Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Dead Letter Room, Allie Tsubota

Masters Theses

Dead Letter Room is a photographic and textual dialogue with images that emerge from the end of the Asia-Pacific Wars and World War II in the Pacific. These images are governed by the historical contexts that produce them; they are mediated by the explosive aftershocks of nuclear war, the transoceanic space of imperial desire, and the onset of oblivion in the aftermath of catastrophe. Throughout this essay, I present the historical, image-theoretical and psychoanalytical frameworks that meaningfully guide my address of historical images and my approach to making new ones. With detours through various artists and theorists, I offer the …

Rememory, Jonathan Mark Jackson

Masters Theses

Rememory, coined in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, refers to the psychological action of placing forgotten or misplaced memories into a narrated context within the self. Rather than directly “remembering,” the characters in Morrison’s novel, like their author, rely on a web of socially produced or shared memories as a way to understand their past. This essay catalogs an on-going performance of rememory in my photographic work. Through an interrogation of physical archives, I remap the historic presences of Black life in New England. This research based practice takes me to the preserved homes and to the workplaces of my …

Mason & Dixon: History And Identity In The Borderlands, Drew Leventhal

Masters Theses

My project, Mason & Dixon, traces the footsteps of the original surveyors of the Mason-Dixon Line and their search for purpose in the borderlands between Pennsylvania and Maryland. For the past 250 years, the Line has inscribed a violent and painful scar on the land, filled with memories and (re)written histories. Holding the legacies of slavery and colonial expansion deep in its soil, the region is now a visceral example of the ongoing divisions and conflicts around the past, the present, and the future of the United States. The friction is in the air, it is in the monuments, and …

The Great Delusion, Beth Johnston

Masters Theses

The climate crisis is a wicked problem that poses many obstacles for action and understanding. This thesis is a non-linear accumulation of academic essays, interpolated with lists, anecdotal observations, data, and artwork that together explore the entanglements and complications of the climate crisis and my journey in making artwork as a response to those complications. The thesis surveys six bodies of artwork created over the course of graduate school, which use photography, sculptural installation, performance, and video to illustrate various topics and methodologies. Grounded in research on environmental justice, this essay explores temporal disjunctures, climate data encounters, the decolonization of …

Pod + College Crusade Photo Journaling 2022, Project Open Door

Project Open Door + Onward We Learn

Participating artists: Abigail, Abdoulaye, Amelia, Aneishka, Emely, Gaby, Joanne, Jaxson, Joshelin, and Simone.

Photography is a tool that can help us to “SEE.” What does this mean? If we are not visually impaired, we can, of course, physically see. But how much do we miss seeing? How much do we take for granted unless we take the time to look? With assignments that hope to inspire careful observation, we can use the camera to observe things in our familiar surroundings in quite extraordinary ways. Photography can help us become more observant and help us have a fulfilling visual life. During …

The Reenactment : "Object" As Performance, Yue Jiang

Masters Theses

Throughout history, women have endured many obstacles placed upon them in both the private and public spheres. Women are pressured to achieve an ideal beauty standard and the expectation to fulfill the obligation of traditional domestic roles. As a 23-year old Chinese woman who daily faces these pressures, I intentionally critique them using my body as the site and the pressure as subject. Through acts of performance, using handmade and mass-produced objects consumed daily by women, I highlight the insidious pressures and expectations placed upon women’s bodies. By utilizing the format of photography to document the discomfort of “wearing” or …

Becoming A Precipice: The Liminality Of Queer Cruising, Chance Deville

Masters Theses

In “Becoming a Precipice,” I am analyzing queer cruising areas as psychological landscapes from a queer, non-binary perspective, counter to heteronormative conventions. These landscapes are important to me, as being a full participant in this culture is my main form of sexual interaction. My inquiry is prompted by the need to interpret how this specific form of desire molds itself into visceral responses and manifestations of performative masculinity. Entering the cruising landscape itself increases awareness and intensifies the senses, in a space where signals become critical in determining transactions with other individuals beyond spoken language. These somatic reactions are uniquely …

Imaging "Interracial": Performing Racialized Desire In "Interracial" Heterosexual Hardcore Pornography, Megan Christiansen

Masters Theses

“Interracial” is a term that implicitly categorizes sex between Black cis men and white cis women within contemporary hardcore pornographic video. The artistic and research practice described in this paper is located in, influenced, and driven by pornography itself as an important entry point for thinking about racialized desire.

