Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Anamnesis, Kristian Thacker

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

My work examines the duality of living in Appalachia and cherishing its picturesque environment; while being complicit in its ongoing destruction via industry and resource extraction. Composed of my own photographs and selections from the Farm Security Administration archives, this body of work presents a vision of the region that’s purpose extends beyond value judgments. Rather, it considers the manmade and natural environments of Appalachia holistically, each one integral to the experience and understanding of the other. Following the same aesthetic choices I make in my professional practice as a photojournalist, I blur the boundary between art and documentation. In …

The Friendly Hammer, Imogen Xaviere Plochere Dalzell

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

See How Man Was Made, Lilian C. Smith

Senior Projects Spring 2023

First there was Chaos, the gaping abyss. From Chaos came the Earth and soon after darkness and Night, from which came Day and Light. To be her husband, Earth created Sky. They made many children together, the Nymphs of the hills, the Hekatonkheires, the Cyclops, and the Titans. When Earth and Sky’s youngest Titan son Cronus overthrew his father, he castrated him, sending bits of the sky into the sea where Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty was born. Cronus ruled until he himself was overthrown by his own youngest son, Zeus.

See How Man Is Made is a project …

Blue-Collar Backroads, Hannah Taylor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The photographer discusses work in Blue-Collar Backroads, a Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibit held at downtown Tipton Gallery from February 1st through February 18th, 2022. The exhibit consists of 17 archival inkjet prints selected from the artist’s two-year exploration of rural backroads as a vehicle for creating images. Using aesthetic traditions of large-format film photography, the photographer poses questions of identity, place, memory, and the intentional pursuit of meditative practices in art. Non-photographic influences are listed, including Claire Wellesley-Smith and Elizabeth Catte. Photographic influences include Joel Sternfeld, Rachel Boillot, William Christenberry, and Mike Smith.

A catalog of the exhibit …

A Natural History (Built To Be Seen), Austin Cullen, Austin Wray Cullen

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

A Natural History (Built to be Seen) is a series of photographic observations of the spectacular and absurd ways the western natural world is presented in museums. The subjects of the photographs include displays from both the front-facing, visitor side of the museum, and the back, research-focused side of the museum. As someone who grew up visiting natural history museums, I've always been fascinated by the extravagant ways they framed the American landscape. Dramatic dioramas, interactive virtual experiences, and miniaturized landscapes all act as windows into the natural world. While this framing provides a guide for reading and understanding nature, …

The Air That Rests On The Horizon, Jane Winik Sartwell

Senior Projects Spring 2022

“Involuntarily I pictured a solitude with an immense horizon and widely diffused light; in other words, immensity with no other setting than itself.”

— Charles Baudelaire

My photographs are an attempt to transform the landscape with a camera. The physicality of moving through the world with the view camera and a tripod is central to my work. It requires me to find my footing, to consciously sense my own body in the landscape. It allows me to more clearly see the subtle geometries and irregularities of the world, those captivating and quiet moments I want to photograph. I am fascinated …

Wet, Flowering, Dry, Caroline A. Minchew

Theses and Dissertations

Wet, flowering, dry is a series of photographic works that explore how vernal pools are a macrocosm for holding memory and a site of omnipresent solitude and decay. This installation distills an embodied and ephemeral experience of how we are grounded in a network of invisible connections with our surroundings. This network becomes evident through biological, historical, and field research conducted at the vernal pools for over a year. Through slow observation and consideration of how multiple stories of place can weave together into a larger parable, Wet, flowering, dry reveals how the life cycle of a vernal pool is …

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. …

Eggs, Hair, Seeds, Milk, Patrick West

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Short story

In/Visible, Raymond Thompson Jr

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

My MFA thesis and supporting exhibition focus on challenging the United States’ photographic archive that often left out African-American people. The work, through the use of appropriation and alternative photographic processes, disrupts America’s historical visual archive and notions that surround the white gaze. Through the unsettling of this visual space, new speculative narratives can be created to help imagine new futures. This work is the beginning of a process of mourning histories I have never known and reclaiming a place for myself and my family in the American landscape that is free of racial trauma.

Erratic Space, Johan V. Orellana

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Orellana's vision in this work, Erratic Space, is to document life as an immigrant that exits in a country and society that attempts to maintain normalcy through the symbolic containment and erasure of marginalized groups and their narratives. He uses the relationship between the domestic and public spaces as a way to evoke an intimate, oneiric and, mutually, crude visual language that puts into context how these two environments intertwine.

