Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Prime, Perform, Recover, Patrick Harkin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the formal and conceptual framework of my artistic practice as it culminated in the installation of my thesis exhibition, Prime, Perform, Recover. My exhibition seeks to operate as an analysis and critique of the separation inherent in media presentation and rhetoric surrounding natural disasters.

I utilize the aesthetics and vocabulary of disaster capitalism and prepping culture in order to pose direct questions about ecological and social change. I examine the role of images within mass media image production as an all encompassing Now-Time. In this paper I describe frameworks that my practice proposes as potential solutions to …

From Me To You, Isabel Lee

AUCTUS: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

As an artist, my work has allowed me to produce as a multidisciplinary thinker, maker, and communicator. Beyond the physicality of medium, much of my desire to make my work manifests in the nuances of human relationships and genuine experiences that I seek and recall in my own life. My most lasting work meanders around the elements of unspoken communication, intimate gestures, and quixotic quests.

Through performative sculpture, I pursue thinking and making through nontraditional materials, utilizing some form of human interaction in the process. Exploring my curiosity for relational and performative art, I’m interested in works that are exist …

Dispersal: A Multidisciplinary Investigation Of Plant Life, Alexandra E. Arzt

Theses and Dissertations

Using plants as a basis for exploring the interstices between the human and nonhuman, this thesis investigates ideas of awareness, intelligence, deep time, animism, and the fluctuating human perception of the agency of Nature. It outlines environmental art practices since the 1950s involving vegetal life. In addition, the paper provides a critical analysis of plant perception of Jakob von Uexküll’s work and theories of vital materialism and “critical plant studies” while noting recent studies in plant neurobiology. In my work, plants become active participants via their movement, seeding, and smell. This study takes the form of imitation, purposeful symbiosis, anthropomorphism, …

The Artist In The Library: Research Services For Creators, Kristina Keogh, John Glover

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

At Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries we serve a variety of disciplines. This poster session focuses on outreach initiatives by the Visual Arts Research Librarian and the Humanities Research Librarian to provide research services to a unique group: students and faculty who create new and unique objects and texts. The needs of artistic researchers in such diverse areas as interior design, painting, and creative writing overlap in many ways, both expected and unexpected.

Our efforts to reach out to creators and offer support for their distinctive research needs have included such activities as taking classes within particular programs and embedding ourselves …