Looking with care and criticality at the pornographic representation of sex between Black men and white women can allow us to think about how issues of gender and race are key in constructing notions of desire and taboo in America. Through this work I begin to consider how racism and misogyny …

Fossil Morphology, Leah Zhang

Masters Theses

Fossil Morphology is a multi-media art project based on my research on the coal mining area in East Pennsylvania. It consists of a film, a series of photographs, and a sound installation. Together, the three works form a dialog among each other about the ecology and aesthetics of the region’s coal mining landscape and its underground.

For a long time, coal, as an raw material for mass production, has been understood and examined from its economic values and social meanings. The gradual abandoning of this material by our industry therefore leads to the seemingly inevitable decline of the coal mining …

Martyr (In Exile), Xinyi Mei

Masters Theses

Xinyi Mei (meimei) is an image maker. She looks to make assessments on the moments when consilience is woven through viewing and limited imagination. She also uses images to examine the precarious state of identity flowing between the individual and the collective. She usually practices with video installation, photography, and writing.

I Just Can't Get You Out Of My Head : Frenetic Vortex, Animal As Image - Field Notes (1989-2021), Steffanie A. Padilla

Masters Theses

This essay is an attempt to describe a hypnosis induced by media through the accumulation of images in everyday life starting the day I was born. Raised by television and the internet, I go through a chronological timeline of my life selecting banal memories to showcase how violence to animals became neutralized/rendered invisible. The work is primarily concerned with mental health while focused on the youth, ecological destruction, and how sensory overload keeps us from knowing ourselves. The motivation of this paper is to better understand how our environment shapes our reality by using a psychological, media theory, and cognitive …

Wounds Need Air, Camilla Jerome

Masters Theses

A personal essay in the first-person voice describes the artist’s lived experience navigating the American medical industrial complex with multiple misdiagnosed chronic pain disorders. The artist’s personal story spans thirty years and is contextualized by illness, gender, race, age, ability, class, and is grounded in the artistic expression of self. Descriptions of mental illness, physical disability, and access to proper healthcare are weaved into an examination of embodied knowledge.

Pod + College Crusade Photo Journaling 2021, Project Open Door

Project Open Door + Onward We Learn

Participating artists: Ashley, Claudia, Daniel, Izenia, Jennifer, Keyleth, Musta'an, and Perla.

Photography is a tool that can help us to “SEE.” What does this mean? If we are not visually impaired, we can, of course, physically see. But how much do we miss seeing? How much do we take for granted unless we take the time to look? With assignments that hope to inspire careful observation, we can use the camera to observe things in our familiar surroundings in quite extraordinary ways. Photography can help us become more observant and help us have a fulfilling visual life. During this time …

Pod + College Crusade Photo Journaling 2020, Project Open Door

Project Open Door + Onward We Learn

Participating artists: Jaylyn B., Jeremy R., Karlim T., Kelssy B., Kenneth B., Maria L., Maria-Camila M., Maria R., Sanilda V., Andrea G., Astrid C., Christiana V., Edgar N., Fredy G., Genesis M., Ilanis R., Jeffri P., Larissa P., and Toluwani A.

