Art and Design Commons^™

What An Interesting Video To Put On The Internet (An Amusing Economic Indicator), Dahlia S. Bloomstone

Theses and Dissertations

My exhibition reconciles representations of domesticity, labor, and morality through the lens of sex-work (SW). It consists of video work, a video game, and free-to-take objects, where donation, the strip club, and the fish tank converge. My work concludes that SW is a timeless construct that will always exist even after reimagining multiple worlds.

No Canvas, No Rules, Francisca B. Ugalde

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This presentation activity is a creative exploration of the concept of DIS-EASE, as in the absence of ease, uneasiness, or discomfort.

Conceptually, I am exploring DIS-EASE in three ways:

1. As you can see, I am painting directly onto the gallery wall. As the keeper of these galleries, I can assure you that this is a big no-no. I mean how dare anyone disturb these pristine surfaces?! The rationale behind my discomfort is rooted in the idea that the gallery is a sacred space, and that these walls ought to be kept pristine so that the objects displayed against them …

Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?, Jackie Ta, Ngoc Uyen Phuong Ta

All Theses

“Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?”

In Saigon, “Ai… hông?” is a phrase that street vendors often shout to advertise what they sell for the day. This body of work, “Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?” (Translates: “Saigon, anyone?”) invites the audience to take a glimpse into the vivid everyday life in contemporary Vietnam through a perspective of a Saigon local. Utilizing the modalities of painting and sculpture, I collect, accumulate and organize parts of the streets and marketplace by manipulating and amplifying certain key visual elements. The goal of the work is to reconstruct an experiential space that speaks not only to the …

Vaccinate: Posters From The Covid-19 Pandemic, Aaron Sutherlen, Judy Diamond, Meghan Leadabrand, Julia Mcquillan, St Patrick Reid

Zea E-Books Collection

In 2022 we are living through a global pandemic, and vaccines are one of the most effective strategies for slowing the spread of infectious disease, minimizing symptoms, and lowering healthcare demands. In short, vaccines save lives and can reduce the risk of contagion from social interaction.

In the United States in late 2021, after the vaccines had been broadly available for almost a year, one in five adults still chose not to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Art can disrupt what is embedded in our minds and open us up to new perspectives and insights. We hope to offer access to …

S.O.S., Sondra P. Schwetman

IdeaFest: Interdisciplinary Journal of Creative Works and Research from Cal Poly Humboldt

There are two major bodies of work I generate: one is based on three-dimensional clothing construction, and the other is allegorical figurative work. Both bodies of work display their own poetry. Working with materials such as: Forton MG resin, fibers, bronze, found objects, etc., I feel that possessing knowledge in as many mediums as possible is necessary so that one can achieve a “vision” that is a basis for communication. It is my desire to start a dialogue about women’s issues, cultural change, and contemporary miasma. S.O.S. addresses a variety of related issues: bearing witness to our current times, social …

Tableaux For The Future, Sally Curcio

Masters Theses

My sculptural installations aim to elicit a sense of optimism and possibility through form, color, and mode of display. The work subverts the symbolic order by repurposing everyday forms and objects, allowing us to see the familiar as new, and thereby awakening us to what may be possible to formulate a better, more beautiful, more universally connected order.

History And Development Of University Doctoral Academical Dress In Aotearoa (New Zealand), Scott Pilkington

Transactions of the Burgon Society

In 2018 it was announced that Auckland University of Technology (AUT) would join the other seven universities in Aotearoa (New Zealand) in offering a higher doctorate qualification. As part of this process it became apparent that new academical dress would need to be designed and created. Working in the university’s Graduate Research School gave me an opportunity to provide input, and as a result, I designed a new set of academic dress for these qualifications in conjunction with the university’s official robemaker, Paul Fielder (FBS).

