Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

Next To A River: Mobility, Mapping, And Hand Embroidery, Sharmistha Kar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This MFA project explores identity, mapping, and embroidery as broadly considered regarding ideas of place and landscape. Concepts such as travel, the familiar, the temporary, the known, and the unknown are motivating notions that I examine through academic study alongside techniques of hand embroidery. Throughout my MFA project, a series of material and technical choices were crucial to my reflecting on ideas of resemblance, mapping, migration, and archiving in order to further understand my identity.

A series of texts on resemblance, archiving, and mapping by Michel Foucault, Arjun Appadurai, and Tom Vanderbilt, along with references to the art practices and …

Buffer, Graham Macaulay

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis dossier is separated into the following distinct sections. The first is an extended artist statement that attempts to locate the uncertain objects of my practice within a relational field, involving writing around becoming, unaccountability and empathy, among other things. The second is a portfolio of photographic documentation of artworks made during my MFA candidacy, primarily attending to documentation of my concurrent thesis exhibition. The third is a case study exploring the work of artist Erin Shirreff, who works between photography, video and sculpture, among other media, drawing attention to bodily presence and duration through mediated structures.

Interfaces Of Nearness: Documentary Photography And The Representation Of Technology, Mark Kasumovic

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The central aim of this dissertation is to provide insights into the ways in which documentary photography, in theory and practice, can be employed in the representation of evolving and difficult to visualize technologies. Examining technology via its relationship to scientific inquiry offers a framework for considering the production of knowledge through instruments and their inscriptions. This relationship is examined from diverse perspectives, such as the philosophy of technology, social constructivism, the philosophy of science, and media studies. Considering the relationship between the function of instruments within the scientific laboratory and the camera as used within the visual arts can …

Representation Of Settler Colonial Violence In Palestine, A Thesis In Support Of The Multi-Media Exhibition Choreographies Of Resistance, Rehab Nazzal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project-based dissertation emerges from my engagement with theories of representation, settler colonialism, and genocide, as well as involvement with direct engagement through embodied experience of the Palestinian reality in the colonized West Bank during 2015–2017. The artworks and written components of this project seek to represent shards of the multilayered Western-Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine through a focus on the struggle and resilience of the Palestinian people and the endurance of their land. Land seizing as the aim of settler colonialism and the colonised bodies as sites of oppression and sites of resistance are central to the various …

Slower Than Time Itself, Matthew S. Trueman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This paper is combined with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, Slower Than Time Itself. There is a significant discontinuity between how duration is measured by clocks and how it is perceived by the individual. This discontinuity generates pressure both on the individual and the environment. The concept of dualism constructs a dichotomy between people and nature, devaluing that which can not be measured. In Slower Than Time Itself the thesis, sculptural and video works aims to dissolve this dichotomy not by rejecting technology but by embracing it. Can one use clocks to escape time itself? I investigate the …

Supernova: Performing Race, Hybridity And Expanding The Geographical Imagination, Raheleh Saneie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis attempts to explore the many socio-political, temporal and spatial factors that contribute to the formation of cultural identity. Through my video work, SuperNova, I examine how race is performed and the discursive structures that contribute to the process of racialization. The core question that is central to this thesis is how race is performed and the potential benefits and drawbacks of this performance. In chapter one, I explore how whiteness is performed and how racial hierarchies are maintained through performance. I critique the Aryan race discourse that is a part pf Iranian nationalist discourse of identity. In …