Arts and Humanities Commons^™

There Are Ghosts In The Machine, Jonathan Green

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are ghosts in the machine is a body of paintings that dare to dissolve the boundaries between my physical body, intimate desires, and paintings. Utilizing the aesthetics of leather lifestyles, the paintings express the transformational potential of desire and transgression. Oriented within my experience as a queer, transgender male, I call upon influences that range from the body horror classics by director David Cronenberg or the transgressive attitude of Nine Inch Nails, to theoretical works on the power of eroticism by Audre Lorde and Georges Bataille.Modified by hardware such as chains, zippers, and grommets, the paintings express the transformational …

As The Sun Yellows The Green Of The Maple Tree, Adam Fulwiler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Sun Yellows the Green of the Maple Tree is a body of paintings investigating communication, improvisation, play, and painting’s capacity for transformation.

Reflecting on my childhood spent with my brother, Austin, who experiences sensory differences due to autism, I establish a painted space that is both forcibly disjointed and meaningfully connected, invoking the uncertainty and complexity of perception and communication. Through chromatic nuance, physicality, representational ambiguity, and visual tempo, I invite the viewer into the act of slow looking—to encounter each work as a living, breathing, individual entity.

In the studio, I invent rules and aleatoric devices, mimicking …

Invisible Until, Markeith Woods

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Invisible Until” explores my personal experiences while working full time at Tyson Foods in Pine Bluff, AR up until moving to Fayetteville for graduate school. The body of artwork comes from reflecting on past a present while drawing from inspiration from Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Casteel, and more. Using history as a tool to break down the American struggle I used conversations amongst my high school classmates to pull from their direct experiences to convey life and what it means to come from Pine Bluff. By using real people and their life events of trying to achieve progress, …

Heartwork, Lance Taylor Loftin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heartwork is a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore the many ways identity is shaped by familial histories and personal memory. Focusing on my time growing up on a pine tree farm in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 90s, Heartwork explores gender, religion, regional traditions, family, and art. Through conversations and collaborations with my family, painting acts as an impetus for strengthening relationships. By reevaluating the past, I am able to create a web of interconnected narratives that inform and shift my understanding of the present.

The Branch On Which The Blossom Hangs, Thomas Sterling Coffey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Branch on Which the Blossom Hangs is a body of paintings which address the relationship between landscape or physical presence and the primary experiences of emotion and perception. Through this examination of phenomenology and the malleability of the perceptual apparatus, the paintings express my feeling of dislocation caused by a cycle between depression, dissociation, and mental well-being. They question how an individual relates to their environment. The paintings seek to elicit the allusive and embodied qualities of poetry, framing and evoking a broader experience without defining it. By using the recognizable visual language of landscape, abstracted to the point …

When They Sing A Song Of Joy With Sorrow, Ziba Rajabi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As an Iranian female artist, my work revolves around my desire to reconcile my relationship with two distinctive places, Tehran (my native land) and Arkansas (where I reside now). In my paintings and installations, I re-create intimate moments culled from my home and neighborhood in Iran. Due to a situation where I am far away from my homeland and not allowed to return without being forced to remain in Iran, I can feel my memories of home fading away. By utilizing memories from my past, I take aspects of images that are no longer recognizable and, therefore, are abstracted into …

Liable To Change, Jody Travis Thompson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Liable to Change is a body of paintings in which I explore diverse approaches to the representation of visual space. Depictions of space and movement change throughout the pictures by combining various artistic conventions, such as trompe l’oeil realism and non-objective, geometric abstraction. Oil paint, resin, beeswax, and other materials create built-up surfaces which contain the history of their making. Interaction between various finishes and light on these surfaces changes based on the viewers' proximity to the painting. Images of monkey bars, lattice, golden ratio and flower of life patterns provide a structure through which line, form, and space are …

For Wintonbury: An Expansion Of Narrative And Painting, Cassaundra Kayla Sanderson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In March 2017, I began planning the narratives of what would become my Thesis Exhibition. One year later marked my installation of the exhibit: For Wintonbury, located at the Fine Art Center Gallery at the University of Arkansas.

A merging of the visual arts and literary fiction, For Wintonbury offers a more immersive experience in storytelling. The painted scenes, drawings, three-dimensional compositions, and short stories each serve their own purposes in presenting partial glimpses into the longer narratives of Wintonbury. Through multiple media and entry points, the viewer is given the choice in which sequence and manner to take in …

Off The Grid, Matthew Owen Buffington

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Off the Grid explores the messy relationship between public and private perceptions of our urban spaces, especially the tensions created when lived experience runs up against the physical and conceptual networks of cities: street grids, construction tape, and property lines. Incorporating different modes of spatial representation, from cartographic diagrams to isometric illustrations and Renaissance perspectives, this exhibition examines the role drawing plays in how we conceptualize the divisions and definitions of everyday space. The drawings engage the often overlooked detritus of city life, from layers of old graffiti to overgrown dirt piles and unmoored electrical wiring, that complicate our understanding …

Place(Ment), Ashley Lynn Byers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Throughout her time at the University of Arkansas Master of Fine Arts program, Ashley Byers has been creating work about the folklore, landscape, and people of the Ozarks. Though she continues to create work with the Ozarks in mind, it became a motif used for a broader conversation about the ad hoc, holiness, painting, landscape, the figure, and intimacy.

In many ways, the concepts within her work are born out of the Ozarks.

When can remnants come together to become more than the sum of their parts? Derelict, easily dismissed objects, when set in the right context or viewed through …

Synthetic Constructive, Jonathan Wade Mcdaniel

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Synthetic Constructive is an exhibition of paintings and collages, both reflect the building and managing of synthetically constructed places and expose the human condition of struggle in both the physical world and the emotional world. I view these works as synthetically created arenas that inform my understanding and experience of natural forces that cannot be rationalized or neatly ordered. Though inspired by and constructed from the imagery of the after effects of devastation they become more than that as they explore these relationships. It is important that these works, both as collages and as paintings, reflect the search and process …

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.

Marais Des Cygnes, John Michael Orr

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis documents the concept, process, installation, and specific pieces in my Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Marais des Cygnes. The Marais des Cygnes is a river in southeast Kansas and western Missouri, near a Bleeding Kansas-era massacre site of the same name. The river is notorious for flash flooding, was named by French explorers and translates to Marsh of the Swans. The work is about a fictional wandering car thief and alcoholic named Vernon, the bad guy in my novel. Vernon is obsessed with the distant past, particularly the time before the Louisiana Purchase and the Louisiana of …