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Articles 1 - 30 of 40
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Unfurling Blue Carpet Memories, Sara Ahli
Unfurling Blue Carpet Memories, Sara Ahli
Masters Theses
Glass is an amorphous solid, existing in a liminal space, embodying indeterminacy. Its states of transformation from viscous flow to structural solidity carry the imprints of bodily influence. With the direct intention of using glass as a conduit to explore materiality, memory, and self-awareness, I construct a language of embodiment that arises through a series of performative encounters between my physicality and glass in the hot shop.
The mediating process I employ to create and arrive at the glass artwork I make is as necessary as its final form. Motivated by the desire to claim agency over my personal narrative, …
Modern Times, Will Beattie
Modern Times, Will Beattie
Masters Theses
At the intersection of glass, photography and sound lies issues of perspective, framing, and information. These factors as well as the conceptual space between object and image offer an opportunity to explore the way we register narrative through contradicting signifiers. Glass historically has been used as an instrument to reveal spaces, moments, and phenomena previously imperceptible to the human eye. This rendering of previously unseen spaces through language, technology or vision, may work to reorient the viewers’ perspective and allow for a new understanding of the world. The power of disruption as a potential catalyst is central to my studio …
An Abundance Of Caution, Gonçalo Preto Jorge
An Abundance Of Caution, Gonçalo Preto Jorge
Masters Theses
Abstract
An Abundance of Caution
3 puffs and breathing stabilizes...
Must have been the pollen last night.
Quiça
An eerie sense of emptiness takes over
And incidentally
The inability to express and verbalize any articulated thought.
Quiça
I seek sensations...experiences. To indulge.
The fascination with dreamscapes hails from the daunting lack of them.
Poooooxa
I listen, imagine, and process scenarios around me
In a precarious attempt to interpret and translate instances into something meaningful.
Oxalá, Matéria pictórica.
Oxalá.
I see my shadow but only an elusive silhouette
I observe the way it follows the wall and fades into the sidewalk, …
Navigating Transience, Nina Liu
Navigating Transience, Nina Liu
Masters Theses
With advancing age, does the act of collecting and collections serve a purpose? Experimental psychologist Daniel Krawczyk claims that the act of collecting is deeply embedded in how the human brain registers time. Building upon the premise of Krawczyk’s research, I delve into a journey of collecting as I trace its evolution from childhood to adulthood, and its significance amidst the rapid digitalization of the modern world.
Through the lens of the transitional object and with a commitment to the preservation of memories, this thesis examines the intricate relationship between humans and their possessions. It proposes that the intimate activity …
Snowstorm, Caleb Shafer
Snowstorm, Caleb Shafer
Masters Theses
This thesis explores the connection between memory and place-building, focusing on how personal narratives and physical models compress details to reveal their core essence. Memories serve as a bridge between time and space, allowing for a non-linear experience of time and offering a unique perspective on the existence and transformation of places. Although this compression involves some loss, it generates new narratives and insights into life while examining the power structures and cultural systems inherent in representation.
Umbrales (Thresholds), Maureen Scally
Umbrales (Thresholds), Maureen Scally
Masters Theses
Umbrales is Spanish for Thresholds.
Thresholds are by nature ambivalent spaces, inviting two distinct realities into play. As an artist, I materialize my experiences as a migrant into an architectural form. A series of textile walls shape a space that is simultaneously interior and exterior so that the audience circulates in the negative space in between. It is in the construction of this threshold condition — a simultaneous placement, neither here nor there — that a complex narrative of place unfolds.
Intangible Shells, Elena Bulet
Intangible Shells, Elena Bulet
Masters Theses
The following essay mimics the constant disruption of a fragmented memory. It reflects on intergenerational gendered family dynamics since the civil war and dictatorship-era Spain and how memory articulates narratives of belonging within the matrilineal lineage. A process of excavation departs from personal memories, familial archives, contemporary interviews, theoretical readings, photographic reenactments, and observations of traces in the landscape of Almayate’s town. The author attempts to retrace her roots, as well as her family history, acknowledging the impossibility of making personal histories tangible.
