Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Land Of Reverie, Sarah Moon

MFA in Visual Art

As children we are fascinated by the mythical. Imagining the attractive or even the disturbing serves as an escape from reality. By painting unicorns, vast surreal landscapes, and imaginative playscapes my work expands the white cube gallery into an immersive extension of my imagination. By viewing the canvas as a portal into a world where limitations dissolve, I paint acidic colors, fluid boundaries, and a malleable reality.

My studio practice is inspired by artists who experiment with color and scale like Kenny Scharf, Katharina Grosse, and Pipilotti Rist. In my colorful, large-scale works I explore the transformative power of play …

Color Psychology: How Colors Can Reflect Our Emotions In Relation To Gender, Age, And Cultural Background., Virginia Alvisi

Honors Theses

Our lives are surrounded and influenced by colors. Colors help us in our everyday lives, from helping us understand different concepts to helping us drive around town with road signs and streetlights. Colors regulate our lives not only physically but also, especially, psychologically. Warm and bright colors can give insight into
energy and happiness. On the contrary, cool and dark ones can be soothing and calming.

Research has demonstrated that colors can shape our experiences and affect our psycho-emotional status (our mental state related to a situation or circumstance). To demonstrate the link between our psycho-emotional state and the use …

Pan Shot!, Samuel Robert Gaston Mattax

Theses and Dissertations

Sam Mattax's practice is aimed at working through what he has lived and what he is living. They are self-involved diaristic building blocks of marking time and release. The layered drawings negotiate Sam's history and his day to day, distorting one another into a place of unrecognizable space and condensed energy. It is a process of attaining a loose understanding of his life and forgetting it all at once. Sam's work is survival.

I, Others, World - A Glass Circuit, Ariel Aravot

Masters Theses

In the summer of 2022, I had an epiphany about what an art-work is in its most expansive form: a circuit, activated by art creation, between self and others, and between them to wider worlds, and back to the self. ‘A GLASS CIRCUIT’ is the tale of my ongoing exploration of myself as a glass artist, the conscious discovery of my path, which is both consistent and incessantly changing. My works are the stepping stones that sustain my creative process as a glass blower and at the same time introduce experimentality, new questions, and new research topics.

The circuit is …

Spirits In My Studio., Katelyn Gabbard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The exhibition “Spirits in My Studio” unveils the inventories of elements in human relationships and connections through collecting and transforming remnants left behind—admiration of an object combined with a presentation format that creates an immersive three-dimensional field to traverse. An acknowledgment and celebration of entropy, the exchange in human experiences elevates the process to both content and medium. Moreover, it creates active entanglements with genuine physical relationships with the artist, the making, and the audience.

The Color Of Sound: An Insight On Chromesthesia, Lupe Rodriguez

Honors Capstones

Many people can see with their eyes, but there are some people who can see through sound. Chromesthesia is when sound involuntarily evokes an experience of color through shapes and movement. The goal of this project is to show what this experience is like and give people an opportunity to experience it in a way themselves.

The Color of Sound Website Prototype

Emotional Landscapes, Jin Young Jeong

Theses and Dissertations

“Emotional Landscape” delivers a sense of gravity, openness, and breathing space through oil paintings on linen of abstracted bodily forms. The imagery in the works generates an atmosphere where one can feel rooted and anxiety-free. The paintings invite a close read of the complexities of compounded affects.

The Friendly Hammer, Imogen Xaviere Plochere Dalzell

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Chromaticity, Whitney Anne Hagen

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Chromaticity is an objective specification of the quality of a color regardless of its luminance consisting of two independent parameters. These are often specified as hue and colorfulness, where the latter is alternatively called saturation, chroma, intensity, or excitation purity. These parameters follow how the human eye perceives color, giving us visual cues when navigating the world. In abstract art, where form is not bound by the constraints of representation, color becomes the primary tool for communication. Creating harmony, tension, emotion, and balance, the color relationships in this collection of work communicates to the viewer in a visual language that …

Seeking Translation, Taryn Sakry

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

I am interested in how we navigate and understand the world around us. As we move through life, meeting different people and having new experiences, we develop a language of self-interpretation that allows us to communicate intangibles such as ideas, values, and emotions. Within this body of work, I explore this idea of translating self, highlighting the reinterpretation of memory and emotion through color and narrative. Seeking Translation includes woodcut, intaglio, silkscreen, and stone lithography prints. The multiplicity of printmaking allows me to experiment with the effects of different colors and juxtaposition of different materials and mediums. And while the …

Connect: Translating Complexity Through Visual Simplification, Ilhee Park

Masters Theses

CONNECT: Translating Complexity through Visual Simplification brings complex data into concise visual systems that encourage ease of access. With a background in Human Factors Engineering, user engagement remains a central focus in my design. Whether reducing barriers to scientific information or untangling deeply complex data, design must contain intuitive concepts without the need for extended explanation. Using bold color and geometric shapes as the core design language to render pictorial narratives, this thesis maps my development as an information designer through modes of gathering, deciphering, and interpreting.

