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Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman May 2022

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …


New Animals, Alina Iakirevitch May 2022

New Animals, Alina Iakirevitch

Theses and Dissertations

To transfer the rhythms of the body into the earth, in Lippard’s language, one has to engage in a non verbal, illogical action. Art is the sphere of this action. Staying engaged with the unpredictable in us, the random, the primal, is the core of art making and encountering art.


A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera May 2022

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.


Dust, Mist, Haze, Michael C. Tracy May 2022

Dust, Mist, Haze, Michael C. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores painting through the ideas of dust, mist, and haze as specific atmospheric metaphors that could be used to describe ontologies of space, time, memory, and history.


​​​​From Repression To Appropriation: Soviet Religious Policy And Reform, 1917-1943, Andriy Dyachenko May 2022

​​​​From Repression To Appropriation: Soviet Religious Policy And Reform, 1917-1943, Andriy Dyachenko

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyses the dynamics of religious reform in the USSR from 1917 to 1943. It argues that the early Bolshevik policy of persecution was increasingly substituted by state co-optation. This dynamic was shaped primarily by Stalinist concerns with state security and problems of ideology.


“Paint What You Hate”: Philip Guston’S Hooded Figures And The Postponement Of The Exhibition Philip Guston Now, Thomas Baldwin May 2022

“Paint What You Hate”: Philip Guston’S Hooded Figures And The Postponement Of The Exhibition Philip Guston Now, Thomas Baldwin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis interrogates the postponement of the Philip Guston Now exhibition, examining the justification for the postponement, the actions taken by the National Gallery of Art, and the effects of the postponement. My research examines the museum’s choice to cite social justice as the main context for understanding Philip Guston.


Steve Mcqueen, The Filmmaker, And Kant’S Sensus Communis, Livia Melamed Margon Jan 2022

Steve Mcqueen, The Filmmaker, And Kant’S Sensus Communis, Livia Melamed Margon

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reflects on the ways in which art reinforces community and reduces political polarity by stimulating shared feelings, namely through Kant's idea of sensus communis. To illustrate its argument, this thesis analyzes the work of Steve McQueen, a politically aware, ethically engaged, and broadly recognized filmmaker and artist.


A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen Dec 2021

A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper consists of a series of scenes in which various narratives with proximity to the truth plays out. within it I aim to articulate the dispersed subjectivity and forensic aspects to my work, as well looking at the perverseness in the desire for proximity to the fantasy, utilizing the self as a vehicle of desire.


An Infinite Horizon: Space, Time, & Mind In The American Imaginary From Thomas Cole To Agnes Pelton, 1825-1961, Jason Friedman May 2021

An Infinite Horizon: Space, Time, & Mind In The American Imaginary From Thomas Cole To Agnes Pelton, 1825-1961, Jason Friedman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how artists, intellectuals, spiritual seekers, and industrialists represented the American horizon across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The purpose of this inquiry is to show how art transmuted ideological and religious beliefs across time and to demonstrate the interdependence of esoteric self-perceptions and American hegemonic power.


Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon May 2021

Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon

Theses and Dissertations

This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.


Eagle Eye Vs. Gear Jammer, Jessica Danielle Ellis Apr 2021

Eagle Eye Vs. Gear Jammer, Jessica Danielle Ellis

Theses and Dissertations

Where similarities in class struggle have historically operated as a unifying force globally, the American crafted mythos isolates the individual and dehumanizes those that do not fall within the parameters of the cowboy archetype. The national protagonist is turned into a class traitor and an extension of government power.


Enclosures And Dichotomies: Coexistence Vs. Distance In The Poems Of John Clare, Jordan P. Finn May 2019

Enclosures And Dichotomies: Coexistence Vs. Distance In The Poems Of John Clare, Jordan P. Finn

Theses and Dissertations

John Clare’s poetry emphasizes an affinity with environment by suspending the distinction between the inside (subject) and the outside (object). Clare’s identification with objects and perception rather than subjects and aesthetics renders his work as a prescient and radical example of ecological poetry in the Romantic period. Raymond Williams’ “green language” and Timothy Morton’s ambient poetics both cite Clare as an ideal figure for their above theories and evoke Clare as a writer who positions the environment as governing thought rather than thought governing the environment. This thesis especially relates Clare to Morton’s Ecology without Nature, a study of …


“The Healing Balm Of Sympathy Denied”: Moral Sense Philosophy, Patriarchy, And Monstrosity In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Estefania Velez Jan 2019

“The Healing Balm Of Sympathy Denied”: Moral Sense Philosophy, Patriarchy, And Monstrosity In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Estefania Velez

Theses and Dissertations

Though Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein produces an ideology of sympathy consistent with the literary and philosophical aims of Romanticism, this essay examines Shelley’s critique of patriarchy which posits that though sympathetic companionship in Frankenstein remains an ethical necessity, it is unattainable within a social order marred by misogynist structures of power.


Archaeology Of Social Patterning, Chase Bray Jan 2019

Archaeology Of Social Patterning, Chase Bray

Theses and Dissertations

The episteme that created the grid as a structure for logic has been usurped. We compose meaning from an adulterated grid, or pattern. I process meaning through the abuse of acrid patterns and the grid, the reduction of imagery to silhouettes and by referencing both cultural and classical mythology.