Soft Procedures, Alec Figuracion
Soft Procedures, Alec Figuracion
Masters Theses
Looking through the soft lens — from the vantage point of a place one calls home, and steered by an interiority that feels a little too much sometimes — I am interested in the hazy, undefined subjects and instances that occur around the peripheries of our lenses: fuzzy imprints of memories, shifting notions of home, and shapeless narratives. Working primarily with the moving image, I investigate the multiple threads that might exist between them, and persistently shift and adjust the focus ring on the camera lens so as to embrace and celebrate multiplicities, and our collective definitions of softness.
Vanitas, Sae Jung Oh
Vanitas, Sae Jung Oh
Masters Theses
Vanitas is a tribute to the missing pieces within the reconstruction of human memory, places, and data. It is a cartography of words, including home, apartment complex, reconstruction, mourning, archive, memory, memorialization, a god within, collective memory, photogrammetry, cyberspace, omnipresence, meandering, heterotopia, alleyway, construction site, and mirror. I invite readers to meander in the map of relations and be lost in the topography. What can you discover when you meander? What happens when you renounce being a subject and become an object seamlessly blended into the topography?
You're Making Me Sentimental, Chris Geng
You're Making Me Sentimental, Chris Geng
Masters Theses
My project is a personal search for a different way to see the footprint we have left on the landscape. A way of seeing that finds potential in existing buildings without placing the building in the background, that instead engages sentiments in order to approach reuse as an act of layering that retains the memories of before. I went about uncovering the memories of a site through film photography, a process equally rooted in nostalgia and sentimentality. These images attempt to capture the beauty of melancholy and in turn, ask the architect and audience to slow down and contemplate as …
From John Street To Union, Andrew Shea
From John Street To Union, Andrew Shea
Masters Theses
I have been making paintings constructed loosely from my experience of walking about one mile each morning from my apartment in Fox Point to my studio in downtown Providence, and of walking back each night. My goal is to rediscover the feeling of these outdoor places—their lights, atmospheres, colors, and topographies—through the process of painting inside the studio. As such, the visual representations of these paintings are not straight-forward and objective, but oblique and affective.
I hope that these works draw one’s attention to the idiosyncrasies of natural life and to the particularities of weather. I want the paintings to …
A Room Full Of Pigeons And Three Spectators, Dina Khorchid, Dina Nazmi Khorchid
A Room Full Of Pigeons And Three Spectators, Dina Khorchid, Dina Nazmi Khorchid
Masters Theses
My work explores themes of identity politics, domesticity, land and memory access - in relation to my own lived experiences as a Palestinian refugee, a daughter of a missing war casualty and an artist.
In this thesis book, I present a cumulation of thoughts, emotions and findings, along with a selection of works from the last two years.
During my time at the Rhode Island School of Design, messenger pigeons took over my studio, channeling physical and mental realms of grief and remembrance. By looking closely at the bird’s aesthetics and behaviorisms in my first semester, their resting deceased bodies …
Cuando Lloro, Melissa Medina
Cuando Lloro, Melissa Medina
Masters Theses
There are moments where I am suddenly hit with a deep sentimental longing for a time that no longer exists, one that has transformed into a deep nostalgia, one that becomes more and more conflicted as time passes. Often thought of as a yearning for a recent past, or homesickness, nostalgia can be difficult to define. Although the concept and emotion associated with nostalgia may seem familiar, the word is in fact complex. Nostalgia, for the immigrant, is an escape from their marginalization; an opportunity to embrace the complexities. Painting then becomes an embrace, a direct connection between the present …
Objects And Apparitions: A Portable Museum, Yesuk Seo
Objects And Apparitions: A Portable Museum, Yesuk Seo
Masters Theses
My work transcends the boundaries between painterly printmaking and sculpture. Through hand-pulled silkscreen prints, I create abstract pixelated images depicting our constantly changing relationship with meaning and reality. Memories are often glamorized and distorted whether it is our childhood home, our neighborhood, or the city. My practice archives my family history and traces patterns in memory and space by using invisibility as a phenomena to render newer explorations of abstraction, in time and in urban landscapes. Objects & Apparitions: A Portable Museum, pairs moiré patterns of ghostly printmaking with wooden objects in specific arrangements. It captures my nomadic journey between …