Photography is a tool that can help us to “SEE.” What does this mean? If we are not visually impaired, we can, of course, physically see. But how much do we miss seeing? How much do we take for granted unless we take the time to look? With assignments that hope to inspire careful observation, we can use the …

First Sweet Truth, Jessina Lynn Leonard

Masters Theses

First Sweet Truth is a photographic dialogue with mystical texts written by Christian women in the late Middle Ages. These visionary accounts are not only significant historically—many of them are the first known texts to be written by women in the West—but, moreover, provide a foundation for non-anthropocentric knowledge. In our contemporary landscape informed by algorithms and data-driven forms of knowledge, mystical experience inherently defies the logic of our time. Today we largely assume seeing to be a disembodied act. In a constant flow of images, our eyes skim, understand, move on—what the philosopher Laura Marks calls seeing-as-mastering. In contrast, …

The Knots On The Underside Of The Carpet, Lily Colman

Masters Theses

A woman enters marriage, guided by a rich lineage of strong, lifelong marriages, yet is also caught in a web of misplaced ideals and expectations deferred by culture. She carries the weight of these histories, as well as her own expectations. Throughout history, women have been minimized and shoved into their own separate, domestic “spheres.” Future generations inherit these traumas, which in turn affects how they experience life. When a woman realizes her marriage is not what it should be, that she has been turned into a flat and unfulfilled version of herself and ultimately files for divorce, the weight …

Make Yourself At Home, Han Seok You

Masters Theses

“Make Yourself at Home” is a personal journey of self-documentation to discover a definition of “home” and family, and to reenact the missing scenes from my youth. As a child who grew up in many different places far away from home, I missed out on many family moments and a sense of belonging. As a South Korean passport holder who has lived mostly in North America, my identity is unresolved. I find myself in the balance between Korean and American. With the progression of this project, I try to reconcile my past in order to gain an understanding of my …

These Inadvertent Marks, Thomas Wilder

Masters Theses

These Inadvertent Marks is a photographic investigation of scuffs, stains, residue, scratches, holes, and blemishes as a complex set of inadvertent marks which possess an inextricable relationship to the human intention to find and make meaning in the world. Excluding marks that are clearly the result of highly substantial accidents, I look to consider those which are largely deemed trivial and peripheral as a means of renewing perception and surrendering to the unconsidered. The photographs included are the result of a process of discovery and close consideration through wandering in my local surroundings: urban streets, private homes, airports, bathrooms, alleys, …

How To Be Simultaneously Precise And Nondescript, Mckinzie Trotta

Masters Theses

As I stood by my car, I kept coming back to the phrase. It is more difficult to hit a moving target. This time, it was not just a passing platitude. I thought more. Just as it is more difficult to intentionally hit a moving target, a moving target is simultaneously more difficult to intentionally miss. It might be easier to hit a moving target if what one is really trying to do is miss it. Isn’t this why car accidents happen? People hit the thing they are by all means trying to avoid. Everyone is in motion and despite …

Amor Fati, Keavy Handley-Byrne

Masters Theses

I am searching for a way to grieve someone I never knew. At age 26, I was lucky enough to meet the woman who would become my wife. We quickly discovered that there were many coincidences and connections that could be found when we examined our lives a little more closely – our parents shared a wedding anniversary, our fathers each had five siblings, Alice’s parents shared their names with my grandfather and his second wife (Walter and Joan). But what quickly became apparent to me were the links between Alice’s mother and my grandmother. Apart from photographs and memories …

Draw Down Books, Draw Down Books, Kathleen Sleboda, Christopher Sleboda, Zak Jensen, Nejc Prah, Daniel Eatock, Maziyar Pahlevan, Benoit Bodhuin, Bráulio Amado, Jost Hochuli, Ian Lynam

UNBOUND 2020 Archive

Draw Down Books exhibitors. Draw Down is an independent publisher located in the northeastern corner of the United States. Created in 2012, Draw Down publishes small books about graphic design, typography, illustration, photography, art, and architecture.

The Afronauts, Cristina De Middel, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

88 unnumbered pages : color illustrations, facsimiles. Title from spine, and page [2] of cover. Publication information from colophon. [3rd] Edition of 1000 copies. First published 2012 ; 2nd edition 2016. Photobook by Cristina De Middel inspired by the short-lived Zambia space program started by school teacher Edward Makuka Nkoloso in 1964. Bound photobook of digital prints, with inserts including a map, artwork, letters, reproductions of vintage photographs and newspaper article. Some of the inserts are single and double gate-fold sheets printed on one side of translucent paper.