This provided a prompt to examine what academical dress exists for existing AUT doctorates – …

Supporting Students’ Social Emotional Well-Being Using Clay: An Action Research Study, Paul Monroe

Graduate Review

The purpose of this action research study is to examine scholarly recommendations on how to use clay to promote the social and emotional well-being of students in the high school ceramics classroom. This study enacts recommendations and strategies to enhance an existing curriculum to align with my school district’s educational goals of promoting social emotional learning (SEL). This study took place at a high school in Westchester County, New York in the fall of 2021. Data for this study is informed by my interviews with two specialists regarding putting SEL strategies into action, my modification of an existing curriculum as …

Scrubbing Off The Grime, Angelena M. Chaishowarat

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

Artist Statement

This piece is centered around isolation and caring for one’s inner child. The inner child is someone each of us has, and it is our job as the adult, to look after, keep safe, and protect this child. Growing up as an Asian American in the southern region of the United States, I felt an immense amount of isolation and lack of belonging. From a young age I felt alone, weird, strange, and out of place. I knew I looked different than most of my classmates, I knew my packed lunch was different, and I knew my last …

The Arts And Changing Rural Places, Bernadette Quinn Dr

Blog Posts

This blog post reflects on how recent changes to rural Ireland is influencing the arts. It recognises that rural places are very vibrant and dynamic, and that this offers many opportunities and challenges from an arts perspective. The blog also reflects on a panel discussion that the FADE project team hosted on ‘The arts and changing rural places’ at the Arts Council & Local Government’s biennial Places Matter conference in March 2022.

The research activities conducted for this publication were funded by the Irish Research Council.

Stop Telling Women To Smile: Stories Of Street Harassment And How We’Re Taking Back Our Power, Mio Yoshizaki

Feminist Pedagogy

This book review addresses the author, Fazlalizadeh's approach to art as social justice, overarching definitions of gender-based street harassment, and intersectionality. This review also offers suggestions for how feminist educators may utilize Stop telling women to smile in classrooms.

“It's So Normal, And … Meaningful.” Playing With Narrative, Artifacts, And Cultural Difference In Florence, Dheepa Sundaram, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article considers how player interactions with religious and ethnic markers, create

a globalized game space in the mobile game Florence (2018). Florence is a multiaward-

winning interactive novella game with story-integrated minigames that weave

play experiences into the narrative. The game, in part, explores love, loss, and

rejuvenation as relatable experiences. Simultaneously, the game produces a unique

experience for each player, as they can refract the game narrative through their own

cultural, identitarian lens. The game assumes the shared cultural space of the player,

the player-character (PC), and the non-player-character (NPC) while blurring the

boundaries between each of these …

Joy As Contestation: Frida Kahlo, "The Dream", Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

This essay analyzes the pictorial representation of Frida Khalo’s “The Dream,” to unfold the nature and reflect upon the notions of joy and innocence as forms of a subtle contestation. How are they represented? By examining the visible and the non-visible as conditions of critical possibility for joy, innocence and contestation, we can reevaluate the interrelation between the notions of life and death in the Mexican culture, and Frida’s personal history. I argue that innocent joy is a quality that articulates a subtle contestation or clandestine activity of freedom

Hema Upadhyay: Disrupting The Hegemony Of The Slums, A Negative Social Spiral., Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

This essay presents the theoretical framework that informs my reflections on the hegemony of the slums’ poverty and human conditions, and whether art can disrupt the hegemony and also become a conduit to question our Being, hence Dasein, as per Martin Heidegger. The following pages investigate the work of Hema Upadhyay, in India, and specially, her inspiring protest work offering insights on India’s overpopulation in urban areas such as, Dharavi. She depicts slums becoming a continuum circle of human misery and wealth, politically called a negative social spiral. I argue that the slums, not only destroy the harmony and promise …