Rooted In Topsoil, Jiaying Wang
Rooted In Topsoil, Jiaying Wang
Masters Theses
Disillusioned by my transnational identity, I have come to realize that my sense of belonging is no longer attached to any physical location, but instead to a state of mind, to an intimacy with the world. My notion of home is an obscure and unsettled—at times utopian—idea, which can be infinitely decoded, re-positioned and re-established psychologically. This thesis is an investigation of that liminal state, questioning the paradoxical place at the intersection of longing and belonging, interior and exterior, rootedness and uprootedness. Through a collection of short essays that accompany projects, I seek to unpack the precarious emotional complexities that …
What The Water Says As It Runs, Jeanette Cosentini
What The Water Says As It Runs, Jeanette Cosentini
Masters Theses
During the last two years, I have been examining the importance of vulnerability, memory and empowerment within my work as it relates to archival silence. The archive is presumed to be an objective record but what is chosen and discarded is an inherently political act. When there is archival silence, what then becomes missing from our collective histories? My exploration has spread across many forms of media, including sound, video, textiles, sculpture and writing . I have sought to understand the ways that these different mediums embody sentiment and concept, while establishing an open-ended record within which others can explore …
Everything Comes Full Circle, Lilan Yang
Everything Comes Full Circle, Lilan Yang
Masters Theses
Following Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) filming locations from Houston, Texas to Los Angeles, California, I use a 16mm Bolex camera to capture the vastness of the American West. The footage draws me to reminisce about snippets of my everyday life. I contemplate how we perceive the world through analog optical apparatuses and how memories are multidimensional yet fragile. Our recollections of people and places can be distorted, unrecognizable, and fictitious. These memories would eventually diminish with the passing of time. By converting the filmmaking back and forth between analog and digital filmmaking, with the loss of information during the …
The Sky Is Falling, Alexis Tingey
The Sky Is Falling, Alexis Tingey
Masters Theses
The ceiling would fall apart in my childhood home, it was an old house. Occasionally a piece of ceiling would clomp down on my head. In these moments, I would pause, and close my eyes until an image of some fabulous, beautiful interior came into my mind, and then I would open my eyes and continue. Sometimes to escape a falling ceiling, I would find respite in my first ideal sitting spot, a post on our back fence; I would sit with the sky and think. Looking back, I believe these are the moments where I caught glimpses of the …
Retelling A Landscape Through The Alchemy Of Recasting, Amanda Lee
Retelling A Landscape Through The Alchemy Of Recasting, Amanda Lee
Masters Theses
This project is an acknowledgment of reshaped landscapes while also understanding that this moment of time is only relevant to my own human lifespan and perspective. The work embodies unmet expectations when one confronts a memory landscape of their, or my, childhood. Specifically, I am discussing the chasm between reality and memory through a recent return to my childhood home in Colorado, and was met by two of the largest wildfires in the state’s history. This project takes a moment to digest that loss, of what was known, what was not, and can no longer be known: forests, trees, and …
Balancing The Tangible And Intangible, Shiqi Wu
Balancing The Tangible And Intangible, Shiqi Wu
Masters Theses
I love reading stories, but until now, I had never written my own. Balancing the Tangible & Intangible is organized around my experiences and stories, which are inseparable from my work. Together they constellate a narrative of remembrance. Memories surface, and so do connections, allowing for assurance and conviction during a time of personal flux and global unsettledness. As a choreographer and composer of relationships between the tangible and intangible, I rebuild networks of connections linking memories of my relationship to China, my home country, to my experience of living in the West.
In today's global society, population migration is …
Phefumula Nami, Ndivhuho Rasengani
Phefumula Nami, Ndivhuho Rasengani
Masters Theses
Cosmos: Building a cosmology (mid 17th century: from French cosmologie or modern Latin cosmologia, from Greek kosmos ‘order or world’ + -logia ‘discourse’,) which mirrors and exhumes hidden narratives from our current reality. It is in this tracing that I teeter between visual codes in the form of memories impressed upon my mind from generations of old and Aesthetic symphonies from the present.