While Nothing Lasts, Edward Cushenberry, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

120 unnumbered pages : all color illustrations ; 33 cm. While nothing lasts, is a collection of intimate and sometimes intrusive photographs of my very close friends and family. This project started four years ago at a party, when I made a picture of my friend crying after she told me she wanted to break up with her boyfriend. After that night, I felt compelled to document every moment of my friends and familys livesthe good and the bad. I wanted to do this to better understand how we collectively cope with life, love, heartbreak and death. Since this project …

At No Point In Between, Zora J. Murff, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

100 unnumbered pages : illustrations (some color). Inserted are two small photograph reproductions and one pamphlet First hardcover edition of 165. Design and cover production by Shawn Bush. Printed in Milwaukee, WI by The Fox Co. "At No Point In Between prompts inquiry into the antinomy that exists in recorded violence: how documentation of anti-black violence was used to shame black individuals, but how we have used those same images inversely to interrupt the collective belief of a racial hierarchy. Murff accomplishes this by challenging the photographs use as an objective document; addressing the convergence of the physical and social …

Yanjie / 顏姐: Combing For Ice And Jade, Kurt Tong, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

246 unnumbered pages : color illustrations (some folded). 1st edition. Combing for Ice and Jade is a love note from Kurt Tong to his nanny, who was one of the last remaining self combed women left in China. An early form of Feminism, the comb up ceremony granted women great autonomy at a great cost. Kurt Tong has worked closely with his nanny over a period of nearly 7 years. Having only 8 photographs of herself, the book is an exploration of her extraordinary life. Her story is slowly revealed through the book, combined with Kurts family archive, found photographs …

Were It Not For, Michael Ashkin, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

256 unnumbered pages : chiefly illustrations. "Michael Ashkin works across a range of media--painting, photography, sculpture, video, and text. Uniting these diverse practices is a conceptual focus on the way that notions of space and place, landscape and self, are shaped by wider political and economic forces. "Were it not for" is combining a 670-line text with 218 photographs of the Mojave Desert. This combination creates a powerful sense of unease throughout the document, which is exploring the idea of fear and haunting as an effect of the violent legacies contained within the landscape, and as a function of the …

Se Te Subio El Santo | Are You In A Trance?, Tiona Mcclodden, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

94 unnumbered pages : illustrations, portraits ; 21 cm. Se Te Subio El Santo is a collection of self-portraits taken by the artist directly after she awoke every morning while away on a week-long residency in Iowa City, IA at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Spring 2016. This daily practice confronts notions of the artist's interests in rendering a full self implicit of gender, race, sexuality, and spirituality while challenging and collapsing the intersections of each identity as well. Includes an essay by Akwaeke Emezi. Offset printing. Sewn, case binding.

Ephemerals, Julia Abbott, Special Collections, Fleet Library

6th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2020

No abstract provided.

Pretend Power, Rosemary Engstrom

Masters Theses

This is an anti-thesis about being a tender and tuff queer femme bitch with mental illness trying to exist in this shitty world by creating worlds of their own. With bright colors, video performance, dress up, collage, and a lot of feelings, I turn power structures on their upside. They become a game of pretend where queers run the show. It’s ok to be sick. It’s ok to be vulnerable. It’s ok to be queer. You’re not alone.

Between Gods And Animals : Deconstructing Heteronormative Masculines Pursuit To Sustain Power, Shawn Bush

Masters Theses

Between Gods and Animals is a multi-angle exploration of the Caucasian heteronormative male’s endless pursuit to sustain power and inability to live by their own set of codes. Using the Grecco Roman period as an origin point, this work examines the forces that have historically perpetuated the myth of masculinity. Relating past ideals of maleness to contemporary standards this thesis illuminates patriarchal structures that are systematizing masculinity while providing a space to normalize a gamut of masculines. The visual works included act as an introspective approach in accepting the complacency of my existence as a man who has operated within …