Arts and Humanities Commons^™

What's Left Over, Bryanna Jaramillo

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The MFA thesis exhibition titled, What's Left Over, is comprised of a series of drawings as well as a large painted sculptural installation assembled as a child's fantasy world. The work explores the roots of creativity through the lens of childhood play by assembling an invented world named Lola. By exploring the relationship between the real and the imaginary, the work manifests childhood memories into a form that can be studied and better understood. Lola is an elaborate but clearly handmade world that explores an unresolved past.

Noise., Laura Katherine Polaski

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My research is in the realm of the psychological, the emotional and way these drives manifest physically. The works in Noise. aims to give a physical representation to the non-physical. Research on Affect Theory and the teachings of Silvan Tomkins were paramount to understanding emotional drives and the ways in which they manifest.

The purpose of this research is to understand how emotions are generated and communicated and to ask if specific emotions can be generated upon viewing inanimate objects. I create abstract figurative sculpture, which imitate emotion that has no specific physicality. These works exist with one foot in …

Breaking Wind, Todd William Pentico

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Breaking Wind is a research project and thesis exhibition composed of a series of ceramic objects in conjunction with paintings that explore the systems that dictate belief, the motives that drive curiosity, and biological connection to our surroundings. The work uses the context of the gallery and devices used in museums such as plinths, shelves, and wall text to reinforce the idealized and fictive into something believable.

In the work, Breaking Wind refers to a clumsy breakdown and rethinking of the seemingly simple natural phenomenon, wind. Wind is understood as a natural occurrence that has no origin or any innate …

Cycle, Nichole Annette Howard

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cycle is the exhibition of a year-long project that experiments with growing food and medicinal herbs. Alongside an exploration of plant growth, I transfer iconic cultural objects of daily life from plastic to ceramics. Using material culture as a physical and conceptual platform, this re-contextualization of objects offers a radically different view of use and meaning. I transform the soda-filled, plastic Big Gulp cup into a terra planter filled with new life.

My working method involves making molds of Big Gulp plastic cups and transferring the form into a traditional plant growing material, terra cotta. I then germinate seeds inside …

Tethered, Samantha Jean Dixon

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Tethered addresses the innate fear of forgetting where an individual's family originates, both physically and historically. Not long after discovering that part of my family was almost completely annihilated during the Holocaust, I produced Tethered as visual documentation of the long-term effects of families of survivors. The exhibition is also influenced by my grandmother's experiences as a Mauthausen concentration camp survivor and my own experiences being raised by a survivor.

The knowledge of the imminent loss of memory initiates an instinct to repetitively record and remember personal history. Numerous memories have been forcefully buried in the darkest recesses of the …

Toile, Dilenia Garcia

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Toile is a painting series that explores constructions of taste and the semiotics of manufactured fabrics. Through the use of irony, paradox and deconstructions of rhythm, shape, color and form, the paintings are a response to the formal and historical content in the fabric. The idyllic landscape, notions of identity, sexism and liminality are some of the themes considered in the series. The paintings in this exhibition attempt to correct and mediate outdated models of representation through the exploration of painting as a process that is open and malleable.

Ant Tribe, Yan Zhao

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"Ant Tribe" describes the post-80s generation university graduates who live together in poor conditions without Social security in communities around China's major metropolises. They dream of a better life in big cities but struggle with low-paying jobs. These struggling "elites" have become the fourth weak Social group, after peasants, migrant workers and unemployed people. The reason why these college graduates are compared to ants is that they are like ants: clever, hardworking, politically weak and living in groups.

The real world is always different from the ideal world of the "Ant Tribe" in China. They often lose their purposes in …

Spiral Installation, Mauricio Alfredo Linares-Aguilar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Spiral is a site-specific gallery installation. Simplicity and subtleness are the goals for this installation. It shapes a spiral from above, and is meant to be experienced by walking through it. It has four different elements: one white cotton scrim, 71 feet long by 9 feet high, one cotton scrim 15 feet long by 9 feet high, a direct wall print, and outside natural air. The piece is made of materials such as cotton fabric, casein, bleach and Arkansas yellow oxide clay.

The intent of Spiral Installation is to convey the idea of the flowing process of life and death …

Pixel; Ghost, John Christopher Kelley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Pixel; Ghost is an exhibition of video and sound installations that explore the creation, change, and degradation of memory, transitional states of mind, and family. The pieces are structured around cinematic clichés such as dream sequences, flashbacks and establishing shots, using them as a language to translate personal experience into something more universal.

In my work, Pixel refers to the individually active component of a larger system. A pixel itself changes and has its own characteristics, though these are ultimately subservient to its role in the larger system of a screen. The purpose and meaning of a pixel comes not …