Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

Pan Shot!, Samuel Robert Gaston Mattax

Theses and Dissertations

Sam Mattax's practice is aimed at working through what he has lived and what he is living. They are self-involved diaristic building blocks of marking time and release. The layered drawings negotiate Sam's history and his day to day, distorting one another into a place of unrecognizable space and condensed energy. It is a process of attaining a loose understanding of his life and forgetting it all at once. Sam's work is survival.

Contact Sheet, Jiwoong Jang

Theses and Dissertations

Jiwoong’s thesis paper is a field guide to how he navigates his curiosity with photography, sound, sculpture, ceramic, and installation. Connecting fragments through narrative vignettes, he underscores how chance, walking, light, time, and uncertainty inform his art.

Emotional Landscapes, Jin Young Jeong

Theses and Dissertations

“Emotional Landscape” delivers a sense of gravity, openness, and breathing space through oil paintings on linen of abstracted bodily forms. The imagery in the works generates an atmosphere where one can feel rooted and anxiety-free. The paintings invite a close read of the complexities of compounded affects.

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

Living Space, Emily North

Art and Art History Honors Projects

The living room is a place where people can feel comfortable, interact with each other, and display some of their most prized possessions. This project uses five pieces of furniture to create a room; an armchair, chaise lounge, bookcase, coffee table, and lamp. These elements, combined with textiles, wall art, and knick knacks come together to make a warm and inviting space that I feel represents myself, and my love of nostalgia, heirlooms, and handmade items.

I Want To Go Home, Amber Boris

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

The significance of a home lies within the memories of the space. I Want to Go Home is a body of work that explores this idea through a collection of sculptures and drawings depicting my childhood home. This house holds meaning to me not only because it is where I grew up, but because it was also my mother’s childhood home. Six generations of our family have passed through the house, creating a long history of associated stories, memories, and emotions.

I have constructed scaled down sculptures of rooms for these memories to live in. The spaces are left empty, …

Do Androids Dream Of Improvisation?, Aidan J. Samp

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

The Mvohc Project, Brooke Day

All Theses

ABSTRACT

A Mvohc is a Morphic Vessel of Human Consciousness. The Mvohc Project traverses' theories of spatial identity in tandem with creative world-building as a method for examining the intricacies of the human condition and reimagining reality. My creations are designed to promote autonomy over the contemporary world's ever-evolving societal complexities to empower individuals, foster imagination and communication, and create space for positive change. This body of work incorporates fleshy biomorphic sculptures inspired by science fiction, deep-sea marine life, and the human body. The abject creatures are partnered with constructed audio-scapes that encompass the frenzy of an overarching internal monologue, …

Geometric Times, Linguistic Spaces, Johanna Strobel

Theses and Dissertations

If the loop is the trademark of our times and truthiness the reversal of the uncanny, what is the correlation between logic and information? This writing investigates the role of repetition and motifs in the production of meaning, how kitsch and neutrality function as modes of signifiers and how authenticity relates to the banal.

Breaching Boundaries: Homogenizing The Dichotomy Between The Sacred And Profane In Csíksomlyó, Zsofia Lovei

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article examines how a Marian shrine in Csíksomlyó, Transylvania acts as a Foucauldian heterotopia for Magyar speaking individuals, residing in the Carpathian Basin, and beyond in the diaspora most especially during the annual Pentecost pilgrimage. Following introductory remarks on the site and my stance, I turn to methodology, and Hungarian scholarship on the topic. Afterwards, I provide a “thick description” of fieldwork I conducted on-site in May of 2015. I then turn to various theoretical ties, which I support with emic analysis. Lastly, I turn to ideas of heterotopias, and provide a brief formal analysis. My main incentive is …

Interface Of Glass And Topology, Travis Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Interface of Glass and Topology is a supportive statement for a collection of blown glass sculptures that employ principles of continuous surface topology along with line and color applications to create a perceptual visual experience. These forms address issues of balance and continuity as well as space relationships of both inside to outside and object to self. This supportive statement will discuss topology as a basis for composition and larger questions of interconnectivity with our environment that serves as a guiding theme of my work.

A Vestige Of The Ultimate Force Of Time And Space, Jiyoung Megan Lee

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This art statement is rooted in an idea that the existential quality is independent of absence and presence (synonymous to appearing and disappearing, and real and recognition) and distilled physicality of human body creates a parallel relationship between the two. In search of a proof and logic for articulating the central idea, –that the absence does not define evanescence of existence— the application of physical interactivity in my art, also known as relational aesthetic, enables the work to invite viewers in a way that the interactors leave their traces by physically interacting with the work. These individual traces are eventually …

Emotional Reverberations, Kirsten Heteji

Theses and Dissertations

Projecting psychological mindscapes onto domestic objects allows for an emotive and bodily connection to the domestic realm. Body, for me, is the clay and how it holds touch and softness indexically recording the actions of making in the final forms. Pushing, pulling and pinching clay evokes sensations that connect the maker’s body as well as the observer of the work to participate. I shift expectations by experimenting between the hard and softness of bodily material like clay, giving it emotional fragility in how it contrasts the original structure it imitates. I think about creating objects and the arrangement them of …

Virtual Spirit, Alanna G. Rebbeck

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The following reflects my personal beliefs, and does not prescribe them to you

1. Human and technological evolution coincide in a reciprocal cycle of creation

2. In its construction, technology reflects humans

3. In their construction, humans reflect technology

4. Both function in a constant exchange between material and immaterial realms

5. Technological objects generate virtual spaces

a. Virtual space: artificially constructed immaterial space that contains products of technological engagement

b. These spaces exist within both the individual and the external virtual realm

6. Human bodies generate spiritual spaces

a. Spiritual space: organically constructed immaterial space that contains products of …

Look&Leave, Ruby Brooke

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Over the summer I had the opportunity to study in a program that focused on drawing and painting the architecture of Rome. Upon returning to the studio, I integrated this attention to architecture with my interest in painting the figure. Over the course of the year, the figure disappeared from my paintings. Instead, I started to paint large empty interiors. My intention was that the viewer feel the vastness of the space, emphasized by the absence of a figure.