Winding Down River Road, Gillian Harper

LSU Master's Theses

As a mechanism to explore my temporary home in Louisiana, Winding Down River Road is a collection of artworks that integrates natural materials collected from landscapes in southern Louisiana with steel and petroleum-based products. My interest in researching environmental issues, ecology, and industry has shaped my vehicles for observation and how I generate data. Through a variety of methodologies, I am considering how climate change is forcing many of us to re-contextualize how our home can be affected by the very industries we rely on. Personal engagement with residents living in the dystopian atmosphere of southern Louisiana’s industrial corridor and …

Half In Dream: The Tangle In The Grid, Abbey L. Paccia

Masters Theses

Half in Dream: The Tangle in the Grid discusses the form and content of a physical art installation by the same name. The site-specific installation is a large three-dimensional collage of natural ephemera collected from the area around Amherst, Massachusetts, which interacts with natural lighting conditions to illuminate a gallery-facing image of ever-moving light and shadow. The written work elaborates some of the many details within the structure of the artwork, and reveals the philosophies, embodied practices, and methodologies that informed the visual work's creation. Woven throughout are reflections on phenomenology, walking practice, General Systems Theory, collective making, narrative arts, …

Gordon Parks: “Homeward To The Prairie I Come” Digital Exhibition Catalog, Aileen Wang, Mark Crosby, Linda Duke, Katherine Karlin, Cameron Leader-Picone, Sarah Price, Karin Westman

NPP eBooks

This open access digital exhibition catalog is part of the Kansas State University (K-State) Gordon Parks Project, initiated by the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art and K-State English. It presents new research about Parks’s activities in Kansas based on materials found in participating Kansas institutions, including 128 curated photographs donated by Gordon Parks to K-State. The contributions in this volume illuminate Parks’s relationship to his home state of Kansas as a source of reference and inspiration. They debunk the myth that Kansas was merely the place where Gordon Parks was born before moving on to greatness elsewhere.

This book …

Confronting Contemporary Mythmaking: On Artists’ Engagements With Popular Culture, Jonathan Case

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

This paper begins by outlining an understanding of how the culture industry operates in American culture and explores ways to counter the transmission of modern mythmaking through art. As described in Roland Bathes’s Mythologies, mythmaking in the contemporary context serves to sever current systems of power and coercion from the historic processes of their creation; to naturalize the current neoliberal order and make it seem like the only way things could ever be. This sort of mythmaking is transmitted through popular culture, and many artists have responded to it through their practices. Herein I describe several different artists’ approaches, including …

Visibility, Jamie Valdez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

I am a woman, activist, artist, mother, and wife. My art practice questions the role of

institutions in disseminating outdated traditions and unfair rituals in relation to women. Bringing

visibility to what is ignored, I create works that are critical to the unfair expectations that society

fosters, expectations which ultimately oppress women vis- -vis the (art) institution. Through

different conceptual strategies, my work questions what society has taught us about gender

roles and explores the pedagogies that our institutionalized education has systematically

perpetuated for women and girls from early educational experiences.

Fossils On The Floor Mosaics In The Rotunda Of The Nebraska State Capitol Second Edition, Robert F. Diffendal Jr.

Robert F. Diffendal, Jr., Publications

The idea for this project arose during a field trip to the Nebraska State Capitol led by my long-time friend and colleague, Joe Hannibal, of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, during the Geological Society of America’s North-Central Section Meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, on Saturday, April 26, 2014. One of Joe’s interests is historical buildings and their building stones. He put together a very useful guidebook to the building and its decorative stones (Hannibal, 2014) that we used on our tour.

One of the many places that we visited was the State Capitol Archives, located in the basement, where the …

Shaping The Witch: A Visual Art Thesis, Amanda Cobb

University Honors Theses

This thesis is an exploration of the complex and interconnected nature of folklore, personal mythology, and re-enchantment as expressed through the lens of puppetry. I have drawn inspiration from the works of deeply reflective works concerning the psychological nature of mythologies of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, as well as the magical and beautiful work of artists Jim Henson, Brian and Wendy Froud, and Mercer Meyer. Through working in the medium of puppets, I have given consideration to the possibilities and limitations of these forms in expressing the complexity of narrative, personal mythology, the anxiety of disenchantment, lost and reclaimed …

