Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Movement, Mechanization, And Coexistence, Yukyung Chung

Masters Theses

A movement is a tool that expresses the subject I pursue, ‘mechanization of human beings’. There are many technologies that replace humans these days, such as artificial intelligence. This makes me skeptical and afraid of being replaced as an artist in the future. Paradoxically, people, including myself, are enthusiastic about it, indicating that we do embrace the mechanization process as a society.

I will reveal this phenomenon of coexistence by demonstrating the possibility that machines cannot replace us, through motion experiments where rules increase, first starting with the reliance on intuition. I will explore not only the things that machines …

Beyond The White Box: Building Alternative Art Spaces For The Black Community, Elijah Trice

Masters Theses

BASED ON THE SYSTEMIC BIASES AND LACK OF SUPPORT FOR BLACK ARTISTS & DESIGNERS IN THE PRIMARY ART MARKET, THIS STIGMA DISCOURAGES BLACK AND BROWN COMMUNITIES FROM PURSUING A CAREER IN THE CREATIVE ARTS. MY GOAL IS TO UNDERSTAND THE UNDERLYING ISSUES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THIS DISPARITY, BY ANALYZING THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF BALTIMORE CITY AS A CASE STUDY.

Landscape De/Re-Construction Through Art, Manuel Gonzalez

Masters Theses

Contemporary landscape architecture practice and education primarily focus on ecological and technical interventions. The climate crisis we find ourselves in demands scientifically informed decisions and well-engineered execution of projects, but, more importantly, creativity and innovation.

The fine arts, which were once integral and foundational to design, are today largely unappreciated and appropriated. The spiritual power of Art, Aesthetics, and Beauty, explored at length through art history and theory, are often viewed as indulgent or secondary to execution. The gap between Art & Design has widened. As a result, designers face challenges in fostering in individuals the kind of care and …

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 …

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 Body Finding Freedom Within Itself, Malda Smadi

Masters Theses

When a dislocation of any type occurs, whether geographical, emotional, or spiritual, the disorder pushes the self to retreat to safety. For me, that safety is in my body. It is in this place of retreat where I locate my original home.

In this space of translocation, I forage for materials from my surroundings and places that I belong to. Moving between Dubai, Damascus, Beirut, and Providence, I shape a reality dependent on what is available. I then transform these materials, searching for the forms and relationships that emerge while meditating on home and the body as a moving vessel …

Margins (I Nvr Needed Acceptance From All U Outsiders), Jahi Lendor

Masters Theses

A comedian said, “American pie isn’t made out of apples, it’s made out of whatever you can get your fucking hands on.”1 With that, my work seeks to provide an honest representation of the infinite value of the everydayness and behavior of blackness ranging from trauma to beauty. Various mediums explore culture, class, collective memory, identity, and erasure. While resisting institutional and systemic boundaries between disciplines my practice actively seeks fluidity between media. The work often translates to (social) poetic-bricolage visualizations that combine gestures of assemblage, sculpture, installation, and painting. The work focuses on reflecting on how I see life …

Metaphors In Materials And Imagery For Self Reclamation And Empowerment, Janice Lardey

Masters Theses

As an experimental multidisciplinary artist, my creative process draws inspiration from daily experiences and encounters with the mundane. I am particularly interested in West African textile cultural practices, specifically the use of symbols and basic geometric forms to communicate through materials (specifically fabrics) and the role these images and forms play in African culture. In my work, I am developing my own distinct vocabulary of symbols and patterns, inspired by these practices.

My artistic practice explores a wide range of themes related to women, sustainability, loss, everydayness, wear and tear, degeneration, the transitory nature of life, and material effects, often …

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 …

A Presence Of P____ And W__Th, Riley Wilson

Masters Theses

This body of work examines the involvement of association as it relates to our cultural interpretations of natural phenomena. Flowers and animals, both real and imagined, have been used as symbols for human morality since the beginning of human history. Two sources with which I drew inspiration from are medieval bestiaries and the Victorian practice of flower language. By combining elements from these references, I aim to pair this idea about the human need for classification with my own considerations about my identity. In combination, I also aim to highlight the responsibility that is intrinsic to curiosity. When faced with …

Cultivar, Scott Vander Veen

Masters Theses

A memory palace is a mnemonic device that facilitates recollection by putting memory, that slippery substance, into a strictly structured mental geography. It is advisable to use a real place with which you are intimately familiar (perhaps your childhood home) as the scaffolding for the compartmentalization of whatever mental objects require organizing. Other objects, sensations, or atmospheric conditions are used to heighten the efficacy of the system—memory #1 may be found in the junk drawer in the kitchen, at dusk, nestled between a box of safety pins and a bundle of rubber bands. I am interested in the way this …

Flores, Rigoberto Flores

Masters Theses

My name is Rigoberto Flores and I was born in Guerrero, Mexico. The work I make involves politics, immigration, cartel violence and religious themes. I’m interested in presenting these challenging and difficult concepts, to have them remain in the public consciousness. The work I produce involve charcoal drawings, textiles, print, and painting. The work I create is intended to address inconstancies in established ideas, usually involving government violence. Throughout history art has been used to promote institutional propaganda. I am searching to do the same, but to oppose those structures.