This body of work explores interior architectural space and how the presence or absence of a figure affects it. I paint …

The Space Of Art In The Digital Age, Ellie Isaacs

MA Projects

This journal article looks at the space of art in the digital age in order to establish whether virtual art practices will eventually render the physicality of art as obsolete. The article draws focus on the construction of virtual spaces to investigate the possibility of a consequential collapse in real space. Two key aspects that I have concentrated on are the social experience of these modes of artistic practice and the inversion of public and private spheres.

Tiktak, Fang Li

CGU MFA Theses

TikTak

My works present the inherent nature of space and light. A chemical process is approached in a way, which has similarly quality to a natural process. I’m interested in how the material can change itself and how I can manipulate that change. Transparency, reflection, pattern, harmony, and movement are engaged.

I use a wide range of materials as much as to match my ideas and the form. They are presented in simple, unified or repeating forms. There is a physical, innermost satisfaction in the activity of working with simple materials. I materialize them and allow them to be both …

More Is The Same, Tyler Reeves Nansen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Nansen, Tyler, M.F.A. Spring 2015

More Is The Same

Chairperson: Associate Professor Trey Hill

More is the Same is the result of my examination of the perception of space in relation to architecture and landscape. By embracing modern concepts of the grid, formalism and design, this compilation of personal experiences and memories, manifests as post-minimal sculptures. However, when considering the hierarchy of importance in my work this involves pure visual perception over any specific narrative. The final product is an exhibition which elicits a perceptual experience for its viewer.

My work is about space and the creation of visual interactions, …

Following The Turn: Mapping As Material Art Practice, Kyla Christine Brown

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Following the Turn: Mapping As Material Art Practice investigates my artistic practice and MFA research based in London, Ontario. This dossier of research elements includes: an extended artist’s statement, a documentation of artistic practice and development, and a selection of in-process and published exhibition reviews of contemporary artists’ work; in Chapters 1, 2, and 3 respectively. This written document is in part intended to work as a specific accompaniment to my thesis exhibition. In the body of the thesis I propose that a project-based and embodied material art practice can perform mapping of negotiated experiences of the city. Dealing with …

Underlying Conditions, Mariam Eqbal

Theses and Dissertations

The following is a collection of lines, curves, and dots on a plane, representing words fashioned to communicate my ideas about relationships between the thing and the nothing. This thesis is like a map, a contour drawing, an assortment of lines, speaking my thoughts about things in relation to space and time. As something moving, developing into another thing, as a thing sentient, I am viewing, performing, and processing incremental acts. I am looking at water and I can see my reflection break into a thousand pieces. It is like watching time.

Interiors Imagined And Remembered, Andrew Brown

LSU Master's Theses

My paintings are about the concept of home and how this notion constantly evolves with each successive experience, changing how I perceive and experience interior spaces. The imagery in my work is limited to common forms such as cardboard boxes and shelving, as these are elements that are easily related to, and that speak to everyday experiences. Color, space and form are manipulated to work within and at times subvert the implied narrative of each painting. Although memory remains an active part of my process, imagination and the exploration of paint’s physical and expressive possibilities have risen to the fore. …

The Darkness Is Passing, Grace Heeeun Park

CGU MFA Theses

My work is about the interplay of light, darkness and space. I express illumination of space and penetrating light with abstract painting. I use the white of canvas and thick application of black paint to create frames and to break rules of defined dimensions. Through my paintings, I challenge the perception of space and question the boundaries between two and three dimensions.

Spiral Installation, Mauricio Alfredo Linares-Aguilar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Spiral is a site-specific gallery installation. Simplicity and subtleness are the goals for this installation. It shapes a spiral from above, and is meant to be experienced by walking through it. It has four different elements: one white cotton scrim, 71 feet long by 9 feet high, one cotton scrim 15 feet long by 9 feet high, a direct wall print, and outside natural air. The piece is made of materials such as cotton fabric, casein, bleach and Arkansas yellow oxide clay.

The intent of Spiral Installation is to convey the idea of the flowing process of life and death …

Cyberspace, Holly Butchyk

Holly Butchyk

No abstract provided.

Mapping The Distant, Llorens Ana Esteve

Theses and Dissertations

This Thesis presents several approaches through art making to deal with light and space and other things, and the relations that their interaction may generate

A City Fragmented, Arturo Javier Lechuga

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A City Fragmented, is an explorartion of the city of El Paso and its various districts. Through this a fragmentation within the city is found. This fragmentation gives El Paso a unique character, one that threads each distric together which creates a connection. A City Fragmented, revolves around the themes of loss and want, which look to help find an identity for El Paso, the speaker and the poet.