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He Makes The Figs Our Mouths To Meet And Throws The Melons At Our Feet, Josh Meier

Masters Theses

He Makes the Figs Our Mouths to Meet and Throws the Melons at Our Feet investigates the relationship between the painted image and the cast subject. By compressing the visual contradictions of pictorial and physical space, my work argues for a simultaneity of conditions and emotions. I am interested in how two material realities can hybridize to produce a new, unanticipated, re-imagined self-portraiture. This thesis contextualizes my recent works within historical frameworks and discourses including other artists’ writings and artworks, philosophies of abjection, feminist and queer theories of embodiment, poetry, film, and stream-of-consciousness memoir.

Smoke And Mirrors, Kiernan Pazdar

Masters Theses

The impulse to make work from the residue of real life has been called many things throughout art history. In my thesis, I use some of these methods to discuss generative modes of creating work. I talk about Lucy Lippard’s proposal for a “way of making,” Disidentification, Camp, Appropriation, Termite Art, and Hito Steyerl’s call to create art that addresses the present in imaginative ways. Each process relies on a commitment to being in the world and building something on its uneven ground.

In Liary I discuss the relationship between my drawing practice and fiction writing. Since subjectivity is dependent …

How To Be Simultaneously Precise And Nondescript, Mckinzie Trotta

Masters Theses

As I stood by my car, I kept coming back to the phrase. It is more difficult to hit a moving target. This time, it was not just a passing platitude. I thought more. Just as it is more difficult to intentionally hit a moving target, a moving target is simultaneously more difficult to intentionally miss. It might be easier to hit a moving target if what one is really trying to do is miss it. Isn’t this why car accidents happen? People hit the thing they are by all means trying to avoid. Everyone is in motion and despite …

Art Beside A Single Handshake : Can You Believe It?, Tongji Qian

Masters Theses

Although I was familiar with works by both McKinzie and Phil, their prints still caught my attention during the Printmaking Graduate Biennial at Rhode Island School of Design in January 2019. In contrast to the numerous talented artists who employed strategies to affirm the relevancy of printmaking in a contemporary discourse, McKinzie and Phil seemed to desire something different. Their collaboration series of Ten Identical Prints was predictably “printerly” and perilously unexciting, betraying a fraught and commonplace relationship between an expressive artist and a scrupulous master printer. How could these two artists showcase such mundanity? What was the stake of …