion, ontology, form, failure, and mindfulness.

Salt At Dawn, Salt In My Veins, Cecilia Hankyeol Kim

Theses and Dissertations

A contemplation on expanded time, over generations along my maternal lineage;

on being on the borders, embodying homeland;

on inheritance and shared labor;

occupying a void that is dense;

looking towards dawn.

Kinesthetic Language: A Dialect Of Kinesics, Terrill Suzanne Corletto

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Human communication requires the disciplines regarding physical fitness, codified language, and the performing arts to overlap, and exist symbiotically. Within the realm of artistic performance, the three disciplines working together deliver a deliberate message in a way unique to performing artists. The general tendency to compartmentalize sports, communication, and the performing arts into their pigeonhole categories of Kinesiology, Linguistics, and Theatre Arts is impractical, particularly for performing artists simply because all of the disciplines are mutually dependent in the context of all kinesthetic communications.

The purpose of this paper is to define and discuss several concepts and the ways in …

Memory Bread, Nisiqi

Art + Design Masters Theses

Memory Bread, constituting a daily performance ritual and the post-action objects, seeks to address the generational decline of mother language use in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, a post-colonized province of China. I chose to eat sliced white bread in the performance and later casted concrete sculptures as the extension of the action for both substances’ capitalistic nature. Being an invasive material that took over the traditional architectural lifestyle, the use of concrete mirrors the pervasive cultural and ethnic assimilation in China. Meanwhile, the materiality of concrete being a mixture of various substances also metaphors the mixed culture that Chinese-Mongolians …

Singing The Landscape: A Meditation On Song, Sound And Community At The Fall Line Of The James River, Sara Bouchard

Theses and Dissertations

I work in the medium of song. A multidisciplinary artist and composer, I make work that is immersive, time-based and often participatory. I interact with landscape and the complexities of American history, bringing into focus local ecologies through the lens of song.

This document accompanies my thesis performance The Sound of a Stone, an immersive exploration of song, language, ecology and locational listening performed in a 4-channel surround format. In the semi-improvised composition, I sample live vocals, mandolin and found natural objects in a combination of roots music traditions and experimental techniques. Utilizing the software Ableton Live to process …

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.

Exploring The Relationship Between Text And Dance: Seeking Music In Spoken Word, Anastasia Ellis

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

I assert that dance exists as more than a worthwhile ,inventive ,and ever-advancing art form; it also thrives as a language. The language of dance cannot say everything on its own, for body language is limited to the interpretive. Yet, speech carries limitations as well. Spoken language houses the potential for dishonesty and fails to encompass all that we notably call thought, seeing as the human mind can think in pictures and invent concepts that present themselves without labels. The two languages therefore have the opportunity to complete each other-an opportunity that I, as a dancer and choreographer, fully believe …

Psychic Fax On Vibrate, Received On Phantom Limbo, Jake Borndal

Theses and Dissertations

I offer a cloud of observations about language and art. I will prioritize my questions about how language operates in art, the way it functions within my own studio practice, and locate aesthetic interstices throughout. There will be insights gleaned from the various orderers of order (Lacan, Saussure) and orderers of disorder (Derrida, Agamben), walks in terra-incognita, and even some poetry on my part. I will take this chance to orient myself among different structures and deconstructions that have piledup around language, aesthetics and art.

Familial Dialects, Amanda King

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Using the framework of scientific investigation, ‘Familial Dialects’ explores the languages – systems of signs and codification of those signs - of individual members of my family, and the metaphors that arise from their interaction with pieces of the natural world. Each of the pieces combine an inherent form and an organizing action as a means of representing an individual’s form of expression. These familial dialects are created and translated using the methodologies of a naturalist - collection, dissection, observation, and classification. The pieces draw meaning from the connotative associations built from familial connections as well as from broader cultural …

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 …

Color Journal, Meichi Lee

LSU Master's Theses

Color Journal consists of a collection of works, which depict landscapes and cityscapes with an underlining consciousness of the interrelationship between humans and their environment. Over the ages, the relationship changes through the history of human civilization. In the current age, nature seems to suffer a losing battle. Therefore, there is a personal nostalgic sentiment to emphasize the beauty of our natural environment and the importance of the balance of the relationship. The image of houses is chosen to represent human activities because of the inherent symbols embedded in houses. All the paintings in the collection rely heavily on memory …

White Sands, Laura Vitale

Theses and Dissertations

I’ve constructed a narrative thread that connects experiences, events, and artworks made during my time in graduate school. This narrative, which has the perspective of time, betrays the firsthand experience of wayfaring through the projects and places I describe. The narrative loosens as it approaches the present moment. Rather than to arrive at any conclusions, my goal for creating this narrative is to understand a tension between expectations: of systematic rationality and subjective knowledge, of play and display. I understand that my work productively fails to r-r-resolve contradictions about the way things are.

Charlotte Bronte's Novels: The Artistry Of Their Construction, Anne Wonders Passel

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Charlotte Bronte is a conscious artist, avare of the demand of the novel form. In her four novels she demonstrates her understanding of the principles of organic unity. Each novel is based on a different pattern, but each achieves unity and coherence through the author's conscious use of structure, language, and theme.

The Professor (written in 1846-1847, published posthumously in 1857), though highly structured, seems the least expertly handled of her novels. Overly romantic, it holds rigidly to a predetermined three-part division, a triple emphasis which the author carries to the extreme. Her conscious attention to structure, however, indicates that …