The Cliffs Of Moher, Megan M. Mishler

TYGR: Student Art and Literary Magazine 2018-present

No abstract provided.

Intimate Nevada: Artists Respond, Lauren Paljusaj, Anne Savage

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Creative Works Winner

Most of us know Nevada beyond the Strip. It’s a place of houses, of shopping plazas, of movie theaters, and grocery stores. A place of hotels that are also places of work. A place of basins, ranges, vistas, and nature. A place of personal history. For Intimate Nevada: Artists Respond, curators Lauren Paljusaj (ENG BA ‘20) and Anne Savage (CFA BA ‘22), draw on photographs found in UNLV Special Collections to uncover the intimate visuality of a Nevada of past centuries. The exhibition focuses on how the imaged built landscape of early 20th century Southern Nevada …

Labor And The Picturesque: Photography, Propaganda, And The Tea Trade In Colonial India And Sri Lanka, 1880–1914, Leila Anne Harris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nineteenth-century colonial photographs of workers on tea plantations in India and Sri Lanka – with women in saris gently plucking leaves from lush bushes and men in sarongs operating heavy industrial machinery – are powerful symbols of a chain of production within the British Empire. My dissertation questions how these images of labor support a sense of nation-building that is defined by a new lucrative commodity: British-grown tea. Labor is at the center of my study, which aims to challenge the clear-cut division in current scholarship between representations of workers in industrialized England, and those in rural South Asia. I …

Journal, Untitled, Angelo Chammah

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This journal has no owner.
It is simply out there.
It belongs to me, it belongs to you.
It is about personal moments but universal experiences.
What do you see when you drive with the window open?
What can you find in your own house?
What light is on at midnight?

Angelo Chammah

Blaze, Meg Roussos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The photographer discusses her work in “BLAZE,” a Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibit held at the Tipton Gallery from September 16th through October 4th, 2019. The exhibition consists of 11 archival inkjet prints, two photographic artist books, a nine-channel video installation, representing the artist’s exploration of how to experience the landscape. Using non-traditional approaches to photographic imagery, experimental exhibition layout, the artist forms questions around themes of walking and landscape. The artist investigates sculptural land art installations represented through photographic documentation. A catalog of the exhibit is included at the end of this thesis.

Roussos examines formal and conceptual …

The Boone Dam Project, Jordan Whitten

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The photographer discusses his work in “The Boone Dam Project”, a Masters of Fine Art exhibit held at the Tipton Gallery, Johnson City, Tennessee from March 18 through March 29, 2019. The exhibition consists of a collection of 14 large color archival inkjet prints from a large body of work that surveys a lakeside community’s landscape and residents affected by lowered lake levels during a dam repair. A catalog of the exhibit is included at the end of this thesis.

Whitten examines formal and conceptual influences through historical and contemporary photographers. Images included are works made by Robert Adams, Stephen …

Solastalgia, Nostalgia, Exhilarating, Immersive: Landscapes: Heritage Ii, David F. Gray

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Landscape: Heritage II presents the scholarly and creative contributions to Landscapes, Volume 9, Issue 1.

The Sea Ranch: Unforeseen Failures And Statewide Successes Of An Ecologically Conscious Coastal Community, Robert Daley

Senior Theses

The term “residential development” or “planned community” brings to mind images of a stereotypical suburbia. The planned community of The Sea Ranch, along the Sonoma County coast in Northern California is a direct challenge to the suburban ideal. Construction of the nearly 1500 homes began in the late 1960s and continues to present day. All of the homes must meet specific design requirements including being ecologically sound and they must fit within the landscape. The strict architectural elements is what provides the distinct look of the community. The construction of a housing development along a ten-mile strip of untouched and …

Complete Issue

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

The complete issue 1 of volume 8, Landscapes Journal.

Canyon Colors, Jacob W. Arnold

TYGR: Student Art and Literary Magazine 2018-present

This shot was taken at sunrise inside Palo Duro Canyon in Canyon, Texas on December 22nd, 2017

Shifting Rurality American Gothic, Iowa Nice, Biotech And Political Expectations In Rural America, William D. Nichols 890252

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This paper traces the linkage between heritage landscape within the context of the election of Donal Trump. Trump's invocations of heritage riled certain regions of the US which had a distinct connection to Regionalism, both as a political idea and as an aesthetic practice. Focusing on Iowa, home to the quintessential American painting, American Gothic, the paper looks at modernity and agriculture, and how the two categories seem to rely on (but also negate) heritage. By examining what a genetically modified landscape might mean in relation to the historical image of the pastoral/provincial farmer, a network of frictions and …

The Hour Of The Wolf, Emily Louise Beresford

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

the hour of the wolf

In these photographs I try to capture the sense of time moving and changing. I am interested in the way that light can change the way we see something. We are made vulnerable by what light reveals.