Mixed Messages, Hannah Duggan

Masters Theses

The bodies of work that I have created during graduate school stem from my interest in mass media, culture studies and spectatorship in the digital era. My research engages digital technology and media studies to consider the ethics and ambivalence associated with spectatorship. Using traditional art mediums, I explore social and digital media, revealing tensions through representation and materiality. This translation from digital to analogue media is pivotal in all my work. Handmade objects introduce slippage and meaning as they break from the limiting format of the screen. This thesis will explore the research and content that inspired the creation …

Time Enough At Last, Scott Lerner

Masters Theses

As an art history buff and sci-fi aficionado, I’m constantly thinking about the stories told of human progress, or lack thereof. Have modern humans surpassed their ancient ancestors or have they only managed to create more technologically advanced ways of carrying on with their same base drives for power, status, and violence? If we turn to popular media, this question becomes particularly intriguing. Our visions of the future are often just a confused jumble of the past; we reanimate old ideas and images when trying to imagine the things to come. An example of this can be found in Star …

New Revelations, Ineke Lynne Knudsen

Masters Theses

This project imagines a not-so-distant American future where Christians and conservatives have triggered the Apocalypse. In my paintings of the Apocalypse, all the desires of conservative Christians have come to pass: the eradication of people of color and queer folks, a revitalization of the American frontier and wilderness, and the return of Jesus Christ in the form of the Rapture. I’m specifically painting White conservative Christian girls, and I’m interested in their unique intersectionality of being a White conservative (an identity rife with racist social implications), being female (an identity deeply abused within the Christian subculture), and being a child …

Baseball Camp And Other Stories, Lucas Mockler

Masters Theses

Of the questions I ask myself concerning the making of a painting, the one that continues to drive the work is this - where do the facilities and properties of technique in paint handling meet the action and then final experience of the painting? In the attempt to answer this question I have made work from the building up of my life. I have dug out from the memories of childhood and the metamorphosis of fictions into personal realities. I have added new movements and marks and built abstractions in the dark. The hope would be that as I work …

Tobetitled, Dylan Riley

Masters Theses

My practice is rooted in an investigation of digital and painted images. It meditates on the interbred way in which contemporary images are produced and consumed through painting and error-prone processes of mechanical reproduction. As seeing is, for many, our confirmation sense (you have to see it to believe it) I search for the power structures and epistemological values within contemporary images, particularly representations of objects. My work explores how the meaning of objectivity has shifted over time and how images respond to that shift. Heavily relying on image making software, I first create compositions digitally before translating them to …

Matingkad - Flamboyant, Bhen Alan

Masters Theses

In the Tagalog language, matingkad is used when describing colors or light. Its English translation, flamboyant, usually describes a character of a person - a queer, performer, drag?

People have called me flamboyant due to the way I dress, my gestures, and how I approach my work. Because of this, I have experience discrimination and abuse towards my race and gender, as well as my citizenship status. Therefore I have learned to begin employing flamboyance to be opaque (matingkad na kulay).

With this experience, I had to adjust the opacity of my body as a way of survival …

Paradigms Of Horror, Xingge Zhang

Masters Theses

“It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy” (Hume, 1757).

Horror, said Adorno in another context, was beyond the scope of psychology. Horror tries to frighten, shock, horrify, and disgust using a variety of visual and auditory leitmotifs and devices, including reference to the supernatural, the abnormal, mutilation, blood, gore, the infliction of pain, death, deformity, putrefaction, darkness, invasion, mutation, extreme instability, and the unknown. Supernatural or uncanny narratives can shape, distort, or reflect the storyline in literary works, but also …

Pace/Place/Space/Tempo—The Choreography Of Equity And Expressions Of Black Living, Vessna Scheff

Masters Theses

My skin is natural. My skin is political. My hair is natural. My hair is political. My speech is natural. My speech is political. There’s no such thing as apolitical.