“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales May 2018

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.


Profanation, Tsahi Zac H. Hacmon May 2018

Profanation, Tsahi Zac H. Hacmon

Theses and Dissertations

This paper attempts to provoke an Israeli American dialogue that comes through profanity of conventional architecture. I am creating this dialogue by displaying two main subjects in proximity to each other: border architecture from Israel and institutional architecture or non-places in New York.


Long Vacation In Bk, Doll Chao Jan 2018

Long Vacation In Bk, Doll Chao

Theses and Dissertations

The diary of a transcontinental search for self and place, a journey through obtuse politics, cultural oppression, and loneliness - this film is the document of a lost generation of Taiwanese youth and its conflict with China, swirling in a transpacific gyre of sound, image, and text.


Ordinary Disorder, Jonathan S. Tracy Dec 2017

Ordinary Disorder, Jonathan S. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

The pictorial spaces in my paintings are found through many drawings, based on memories. In these drawings I use the architectural technique of paraline drawing, in pointed contrast to one or two point perspective. With a fixed point of view unavailable, the viewer or reader becomes the writer too. This is what I intend. The paraline method also engages specific corners of art history to which I relate, including woodblock prints of Japanese interiors, Chinese brush painting landscapes with houses, and the shifting, rotating perspectives found in Baroque painting. My intensely personal memories/drawings are transfused into highly material finished paintings. …


Theory For A Starving Obese, Ishai Shapira Kalter May 2017

Theory For A Starving Obese, Ishai Shapira Kalter

Theses and Dissertations

Theory for a Starving Obese (2017) is both a book and an installation. During the years 2015-2017 I began writing Theory for a Starving Obese; a collection of essays and art criticism about exhibitions that took place in white cubes in New York. I was following my dissatisfaction, and hoped to delve deeper into the question “What is Contemporary Art?” At the end of a process, I sent seventeen envelopes to artists who exhibited solo shows in New York and whose works I have criticized. Each envelope consists of one digital drawing (שרבוט, pronounced Shirbut), DVD with the …


The Sounds Of Silence; Or, Isabella’S Counter Discourse In Measure For Measure, Gina Vivona May 2017

The Sounds Of Silence; Or, Isabella’S Counter Discourse In Measure For Measure, Gina Vivona

Theses and Dissertations

This argument reshapes the thinking about masculine dominance in Measure for Measure, and considers the patriarchy as a series of socially constructed, hence artificial, rules and regulations. It also explores how Isabella’s discourse and celibacy empower her to defy the constraints of early modern paradigms and achieve individual freedom.


The Feminization Of Violence, Caitlin Logan May 2017

The Feminization Of Violence, Caitlin Logan

Theses and Dissertations

Grounded in the necessity of upending the economic base as it is defined by Louis Althusser, this paper seeks to express a possibility for the creation of a feminine voice, that when expressed as itself, independent of the pervasive nature of patriarchal power and significance, could be the very event that engenders the first real “violent” attack on the base. Using Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God, as an example of a uniquely feminine voice, this paper also seeks to empower the experience of the Black female aesthetic as a perspective capable of tapping the multiplicity of human …


Rationality, Parapsychology, And Artificial Intelligence In Military And Intelligence Research By The United States Government In The Cold War, Guy M. Lomeo Dec 2016

Rationality, Parapsychology, And Artificial Intelligence In Military And Intelligence Research By The United States Government In The Cold War, Guy M. Lomeo

Theses and Dissertations

A study analyzing the roles of rationality, parapsychology, and artificial intelligence in military and intelligence research by the United States Government in the Cold War. An examination of the methodology behind the decisions to pursue research in two fields that were initially considered irrational.


The Poet And The Polemist: Demystifying The Natural Law Theory Of John Milton, John J. Mazola Dec 2016

The Poet And The Polemist: Demystifying The Natural Law Theory Of John Milton, John J. Mazola

Theses and Dissertations

A summation of the influences behind Milton's Natural Law theory as found in the works of Aristotle, Grotius, Hobbes, and Thomas Aquinas. The essay's intent is to uncover this important thread that runs through both Milton's Poetic Verse as well as his Polemic tracts.


A Performative Script: Play With(In) Me, Erik Patton May 2016

A Performative Script: Play With(In) Me, Erik Patton

Theses and Dissertations

Patton continues his interest in the body, its relation to material, the notion of abstraction (specifically related to queerness), and the phenomenological with this performative script. Enter the bath first; you must wash your dirty asshole, as you shat only two hours ago. Collect your body in the Silver Pond.


Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press And Fluxus, Meghan A. Dellacrosse Dec 2015

Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press And Fluxus, Meghan A. Dellacrosse

Theses and Dissertations

"Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press and Fluxus," positions Knowles’ Big Book (1966) as a case study of historical methodology and interdisciplinary artistic practice in the post-war period. This comprehensive analysis of Big Book, a work of art no longer extant, contextualizes its publisher, Something Else Press through Dick Higgins’ concept of “intermedia,” and important lesser-known junctures relevant to Fluxus and the group’s leader George Maciunas are illuminated. Knowles' early and lesser-known silkscreen paintings are also examined.