The photographs are about a specific time of day as well as time passing over a year. The interweaving of faces and landscapes reveals this progression of time during the days, the seasons, and the years through which each person has lived.

With time, light moves across …

Es-Sen-Tial, Lyn A. Govette

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is in support of the exhibition entitled ES-SEN-TIAL on display in Tipton Gallery located in Downtown Johnson City from February 27, 2017 to March 10, 2017.

The exhibition is a presentation in fiber medium of the human impact on the landscape, specifically using the extractive industry of coal mining as example. This is accomplished through the use of digital imagery printed on textiles, hand and machine embroidery, and surface design techniques of dyeing and layering. This body of work reflects the artist’s interest in art activism and the utilization of photography, fiber arts, ideas and techniques, as creative …

Beyond The Surface, Tamar Sandalon

Senior Projects Spring 2017

This world is my own. I’m like a child in a new house, I just want to explore. Everything is exciting, and I’m seeing it for the first time.

I’ve created a series that primarily focus on curiosity and base reaction. Ordinary scenes are depicted through a childlike lens. Images are flattened, their planes meld together creating fluctuation and distortion- a nod to reality’s inherent fluidity. These images are not windows, rather, they resemble canvases. They explore color and expression in an immediate fashion, but also contain subtleties- little secrets. When photographing people, I tend to focus on individuals, though …

Enduring Peripheries, Anna Yeroshenko

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

In the 80s when Russian state-sanctioned architectural production consisted of standardized buildings that deplored any unnecessary ornament or decoration, an architect functioned only as an interpreter of numerous limiting factors. As an act of protest against the stagnation in architecture, a group of young architects began to create projects that existed only on paper. For them ‘Paper Architecture‘ became a way of bypassing restrictions and dissenting, a way to critique the dehumanizing nature of the architectural style that prevailed at that time. Spatial compositions, which were hard to comprehend visually, elements of inverse perspective, and impractical, idealistic environments depicted a …

Tales From The Fells, Anne Elder

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Our relationship with the natural world is complicated and under scrutiny as we make irrevocable changes to the earth. We enter the woods to get lost, and to find ourselves. We walk there to find thrills, peace, inspiration; to hear ourselves think, to be surprised, to make profit. Our childish fears may have changed from bears, monsters and getting lost, replaced by adult fears (bears, unsavory humans, getting lost). The woods may frighten us or be a place of comfort, but it is rarely a neutral experience. When we lose access to these spaces, it affects our ability to find …

Images For A Nation: The Role Of Conservation Photography In American Environmentalism, Nathaniel W. Yale

Pomona Senior Theses

Photographs have long been integral in revealing American values, ideals, and identity. Accordingly, a study of environmental, or "conservation," imagery offers insight into America’s relationship with the natural world. In an examination of key figures and their conservation photography work, this thesis explores how the national conservation dialogue has been shaped by powerful images that, in some cases, even led to crucial acts of federal conservation. The first section highlights four photographers and their context and influence in this dialogue: W.H. Jackson’s photographs from Hayden’s 1871 survey of Yellowstone, Carleton Watkins’ work at Yosemite and Mariposa Grove in the 1860s, …

Trepidation: Void, James Farley

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

An easy definition of the VOID eludes us, for each person’s understanding is unique. One may experience it as spiritual, but it need not be so. Others will relate to an implied sadness or loneliness that the infinite presents while some may find solace in the silence that I have created. By photographing these apparent scenes of “nothing”, I am asking you what is this, what are you looking for and what is missing? And the answer…

Anthropocene Autoscene, Alison Pouliot

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

During the last decade in Switzerland, nature-culture connections enmeshed in landscapes constantly grab my gaze, perhaps more visibly than in my homeland, Australia. Abandoned vehicles in a winter forest - an ‘Autofriedhof’ - slowly subside into leaf litter – one of the most complex, little explored and biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. The enzymatic power of lichens, among the earth’s first colonisers, witness its demise as they disassemble the complex compounds of car paints and parts. Water and salt, rot and rust, subsume human creations returning to their elemental parts, to 'nature'.

An aesthetic beauty emerges as layers of paint, …