Arts and Humanities Commons^™

It Can't Leave You The Way It Finds You, Kyle Nobles

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

There’s a beautiful innocence in childhood where, although the world is large and new, it feels as though your place in it and the roles that you play are stable and unchanging. In our youth, outside of extraordinary circumstances, we are unburdened by the awareness that everything and everyone is subject to radical change—including our own sense of self. As we grow older though, looking back it becomes clear that this was never the case. In a matter of years, you can change so dramatically that you did not even notice as you became an entirely new person. For me, …

Don't Worry, Patricia L. Davis

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

When I was really young something at the core of my being whispered to me, “she won’t live very long.” At the time I didn’t know where that voice was coming from, but I knew it was true. It was unsettling. Over the years I realized that I was being prepared for the eventuality of my mother’s death and that I wouldn’t know when or how it would happen. When it did occur, suddenly I knew there was nothing between death and me but time. This thought has haunted me to the point that I have developed a fear of …

Man To Man, Chadric Devin Harms

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

In athletics, the phrase “man-to-man” refers to a type a defense: one where a single player is paired against another individual. They are in constant competition, and as rivals they relentlessly compare themselves to one another. This colloquial expression, which I use as the title of my thesis, also draws attention to the gendered term “man” as a social construction and signifies the diversity and complexity that exists between one representation of masculinity and another.

Throughout my childhood I felt an overwhelming responsibility and pressure from my stepfather and the small, Midwestern community in which I grew up to participate …

All That We See(M), Alison H. Vanvolkenburgh

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Born open-eyed, ready to take stock of our surroundings from the first breath, no other sense so largely informs our understanding of the world as sight. The ability to visually process our environment may seem extremely straightforward to those long accustomed to its instinctive use. However, there is more to seeing than the pure mechanics of visual perception. Since we live, not in a static environment, but one of constant change and motion, our knowledge of the world around us comes in fragments, shifting flashes of color, shape, and movement that coalesce through the active process of vision. In these …