Art and Design Commons^™

Otherworldly Gestures, Sadia Quddus

Masters Theses

OtherWorldly Gestures seeks to give form to the intangible. I work primarily with light as material substance to shape a speculative emotive space in which I make metaphysical phenomena experiential. I collaborate with ecological and technological elements to express a spiritual understanding of Self and World. Most recently, the work translates material objects and architectural elements from my cultural heritage, and gives visual and haptic form to the sacred relationship between body, soul, and natural world.

Through these explorations, I begin to propose a speculative OtherWorld. I delve into the precolonial, ancestral teachings of a mystical spiritual path, referencing Sufi …

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.

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

Echoes Of Home, Hanna Traynham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses her Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Echoes of Home, held at the Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, Tennessee on display March 15 through April 8, 2022. The author provides insight into concepts and influences relating to the creation of the exhibition with perspective on her intimate connection with place and memory.

The exhibit features five installations addressing home, elusive memory, and the change and continuity of cultural traditions over time. The works consist of a series of large-scale wild clay vessels, gestural clay bookends, a wall installation of cups with a line drawing, suspended porcelain slabs, …

The In-Between Times, Abraham C. Shenk

Senior Projects Fall 2022

I have grown up around cameras. My parents are documentary filmmakers. Early on, I understood how a photograph can capture reality. As a child, I also spent time in my grandfather’s darkroom, watching him as he went through the process of printing negatives. I watched as the images emerged in the chemicals. It seemed magical to me. A gnarled tree limb, a snow drift, a strange image emerging out of a series of torn papers on a wall. I remember him explaining the steps of making a picture. However, it was only when I arrived at Bard College that I …

Dissonant Forms: Landscape, Nature-Love, And Art, Taylor F. Benoit

Masters Theses

As artists continue the long and storied lineage of Landscape, are there aesthetic responsibilities that come with representing the forces that afford you the capacity to do so? As we delineate spaces into places, endless interconnectivity into knowable “systems”, and living matter into thing based taxonomies, who do these delineations serve and with what intentions do we proceed? My studio art practice explores what it means to give form to our Former—the Former being that from which we came, the here and now, our explicit ecological reality, the stuff of what we call nature. …

The Dream Of Being Totally Open, Frederick Greis

Theses and Dissertations

This essay details four major themes in the paintings of Frederick Greis: spiritual experience, nature, pleasure, and humor. These themes are described within the context of the artist's main goal, which is to create an experience of profound unburdening.

Through My Window, Haiyin Liang

Theses and Dissertations

I convey my thoughts through art jewelry; making jewelry is my language of communication and commemoration. Inspired by historical Chinese art and contemporary jewelry, my practice pays attention to bring classical Chinese aesthetics of hazy poetic and ideal arrangement into the contemporary jewelry field. The attention to detail refers to the quiet contemplation and emotional experiences encouraged by each of my works. Through my research, I use metalsmithing language to communicate with non-precious materials finding my own way of expression and meditation. Meanwhile, I build environments that display jewelry off the body in order to construct a picturesque landscape. The …

A Chair In The Woods, Victoria Dolloff

Theses and Dissertations

Victoria Dolloff's MFA Thesis considers traces of play and perception in the development of her artwork, exploring the idea of reorientation through subtleties of the absurd. Her installation Untitled (Landscape) questions object as place and place as memory utilizing fragmentation as reconstruction.

Es-Sen-Tial, Lyn A. Govette

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is in support of the exhibition entitled ES-SEN-TIAL on display in Tipton Gallery located in Downtown Johnson City from February 27, 2017 to March 10, 2017.

The exhibition is a presentation in fiber medium of the human impact on the landscape, specifically using the extractive industry of coal mining as example. This is accomplished through the use of digital imagery printed on textiles, hand and machine embroidery, and surface design techniques of dyeing and layering. This body of work reflects the artist’s interest in art activism and the utilization of photography, fiber arts, ideas and techniques, as creative …

Enduring Peripheries, Anna Yeroshenko

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

In the 80s when Russian state-sanctioned architectural production consisted of standardized buildings that deplored any unnecessary ornament or decoration, an architect functioned only as an interpreter of numerous limiting factors. As an act of protest against the stagnation in architecture, a group of young architects began to create projects that existed only on paper. For them ‘Paper Architecture‘ became a way of bypassing restrictions and dissenting, a way to critique the dehumanizing nature of the architectural style that prevailed at that time. Spatial compositions, which were hard to comprehend visually, elements of inverse perspective, and impractical, idealistic environments depicted a …

Tales From The Fells, Anne Elder

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Our relationship with the natural world is complicated and under scrutiny as we make irrevocable changes to the earth. We enter the woods to get lost, and to find ourselves. We walk there to find thrills, peace, inspiration; to hear ourselves think, to be surprised, to make profit. Our childish fears may have changed from bears, monsters and getting lost, replaced by adult fears (bears, unsavory humans, getting lost). The woods may frighten us or be a place of comfort, but it is rarely a neutral experience. When we lose access to these spaces, it affects our ability to find …