Just Enough, Amelia Greteman

Masters Theses

As a child, I never answered the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with “a furniture designer.” Even though both of my parents are artists, making things never seemed like a job; it just seemed like something we all loved to do. Some of my best memories are of working in the studio alongside them - painting, smearing, building, and destroying, but always vigilantly coloring within the lines.

This thesis investigates my past and current relationship to making and the urge I have to simplify and reduce. It takes place in the form of furniture …

(1-12 All The Way Down), Amorelle Jacox

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings are born out of a profound sense of cosmic free-fall. Tables and black holes hover in a realm where slippage between figure, object and space are confused. Metaphor pries open depths of metaphysical inquiry. That, with a brushstroke, the sky’s stomach might fold into a plate, and slip between the days.

Buzz Buzz, Sarah Heinemann

Theses and Dissertations

Taking the form of a series of notes and notations, this document serves as an account of color in my painting practice as it intersects through personal memory, research, and my studio and professional practices.

Culture In Disney Films: A Comparative Analysis Of Color, Composition And Rhythm, Megan Paul

Interior Design Undergraduate Honors Theses

As a student of design, I take inspiration from everything around me. The media I consume, the places I visit, and the people I meet.By choice or not, I and my generation are subject to the various forms of pop culture, film is one of them. Film is one of few art forms which combines several methods and elements of design to produce a cohesive result, as opposed to a singular medium. This forms the connection to design thinking and is the foundation for the study.

Another critical component to pop culture is the ability to reach the masses. Due …

The Effects Copper Has On Casting Glass, K. Malika Haver

Honors Projects

The aim of this honors project was to discern the difference between how various types of copper reacted with glass. The two disciplines that were connected were chemistry and glassblowing. The basic components learned in chemistry were applied to glass with an end goal of a project installation that visualized the discoveries with copper. The glassblowing technique used was lost wax casting, and the two types of copper used were copper foil and fine copper metal powder. The copper was found to turn the glass into various blues with the intensity and darkness of the blues being dependent on the …

Visions, Ella J. Menees

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Visions, by Ella Menees, comprises four diptychs. While the paintings serve as a true exploration and celebration of color, each pair also has a distinct focus on the psychological and the unexpected. Littered with bright colors and surreal landscapes, these paintings cause the viewer to ponder all that is not shown. Each diptych presents the same subject in two different moments. The strange lighting washed over each face acts as a mask, whereas the background depicts each subject’s state of mind. Instead of “landscapes,” I consider them to be “mindscapes.”

Each subject has a distinct, yet similar, experience with trauma. …

“Fake It!”: An Exploration Of Cinematography, Societal Expectations, And Artist Collaboration, Sullivan Perry

Undergraduate Honors Theses

An exploration of cinematography, societal expectations, and artist collaboration, “Fake It!” challenges the traditional definition of art. Part one follows the journey of creating a music video for an original song titled “Fake It!” by the band Model City. Location, lighting, camera, and editing choices are explained and connected to the song's themes of teenage angst, regret, and a rejection of societal norms. Part two explores the process of creating art by translating the hexadecimal color values from the music video into a new musical composition. This is accomplished through a mathematical process that converts the computer-identified RGB letters and …

Our Mother Never Asked For This, Casey Cataldo

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

Abstract

Our Mother Never Asked for This, is a series of artworks consisting of paintings, sculptures, installations, and fiber art. The aim of the work is to capture the colors and emotion that I have encountered in my time outdoors.

My work examines a human connection with nature through the use of naturally derived materials used to create pigments, and recycled linen. In the age of Anthropocene and the ever present advancement of technology, and consumerism, my work looks at how these “advancements” have changed my relationship to the natural world. I use the context of art to explore the …

Elsewhere: Impressions Of Sense & Nonsense, Madeline Woods

Masters Theses

I’m not going to give it all away up front, but here are a few things you’ll find inside: a flower that tastes like peppermint, a book that smells like sunscreen, a silver orb that purrs, a woman becoming a tree, a shy rainbow, and a hat that is also a disguise. There are lists, letters, dreams, and notes. I hope there aren’t typos, but I’m only human, after all. There is sense, and there is also nonsense.