Personal Positioning System, Laura Diez De Baldeon
Personal Positioning System, Laura Diez De Baldeon
Masters Theses
Personal Positioning System (PPS) is an exploration of spatial memory in an unstable world. While the GPS gathers many different, shifting data points in order to provide us with an apparently stable representation of our position, a longitude and latitude in the earth’s grid, PPS offers alternative forms of mapping based on a more flexible unit: memory. PPS reverses the directionality of the GPS and returns to the fragmentary; it disperses rather than unifies, offshooting in different directions, overlaying the intimate on corporate territory, chasing the shifting flow of geographical information. It conceives of design as a spatial practice, one …
The Beauty Of Collision, Yixuan Pan
The Beauty Of Collision, Yixuan Pan
Masters Theses
As a Chinese artist living in the United States, I’m researching the integration of Eastern and Western aesthetics, as well as the loss of identity that can occur when visual cultures begin to assimilate. My work endeavors to locate the connection between Eastern and Western arts through my own memories and experiences. From the age of five, I have studied calligraphy and traditional Chinese painting with my grandfather, who was a calligraphy professor. Today, I use the shapes of traditional Chinese hand fans as symbols of youth, drawing from memories of my mother and grandmother brandishing the fans to help …
Living Objects, Katie Tzu Hua Huang
Living Objects, Katie Tzu Hua Huang
Masters Theses
Sometimes, I find myself sunk into my memories, during daytime when the sun illuminates through the seam of the shutters in my room, or at midnight, when the world is in deep silence.
The sound of flipping books brings me back to the time when my mom sat in the living room quietly, with a cup of hot black tea as always. At the time when she read, I always found a stream of light illuminating the table, covering her face partially. One page, two pages, and three pages; as she kept flipping, the repetitive sound made the quiet afternoon …
, Nevertheless,, Ji Yoon Chung
, Nevertheless,, Ji Yoon Chung
Masters Theses
Derived from transitions, my artistic practice is an act of condolence for the transient presence that takes time and indulges every process as an acceptance of loss.
Over the years, I have moved between distinctive regions and cultures, only to be disoriented by mementos that are residues of a seemingly in- accessible past. What remains is to witness the vanished moments that evoke associated memories. I tend to solidify the volatile condition of transition by carving a temporary fragment on a permanent surface to make the ephemeral, eternal. The attempt to preserve a transitory phenomenon through archives by utilizing digital …
Finding Identity In Memories, Hyejun Youn
Finding Identity In Memories, Hyejun Youn
Masters Theses
What are the ways in which we form and build our identities and habits in both physical and digital spaces? How can our different uses of the digital expression which evolved from analog forms reveal traits and memories that we have forgotten or overlooked?
The way I define my identity through the analog media I collect correlates with the quality of the memories within my current schema, knowledge structures that represent typical instances of categories.
We interact with an infinity of objects from birth to death. Our collection of objects resonates more and more with memory and nostalgia as the …
This Side Of The Air, Madeline Peckenpaugh
This Side Of The Air, Madeline Peckenpaugh
Masters Theses
In my thesis, I have chosen to present a collection of stories throughout my life that continue to impact my practice, along with journal entries, gathered notes, and small to large conversations I've had with my peers, parents, visiting artists, and professors. These collection of stories take place in Wisconsin, Philadelphia, and Nepal, ranging in small moments to a span of seven years. I've been writing down words and clues that could lead me to find the thesis-worthy definition of my work and practice. As if someone or something else other than myself holds the knowledge I'm incapable of locating. …
Make Yourself At Home, Han Seok You
Make Yourself At Home, Han Seok You
Masters Theses
“Make Yourself at Home” is a personal journey of self-documentation to discover a definition of “home” and family, and to reenact the missing scenes from my youth. As a child who grew up in many different places far away from home, I missed out on many family moments and a sense of belonging. As a South Korean passport holder who has lived mostly in North America, my identity is unresolved. I find myself in the balance between Korean and American. With the progression of this project, I try to reconcile my past in order to gain an understanding of my …
Wrung From Grave Architectures, Megan Solis
Wrung From Grave Architectures, Megan Solis
Masters Theses
Found or imagined findings... notes, diary entries, texts, prayers and poems
Disasters are avenues to gain intimacy glory is the constant
What is the skeleton made of, if not to be filled with meat to be piled and molded to bring back life.
pain and memory to be grave architectures, the stuctures that fall,
a plea for humanity: “Am I just a phantom waiting to be ripped from shady ground?”
desperate melancholy we realize that she is
I am
you are
tragic.
guilt to perform, to retraumatize is a punishment and is masochistic. to violently reenact, like haunted ghosts, to …
Bundles And Blanks And Binds And Bends, Steven Kaplan-Pistiner
Bundles And Blanks And Binds And Bends, Steven Kaplan-Pistiner
Masters Theses
This thesis investigates how objects we make offer us a chance at maintaining what makes us human.