Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Skim, Joy Wong

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis dossier provides the theoretical structure to my art production, and is presented alongside my thesis exhibition skim at McIntosh Gallery. This document is comprised of three parts: a comprehensive artist statement outlining the methodology and theory to my work, a case study of painter Cecily Brown, and photographic documentation of my studio practice. These components illustrate the research and material engagement about skin, corporeality, the abject, the grotesque, the formless, and purity.

Art B0051 Studio Critique, Thomas A. Thayer Mr

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

White Gilt, Daniel Schmidt

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

White Gilt

This exhibition is a dissection of American masculinity and institutional oppression. The systematic mistreatment of people within certain social identity groups is supported and perpetuated by society. My work is a personal investigation of this flawed system, my place therein and its ramifications.

The fragility of masculinity provokes immeasurable violence. Whiteness can be stereotyped as a toggle switch between bland culture, and self-entitled bigotry. These works are a confrontation with the dark parts of the human psyche, and the fears surrounding vulnerability, power and sexuality.

Through discomfort we can deepen empathy and cultivate progress.

Daniel Schmidt

Selfie-Portrait, John Shield, John Shield

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The selfie has become the currency of today; boldly stating: I was here, this is how I felt, and, most importantly, I exist.

This has become our self-reflection. Exploring the self-portrait, as have countless artists of the past, Johnny Shield uses the various selfies as reference for his sculptural works - both empty vessels and sculptural busts. Made from glass these fragile objects are all doomed to break. You, the viewer, are witnessing a truly damned object: the central portrait uneasily rests on a pedestal that is actively electrolytically corroding. While on display, this pedestal will lean more and more …

Layered Histories, Interpretive Desires, Rachelle Dang

Theses and Dissertations

I aim to excavate source material from the past and reinterpret its significance in the present through art. I merge history with the contemporary through acts of appropriation and material exploration, creating conditions for the viewer to grapple with colonial legacies in an affective space of visual experience.

Overlapping Entities: Visualizing The Space Between Nature And Culture, Zoie Brown

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my work I generate forms that occupy the space between our false conceptions of nature and culture. I subvert binaries–both between nature and culture and between women and men–through the physical conflation of microscopic and macroscopic spaces. Nature itself is a cultural concept; the notion that we are separate from nature at all is a fallacy. The body of work discussed uses ideas from Environmental Sociology and my definition of intersectional Ecofeminism to visualize the intersection of these cultural binaries within physical space. The pieces included utilize light responsive technology as a means of mediating our experiences with the …

Unmaking As Making, Viola Bordon

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Artist Viola Bordon examines the processes of touch, unmaking, and materially dictated aesthetics regarding her studio practice. The philosophical ideas of absence are used to establish a purpose for undoing, which is then explored as a learning process. This process is complicated by the sense of touch, resulting in formal aesthetics that are materially inspired.

Profanation, Tsahi Zac H. Hacmon

Theses and Dissertations

This paper attempts to provoke an Israeli American dialogue that comes through profanity of conventional architecture. I am creating this dialogue by displaying two main subjects in proximity to each other: border architecture from Israel and institutional architecture or non-places in New York.

Poteus, Jimmy Snowden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Proteus is an exhibition that consists of seven sculptures, three woodcut prints, and an installation comprised of steel and ceramics. The seven sculptures vary in size and are fabricated from steel, wood, plastic, and foam. The woodcut prints are hand carved and large in scale from a printmaking standpoint. The purpose of Proteus is to explore ideas of balance as it pertains to: life, death, love, resentment, adventure, responsibility, the subconscious, and the physical world. The methods employed while producing this body of work range from traditional to experimental, and the results of the endeavor are mainly obtained through …

Ode To The Sea: Art From Guantanamo, Erin L. Thompson, Charles Shields, Paige Laino

Publications and Research

Exhibition catalogue for “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo” (October 16, 2017-January 26, 2018, President's Gallery, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York). Detainees at the United States military prison camp known as Guantánamo Bay have made art from the time they arrived. The exhibit displays some of these evocative works, made by eight men: four who have since been cleared and released from Guantánamo, and four who remain there. They paint the sea again and again although they cannot reach it. The catalog includes contributions by Trevor Paglen, Solmaz Sharif, Natasha Trethewey, Jericho Brown, and current and …

Of The Crickets, Kathryn Lien

Theses and Dissertations

Of the Crickets imagines the overlapping worlds of ethical ecological solutions to climate changed sustenance and the potential for collective excellence in female exclusive environments. Using garments, furniture, site-specific installation and directed performance, the project harnesses social and material sensitivity to mine solutions for idealized living.

Isolation, Hollis B. Mccracken

Theses and Dissertations

My work investigates a lifelong passion for buildings, homes, and architecture. Buildings are more then shelters made of wood and screws; I personify them as if they were living breathing creatures. I’m particularly drawn to rundown and abandoned structures because I empathize with these sad looking buildings that were once majestic. This personal connection exists because I view them as versions of my former self, rough around the edges with a promising interior. Expanding beyond vacant and decaying buildings, I portray my experiences within fabricated architectural systems. I communicate with building materials and architecture through their many layers of physical …

Power Suit, Clarice Cuda

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

The focus of this project began in utilizing hair as a vehicle to investigate rituals associated with mourning, grief, and the liminal space that exists between life and death. After an in depth search into the cultural, physical, spiritual, and material aspects of hair, I enacted process and labor to create a sculptural form that performs in response to grief.