The Ephemerality Of The Living And The Persistence Of The Inanimate, Erin Johnston

MFA in Visual Art

I create fragile, sculptural works with paper. Either cast from pre-existing objects or constructed forms, my three-dimensional works ultimately become pure paper objects. I use the visual language of absence, memory, ruin and ephemerality to present modern artifacts and address the now. I am interested in how the manufactured crumbs we leave behind as a species reveal our collective desires, and our relationship to the body and mortality. I am fascinated with, and even enchanted by, the proliferation of material objects and their tendency to surpass the lifespan of any single human. Perhaps this behavior of producing lasting creations is …

La Cultura Que No Cambia, Karina Arreola-Gutierrez

MFA in Visual Art

In the text of La Cultura Que No Cambia, I mention how my work has been influenced by becoming more aware of generations of altar making that occur in my family. By collecting stories and photographs of altars, I can observe and create work based on how the legacies can change through generations or stay the same. The memory of my ancestors and family traditions is strengthened. Growing up seeing discrimination towards others has influenced me to highlight my Mexican heritage of traditions, culture, and language through several different methods. Using these elements, I can create work informing audiences about …

Paths Of My Development In The Cct Program, Russell Suereth

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

This paper shows the development of a view of personal transformation and social transformation, and the creation of art that depicts that view through courses in the Critical and Creative Thinking program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The paper is a focus on the courses and their impact on the view and the associated art, rather than an analysis of the view and art. Since the program is centered around critical and creative thinking, the paper also describes how thinking in critical and creative ways benefits a project of vision and art. Self-reflection is also an important component of …

Entities: A Field Of Imaginary Games, Thrasyvoulos Ioannis Kalaitzidis

LSU Master's Theses

With this body of work, I am looking for visual symbols that help communicate unuttered meanings through storytelling and stimulate an affectual response to the viewer. This exploration is presented in two different forms: a surreal sculptural installation and a board game. The installation consists of large-scale sculptures made from light and soft materials (polyurethane foam, plastic waste, paper) that are available to move inside the gallery, while the board game is presented as a set of 3D prints with instructions on how the participants can play it. The materials used in the installation suggest a way to transform waste …

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

A Perfect Escape: Fantasy, Place And Narrative In Adolescence, Cydney Cherepak

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the realms of special places, the literary genre of fantasy, narrative, and comics. These topics are traversed alongside subjects of adolescence and the creation of stories for middle-grade readers. Framed with personal stories, as well as peaks into my process, I investigate these subjects through the lens of my own life and work, specifically my thesis project, a comic for middle-grade readers titled Beyond the Castle Walls. Beginning with adolescence in association with special places, I consider the work of developmental psychologists David Sobel and Edith Cobb as they pin-point the role of secret forts, nature, …

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 …

Emotion And The Visual Arts, Hailey Bayne

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

The emotional aspect of the visual arts has been researched and reviewed for decades, and many artists have completed work with the purpose to instill an emotional response in the viewer. How are emotions communicated and perceived through the visual arts? Utilizing knowledge from centuries of art theory, other emotion-focused artists, and the science behind the core emotions, I completed five multimedia pieces in complete isolation whilst triggering only one singular core emotion per piece. I used my understanding of myself and my emotional responses to center each piece around a different schedule, diet, look, and routine complimentary to the …

Cultural Formation Of Place: Making Yourself At Home, Olivia Arratia

Art Theses and Dissertations

The environment you grow up in can become a pivotal part of your existence. The sights, smells, people, and places you experience every day can transform the way you see the world. Growing up in a Mexican-American household has brought its own set of experiences that have made me the artist I am today. I am one of many contemporary artists building on the foundations of their heritage and the Chicano movement. I am also a Mexican-American artist expanding the identity and extending the legacy in the 21st century. This paper will investigate how Mexican-American heritage has influenced my artistic …