Arts and Humanities Commons^™

How To Forget, Jesse D. Hoyle

Theses and Dissertations

How To Forget was born from a need to give tangible form to the psychic residue left behind by a life lived. Through the use of silk-screening of red clay mud onto ink-jet photographs, archival textiles, and site-specific installations, I attempt to tie and/or divorce myself from my own and my family's extended history and examine the function of memory within the dynamics of the archive. How To Forget takes a non-linear, non-chronological approach to this examination, compressing decades of time and space through the manipulation of the archive and my own self-portraiture, designed specifically to deny myself from its …

Kavana: Photography, Jewish Storytelling, And Memory, Hannah Altman

Theses and Dissertations

Jewish thought suggests that the memory of an action is as primary as the action itself. This is to say that when my hand is wounded, I remember other hands. I trace ache back to other aches - when my mother grabbed my wrist pulling me across the intersection, when my great-grandmother’s fingers went numb on the ship headed towards Cuba fleeing the Nazis, when Miriam’s palms enduringly poured water for the Hebrews throughout their desert journey - this is how the Jew is able to fathom an ache. Because no physical space is a given for the Jewish diaspora, …

Martian Mother, Elizabeth Mcgrady

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the relationship between humans and land, through the lens of the scientific and religious, bridging the physical realm with the spiritual. It acts as accompanying material to the project titled Martian Mother, supplementary information to the visual work, and an extension of the proposal, the center of the work. The proposal exists to send myself, or a like-minded individual, to Mars with artificial insemination equipment to give birth to the first Martian, becoming the first Martian Mother. This work is rooted firmly in speculative fiction, creating a nonlinear future framework for a new society and space exploration.

The Wild Beasts, Peter Cochrane

Theses and Dissertations

The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to …

Construction Of An Album For Oneself, Maria Tinaut

Theses and Dissertations

My work focuses on the construction and validation of images assembled from fragments of found photographs, generating new narratives that hover between “reality” and fiction. Archive and Fiction: Construction of the past and the self is the result of two years of artwork exploring my family archives and my relationship to my family through them. I understand the family as a place of identity in continuous change, serving as a container of history and memory. Conceiving of my family albums as material allows me to approach my family history as a visitor. Mediated memory and constructed memory intertwine in the …

American Splendor, Christina Ehmann

Theses and Dissertations

Artist Statement

My photographs and paintings are reflective of a simpler and slower paced, rural life. This focus is in high contrast to what contemporary urban life often requires. I depict scenes of tranquil landscapes, farm animals, old barns, fields of grasses, and growing crops.

I alter my digital photographic images with computer software. I use various filters that transform color, clarity, and value to give the photographs of nature an intentionally peaceful mood. These photographs are a basis for my paintings where I soften nature’s contours and emphasize tranquility. My desire is that viewers will look at my work …

Nostalgia And Iphone Camera Apps: An Ethnographic Visual Approach To Iphoneography, Maria L. De Panbehchi

Theses and Dissertations

The iPhone is the most popular smartphone and camera on social media. iPhoneography, the photography taken or edited with the iPhone, has set the trend of nostalgic photography on social media during the 2010s; thus, the iPhone, a high-tech camera, produces low-tech-looking images. This dissertation attempts to find out why iPhone photographers (iPhoneographers) take, edit, and share images that mimic photographs taken with analog photographic equipment. I argue that nostalgia allows iPhoneographers to use the iPhone as a creative tool and to belong to a community. Based on the arguments of Vilém Flusser—who suggested that photographers are more interested in …

So Much Apparent Nothing, Emily Mcbride

Theses and Dissertations

This document contains reflections on motivations behind selected works leading up to and including my thesis exhibition so much apparent nothing. Through journal excerpts and analysis of my own psychology, I attempt to put into words my thoughts concurrent to my making, indirect as they may be. The following text shares my personal conflicts and ideologies surrounding art-making, the permanence of objects, and the acceptance of an identity in flux.

Double Zero, Anthony Earl Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis follows the trajectory of my artistic practice over the past two years, which has led to the installation of my thesis exhibition titled, Double Zero. I hope to position the work among its art and cultural terms by exploring how I have expanded my research concerning Situationist and Marxist theory as well as developed a broader photographic studio practice driven by material experimentation, play, and an investigation into how we live and interact with commodities through media.