I chose to work with acrylic hair, as it exists in a space between the real and unreal, and visually is absorbed as the uncanny representation of the separated body. I wanted to discuss the body, while emphasizing its absence. …

The Building Breathes Together, Mckeever Donovan

Theses and Dissertations

The Building Breathes Together presents a realm of speculative, industrial habitation and alchemical production. In my instillation, I look to raise questions surrounding romantic notions of production and utility. The work introduces a surreal and haunted space of decomposition and regeneration.

After The Big Wind Stops I See Gentle Waves, Eunji (Jubee) Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis covers my reflections on the inspirations and the motivations behind selected works including my candidacy exhibition; Resonance and my thesis exhibition; after the big wind stops I see gentle waves. It contains my life throughout my MFA studies and the development of my art practice. Through its story-within-a-story method of narration and my describing streams of my thoughts, I am attempting to explain the processes of my development and the discoveries I have made, the little things in my daily life, and the big turning points that inspired me. My work and this document have been strongly determined …

Bloodlines – Mammalian Motherhood, Biotechnologies And Other Entanglements, Lynn Mowson

Animal Studies Journal

This paper outlines my current sculptural research project bloodlines focusing on the ways in which dairy cows are entangled with multiple biotechnologies and the wider environment. bloodlines brings extant works such as fleshlumps, boobscape and slink, together with new works, to represent the dairy industry, the environmental impacts of animal agriculture and the biotech innovations of in-vitro meat and bio-fabricated leather. These works are linked together by a web of interconnected fluids: excreta, milk and blood. In this new work, I hope to make the links between the dairy industry and these extended concerns both visceral and visible.

Profile In Scale, Jason Boldt

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

I started gaining and interest in sculpture after seeing and learning about Frank Lloyd Wright and his use of natural materials integrated into planar and linear forms. I appreciate how he creates buildings such as Fallingwater, a home built for a family, where the structure is part of nature rather than intruding in on it.

The underlying feature between all of my work is the relationship between different forms that are integrated together. My sculptures include different media, such as wood, stone, metal, and found objects. My latest projects, however, include creating maquettes, which are miniaturized versions of larger objects. …

Leviathan: Ontogeny Of Salvation, Faren L. Lejeune

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Wrought from clay and hardened by fire, the narrative sculptures which comprise this body of work are dualistic symbols of life’s brutality and nobility. The philosophical import of the opus is manifested through the convergence of material, process, and form—to instantiate truth and initiate analysis. In my interdisciplinary research, I have come to understand leviathan as an exceptional, universalizing symbol of life's duality and the locus of Man's potential for honorable distinction. I invoke the name in order to instigate reflection upon the concept of the world serpent as a symbolic representation of existential nuance.

Path, Evan Galbicka

Theses and Dissertations

Path is a collaborative system that developed over the course of five months of studio activity and continued through the duration of the exhibition. The system’s main collaborators were a land snail native to eastern North America (Neohelix albolabris), myself, and a digital cellular automaton. These prime agents interwove processes and exchanges between one another into a complex network of folded fractal feedback loops. Cyclic processes produced artifacts and infrastructures to support communication between the components and agents of Path. As a whole, Path spoke to the possibilities for interspecies, cyber-physical, and ecological collaboration to create an …

Xx Openings, Jackson Siegal

Senior Projects Spring 2018

XX Openings represents my dual sculpture and photography practice. The title comes from a 70’s domestic frame, with 20 openings of varying sizes for family pictures. Half of the slots were filled with stock pictures of smiling family scenes, while the others just had measurements for the openings themselves. The object struck me as alienating, and oppressive. I didn’t see any scene within those openings I felt connected to.

The frame came to symbolize varying perspectives, ways of seeing, and ways of being. As my sculpture practice has weighed more heavily on my work as a photographer, I feel tensions …

Wrap Your Arms Around Me, Frederick Lightfoot Bayne

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Most of the personal themes in this project are not things I am comfortable with expressing verbally or textually. The reason they came out in this body of work is because it how I found myself comfortably addressing them. I can acknowledge that I was working through frustration, pain, and confusion related to my body and relationship to other bodies. Being a private person, however, I am far more interested in people approaching this work with their own narratives and associations than using it to get a glimpse into my own personal struggles. While visually and thematically the work can …

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

Lessons, Kathryn K. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

I am learning through these lessons.

The following document includes my convoluted musings about my work, making process, and body leading up to my thesis exhibition, Avoidance Kitchen. My struggle with my reflected image comes from my struggle with my self-perceived physical image.

What does it mean for a piece to disappear, only to find the reflection of someone else's work or body in its place? Is my craft rendered obsolete if all you want to do is take a funny selfie? Is my work unacknowledged if all you see is the sculpture across the room, in reverse? What happens …

Irrational Aggregates, Courtney N. Ryan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis paper examines the work included in my Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition entitled Irrational Aggregates. The goal of this work is to facilitate a dialogue between our natural environment and the excessive consumer-based environments in which we live. Combining a variety of ceramic techniques including hand building, wheel throwing, and casting these sculptures appear to be grown from, and even taken over by nature itself.

Often drawing inspiration from my personal narrative, that of consistent upheaval, relocation, and adjustment to new places, my work can appear both grounded and in a state of motion. I believe …