Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Re-Enchanting The Spectacle, Shayna Cohn

Graduate School of Art Theses

“Re-Enchanting the Spectacle” explores guiding notions and central themes within the art practice of Shayna Cohn. Cohn’s installation spaces and sculptures within them, evoke a type of fabricated aura and melodramatic attitude of entertainment sites. By isolating the affect outside of the original environment, Cohn references the perceptual duality of entertainment sites within this “post-sacred” era. Entertainment venues become sites of potential transcendence, yet are also inextricably tied to their automated mechanization. Drawing on the Peter Brooks’ analysis of the historical and poetic relationship between melodrama and the sacred, Cohn argues that contemporary notions of melodrama can be found within …

Seth Czaplewski Thesis, Seth P. Czaplewski

Graduate School of Art Theses

My work investigates the history of production and how human interactions have been affected by shifts in production over the course of the past two hundred years in the United States: the pre-industrial, Industrial Revolution, and the post-industrial age. The changes that occurred in society as a result of how production shifted from era to era informs my artistic practice and productions, which address areas neglected in the wake of progress. At the onset of each era, the technological advances initially appeared to be beneficial to society and people shifted from being locally oriented to being globally oriented.

My historical …

A Composed Space, Adam S. Hogan

Graduate School of Art Theses

My practice is invested in expanding our conscious scope—revealing phenomena and observations, and presenting the information to the viewer through auxiliary channels. Using the language of minimalism, cinema, and abstraction I create technologically sophisticated systems to produce spaces of contemplation (a meditative space challenging the ephemeral relationships between our sensorial perceptions, space, and time).

Material, space, and technology become instruments for composition manifesting as silent experimental cinema (created and controlled sonically). My work seeks to illuminate our conscious scope through the succession of frames.

In Pursuit Of Distant Horizons, Whitney Polich

Graduate School of Art Theses

Our lasting human desire to rationalize the phenomena of nature manifests as ceaseless attempts to fix fluid landscapes within the rigid boundaries of an image. Each landscape with its own physical language, rooted in the temporal and subjective particularities of sense—taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight—requires a lived immersion to be read and as such, eludes static interpretation or expression. The physical horizon provides both a physical and metaphorical reminder of the limits we constantly find ourselves confronted with—those limits of perception, language, and knowledge—as we seek to expresses the immediate experience and profound vastness of a world far exceeding …

The Thing You Are Looking For, Jessie Shinn

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis document explores the influences and content of visual artist Jessie Shinn’s work, in particular the photography she has done as part of her Master of Fine Arts degree program at Washington University in St. Louis. Ideas discussed include phenomenology, phenomenophilia, affect, defamiliarization, the everyday, space, emptiness and boredom. Important artists and movements mentioned are Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner and Romanticism; Alfred Stieglitz and Modernism; and contemporary artists Hiroshi Sugimoto, Uta Barth and Wolfgang Tillmans. Writers and philosophers Samuel Coleridge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rei Terada, Kathleen Stewart, David Markson, David Foster Wallace, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze are …

Desire And Fantasy: The Conditions Of Reality Between The Self And The Other, Raleigh M. Gardiner

Graduate School of Art Theses

The human condition is constituted by the fluctuating operations of desire and fantasy, which emerge in response to one's fundamental differentiation between 'Self' and 'Other.' As infants, we exist in an expansive realm of sensational “sameness” with the world around us; but as we develop, we quickly learn to differentiate between our internal and external worlds, and are forced to divide and organize our once primordial experience of unity on the basis of isolated exclusion of difference. As we slip into the structures of our social and cultural reality, we absorb language, and are taught to construct our own identities …

Fuck Yeah, Thesis!, Marianne R. Laury

Graduate School of Art Theses

Fandom is a feature of American popular culture that takes elements from specific genres, and reworks them into an individual to formulate an identity. Clothing, music style, meeting places, and even drink choices can be the defining factors for determining which particular group one might associate with. Focusing on groups within fandom culture, I work to disprove the phrase “you can’t judge a book by its cover” by discussing embedded stereotypes common to dedicated fans. As I am not elevating or undermining these groups, I describe their attributes in a non-discriminatory way, and relate them to my own work.

I …

Painting And Stuff, Lol, Sopearb Touch

Graduate School of Art Theses

Our own human experience is a distinct realm which can never be precisely duplicated in another lifetime. It frames our whole view of existence and, as artists, affects our art making process. The theory of the Tabula Rasa functions as the inspiration of my work and this writing examines my personal view of growing up in the internet age and America, and how my view of life, as well as artistic practice, is shaped by a consumerist culture that has gone global. Additionally, as a figurative painter, I create a context with other artists who create work about their own …