Dispersal: A Multidisciplinary Investigation Of Plant Life, Alexandra E. Arzt

Theses and Dissertations

Using plants as a basis for exploring the interstices between the human and nonhuman, this thesis investigates ideas of awareness, intelligence, deep time, animism, and the fluctuating human perception of the agency of Nature. It outlines environmental art practices since the 1950s involving vegetal life. In addition, the paper provides a critical analysis of plant perception of Jakob von Uexküll’s work and theories of vital materialism and “critical plant studies” while noting recent studies in plant neurobiology. In my work, plants become active participants via their movement, seeding, and smell. This study takes the form of imitation, purposeful symbiosis, anthropomorphism, …

Locus, Claire Krueger

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores my practice as it has progressed into video and video installation. I detail my use of cinematic tropes and mechanisms as they function within a spatial installation. I discuss the relationship of my work to other artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and Kevin Cooley who also deal with themes of landscape, spatial displacement, and video viewing. My work has evolved to video installation from a need to experience the traditionally flat viewing plane of photography in a more experiential way. The Locus installation is multi sensory, in that it addresses smell, …

Some Account Of The Art Of Photogenic Drawing, Joseph Minek

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an overview of the processes and procedures used in the production of my artistic practice. In my work, I explore notions such as the ambiguity of the photographic image, what constitutes an image or object as photographic, and the unexplored possibilities of the medium through surface and mark making. In addition, I draw inspiration from artists Wolfgang Tillmans, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Marco Breuer as entrance points to my conceptual interests. For viewers, my work generates an internal dialogue about the limits of the photographic medium.

Freedom Of Interpretation, Georgi Ivanov

Theses and Dissertations

The photographic series Ideal Cities that I started in 2011 is inspired by the conflict between my idea of the “west” and my evolving experience in the United States. What struck me was the popularity of what I see as model experience – a spatial experience controlled by the Spectacle. In the terms of the Situationist International and its most prominent figure Guy Debord, the Spectacle is the collapse of reality into the streams of images, products and activities sanctioned by centralized monopolist business or state bureaucracy. Thus, personal experience is replaced with preconceived notions, which control the way people …

Dismemory: On History, The Southern Imaginary, And Abusing The Visual Record, Matthew Pendleton Shelton

Theses and Dissertations

Using the literary device of a fictional interview between the artist and a sympathetic intellectual, I explore concepts relating to subjectivity, pedagogy, memory, “Southernness,” whiteness, the deceptive nature of images, social justice, and 20th century art as they relate to a contemporary artistic practice.

Homage To Everyday People, Sang Ja Chun

Theses and Dissertations

Influenced by an ever-growing sense of alienation with my homeland, I have been determined to discover through my art practice an ability to challenge conventional notions of home, identity, communication and miscommunication. Exploring these themes, I became increasingly aware of the parallels between everyday life and art practice. By creatively connecting with a diverse amount of local people and their communities, I fulfilled desires to discover a sense of belonging and generated opportunities for others to break through traditional social boundaries and roles.

Alghe Mist, Jeffrey Kenney

Theses and Dissertations

This is an overview of the source material, methodologies, artistic influences, and conceptual decisions that inform the sculptural and the photographic means of production that characterize my art practice. Research topics include model-making, the indexical relationship of the photograph and object, and a brief phenomenology of accidents, alchemy, and ambivalence in relation to specific artworks.

Plex, Jon-Phillip Sheridan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the evolution of my practice as it developed over my two years of graduate school. I entered school interested in the built environment and how structures helped create subjectivity and provided sites for material and phenomenological transformations. Early in graduate school, I developed a photography series that investigated these issues. However, an awareness of a conversation occurring in the larger art world that questioned the efficacy of photography drove me to consider ways to extend my practice into sculpture and installation. Over the next two semesters, I developed my ideas of light, form and structure into video …

Rewrite, Jamie Lawyer

Theses and Dissertations

“Rewrite” is a photographic project that utilizes the domesstic space as a stage for emotional projection of a traumatic memory. The work considers the relationship that exists between an individual and the rooms and objects within a home space in an attempt at understanding an individual’s mental state. “Rewrite” explores the ways in which we exist through our home and how a juxtaposition of objects and materials can create meaning. The photographs are a visual interpretation of the emotions surrounding sexual abuse/assault/rape as they have related to my own personal history and conversations I have had with women close to …

Mind, Body, And Handwoven Cloth, Andrea Donnelly

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores the nature of individual perception, and the side of our lives lived entirely within our minds. I do this through the lens of self-reflection, examining the images of my own mental life and translating them into delicately handwoven cloth. These images and their structures become sensory experiences of the intangible, and a meeting place for my internal life and that of my viewer. The cloth I weave is simultaneously familiar and strange. Through woven surface and imbedded imagery, I attempt to illuminate the deep emotions that necessarily isolate us from each other, and the shared experiences of …