If you decide to join me here, we will wander elsewhere — across different kinds of terrain, into sensory experiences, between mediums, …

Polyrhythms, Kevin Costante

Masters Theses

This work strives to integrate seemingly ‘distant’ practices into a concept by emphasizing their differences. A syncopation between a maker and designer, a planner and improviser. A search for commonalities in the middle of what otherwise creates conflict. I cultivate a space to play alongside my inherent formalities by incorporating color and movement. I find rhythm persists uninterrupted through the discrepancies of my process and inspirations. I want to see it in the outcomes of my work.

How can I be compatible with this world of rudiments and structure and also comply with my reliance on ‘chance’?

Excerpts From Witness’S Testimony, Menahem Haike

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Excerpts from Witness’s Testimony

(New York v Taylor)

including “Eyes Like the Eyes of a Man, and a Mouth Speaking Pompous Words”

by Dr. Daniel Yochai

Introduction by Dr. Yehuda Mendelsohn

Shifting Center, Walker Bankson

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Interior Friends, Odette Steinert

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Myelination: A Plastic Religion, Cody A. Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Plastic products are convenient, abundant and our use of them has become routine. This acceptance of

plastics’ presence has become a dogma that most humans adhere to. The continual consumption of

these single-use plastics in our daily lives has unknowingly shaped our environmental consciousness,

behaviors, and justification for them. This belief in plastics function has been strategically developed by

companies that rely on our behaviors to distribute their products. Humans have become the faithful

consumers of these goods and this belief. The brain and its ability to remain plastic and develop

decision-making skills are known as Myelination. New experiences enhance …

My Exploration Of Treasures From The Mind Of David Park, Brittany Schwartz

Honors Theses

My honors thesis, “My Exploration of Treasures from the Mind of David Park” draws attention to communicate my sense of the female figure to the viewer, while taking particular gestures from the figures of the Bay Area painter David Park’s work. I seek to convey how the self or essence of being can appear on canvas. David Park resonated with me because of his eye for exceptional color combinations, physicality he builds with substance on canvas, use of bold mark-making and simplicity of forms. I am manipulating David Park’s representations of figures and making my own compositions, applying drybrush, oil …

To Protect The Hell Yeah And Every Hell Yeah's Variations, Lukey Walden

Masters Theses

I try to imagine a scrutiny free from transaction and authority, where time and generosity are not scarce. If real generosity divests from the expectation of returns, then what are the full implications of imaging someone in this way, through touch? My sitters gave me permission to stare at them in private. What happens to this momentary consensual gaze over time, prolonged into months of looking? Prolonged into an abundance of labor, abundance of attention, abundance of precious materials?

‘How Has Art Refocused Consumers’ Attention Within A Visual World Through The Exploration Of Package Design?’, Frances Hackney

Honors Theses

The art of design has refocused the attention of consumers as they have entered into a visually demanding world. While this concept is complex and perplexing, stemming from endless influencing factors, the elements of design can be broken down into areas of focus to dissect the visual world of marketing. A simple way to communicate the influence of design on the consumers is to unveil the answers through the study of art.

In this thesis, the study will turn to the world of art to learn more about consumerism. The goal is to understand how visual images and the ongoing …

Turning And Turning, Nicola Stephanie

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores Nicola Stephanie’s works in painted and shaped canvas, which investigate sensation and visual awareness of motion. Inspired partly by clothing forms, her vocabulary of color, shape and surface articulates a sense of the body and its boundaries. These spatial drawings evoke perceptions of gravity, rotation and orientation.

Systematic Fractures, Lucas Bourgine

Senior Projects Spring 2020

At the end of the road, facing the beach a woman sits in her car, her face dimly lit by her phone screen. While the incessant scroll happens, I observe, ponder, let time and space communicate. As for myself, strewn about the landscape I construct and puzzle. At hand is my own personal catharsis, never forgetting an imagined viewer in the back of my mind. Whether it be through guiding their sight, misleading them, confusing them, obscuring their vision, making them question. Ultimately, I want to play and push boundaries of space and three dimensionality, all the while observing a …