My current interdisciplinary practice in painting and performance focuses on how Black diasporic identities hold, create, and process subsistence narratives. For this research, I am asking the questions: What role does pace play in resistance strategies and how can it be communicated through tempo? How are unspoken histories conveyed through movement, silence, the glance of an eye, fat crackling in a cast iron, pushing play on a walkman, and seeds …

Can’T Stop Coyote, Tala Worrell

Masters Theses

I work hard to keep language out of my studio. Language reminds me of my mom’s voice, people telling me what to do, not having the right accent, critiques, criticism in general, mis-truths, and never being good enough. Language is the material of my thoughts, and most of my thoughts, or the ones on a constant loop anyhow, are all those voices over and over again.

Painting is where I get to be me, with myself, and in my body. Painting is my home, family, refuge, and best friend. I’m not looking at myself from the outside, no one can …

Uncaring Universe, Jingqi Wang Steinhiser

Masters Theses

Depicting the mythical and chaotic, my work revisits traditional and pop-cultural icons. I borrow my framing of absurdity from Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus: “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. [...]This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”

I grew up as the only child in a family of diplomats, a learning journey that mutated across geographies. Born in China, I lived in Russia, Mongolia and Korea before coming to the USA. My world is an aesthetic amalgamation of dissonant …

Mending What’S Invisible, Chaehee Yoon

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition Mending What’s Invisible, in which the artist’s personal experiences and memories explore the cultural identities and femininity in Korea and the US. These identities are explored by using traditional Korean motifs, embroidery patterns, and the visual images of the artist's childhood photographs in the projects of “Reconnecting of Nostalgia” and “Mutating”. Also the visual clips of the artist's hometown is demonstrated in the video project “Things I hated” that discusses criticalities of Korean cultures and a sense of nostalgia for childhood in Korea. The project comes out of a personal need to …

Dissonant Forms: Landscape, Nature-Love, And Art, Taylor F. Benoit

Masters Theses

As artists continue the long and storied lineage of Landscape, are there aesthetic responsibilities that come with representing the forces that afford you the capacity to do so? As we delineate spaces into places, endless interconnectivity into knowable “systems”, and living matter into thing based taxonomies, who do these delineations serve and with what intentions do we proceed? My studio art practice explores what it means to give form to our Former—the Former being that from which we came, the here and now, our explicit ecological reality, the stuff of what we call nature. …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

Records Of (Un)Learning, Gregory Deddo

Masters Theses

The internal processes by which we remember and learn (mnēmē) are in tension with the exterior mnemonic devices of writing, photography, and archives (hypomnēsis). Attempts to accurately record and document our lives often disrupt the living, intersubjective memory it is meant to aid. This dichotomy plays out in both the interpersonal sphere of relationships and identity, and in the socio-political sphere of history, governance, and economics. Our contemporary postmodern condition, as shaped by technologic developments, is marked by an increased skepticism about testimony, witness, and experience and a greater reliance on data-driven information and the structure …

Blue Loops, Rebecca Senn

Masters Theses

I started threading wires between objects in an attempt at connecting the fragments of my life, winding forms into spiraling webs of meaning. Bluebirds, cartoon toys, Jewish kitsch, 90’s teen angst, immaterial feeling. Wires are squeezed with plaster and smothered in paint, tightly wound, mummified, squeezed to death, or post-death, suspended in an oxygenless void, as if time stopped and all at once we could feel the simultaneity of things — the star hurtling through space, a swimmer falling into water, raindrops sliding off a pair of glasses. I spin wires, squeeze them with wet plaster, mummify them, until they …

Everyone I Have Every Crowed With 2021-, Hannah Lutz Winkler

Masters Theses

I started taking walks at sunset to feel better. It was January of 2021, nearly a year into the COVID pandemic. On these antidepressant walks, I kept running into crows, participating in their own sunset ritual, hundreds of them in a raucous shimmering black net. They flew around the city, my hometown, gathering, gossiping, and ultimately sleeping together in trees. I was both intoxicated by and jealous of the nightly crow party—standing under them was my only crowd experience in nine months. For the next three months, I tracked them every night I could. My solo practice of paying the …

The Broken Thought Machine [Broh-Kuhn Thawt Muh-Sheen], Michael Dispensa

Masters Theses

A bulky, inflamed, excess volume of overactive targeted neuron choking nonsense that profits off creating fear-induced high-speed bowel movements.

My current work seeks to create space for intrusive thoughts and images that repeat, disturb, distress, and contaminate. The source of these intrusions is called the Broken Thought Machine(BTM). I use multimedia practices of drawing, sculpture, performance, and video to unearth the origins and properties of the BTM to then perpetuate its product to an absurd degree. This obsessive reiteration brings negativity to a threshold where horror and detachment can spontaneously metamorphose into humor and compassion.

The BTM can be an …

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 …