Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Humanimal, April Vandegrift

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is part of a project that includes a physical body of work in which I investigate ideas about cultural narratives and hierarchies of power. I discuss how animal imagery in the stories that we tell at multiple levels in our culture has been used to communicate societal norms and rules. Thus, the paintings explore the notion of power in contemporary culture. The language of 18^th and 19^th century portrait painting is employed to draw a comparison between depictions of people in power and animal stereotypes. Childhood games are utilized as a way to demonstrate how social …

Racial Epithet Vignettes, Luz Maria Camarena Test

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In this paper and the accompanying exhibition I examine the overlap of racism and immigration. This work explores the silent violence of oppression that results from dominant culture attitudes and policies about immigration. It also considers how these attitudes affect the formation of identity, including my own.

For the development of this work, I had to move away from the idea of creating just a project inside my studio to an active participation with the community in search of answers to my internal questions. The work presented is the result of a long process of research within the Mexican community …

Awful/Awful: An Archive Of Light Embarrassments, Teysha Vinson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The difficulty of representing intangible religious ideas is at the core of Awful/Awful: An Archive of Light Embarrassments. Through an interest in how light is discussed in the Bible as a symbol for God and his fellowship, I make imagery that both repulses me and intrigues me but never do I get to the point where I feel the work encapsulates any answers. Instead, the photographs are questions, archived, unable to represent this light of God on their own without being trite or obtuse. The arranged work on the walls consists of these photographs plus a few ephemera from my …