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The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

Someone, Stop Her! The Musical (The Gallery Show): The Thesis Document., Hannah Dewitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis document accompanies a body of work that is radically vulnerable, personally political, and emotionally complex. Through my work, I challenge myself and my audience to sit with discomfort and create an environment suitable to generate a nuanced appreciation of pain that approaches its acceptance through humor, confessionalism, and the subversion of tropes against themselves as an act of counter-mimicry. This document situates my work within art-historical context with a primary focus on performance art and applies insight from each artwork referenced to further analyze and defend my own work. Additionally, I use texts relating to Camp sensibility, binary …

Transformation., Jingshuo Yang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My works mainly show my perception of life and my change of thought. The world is full of changes, and the pandemic has disrupted our lives. Many people, including me, are confused about the world. Philosophy and my observation and thinking about the world helped me to have a clearer understanding of the world. My paintings Licia, Butterfly Woman, and Live with Covid reflect my understanding of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's theory of empathy. Within my art, I also use another German Philosopher Theodor W. Adorno's theory of the culture industry to deepen my understanding of some social phenomena. My …

-Rhiza., Katherine E. Watts

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

-rhiza is a collection of work that focuses on an immersive experience of local ecology and the dichotomous relationship of humanity and nature, presented through the artist's eyes, ecophilosophy, mycology, ecofeminism, and metaphor. An installation of experiential work, -rhiza consists of videography, printmaking, photography, musical elements, both found object and natural item sculptures, and poetry. This compendium of work addresses humanity's apathy towards the ecological imbalance and how this affects our fundamental interconnectedness with all life. Based on explorations of local waterways and the recognition of human consumerism's pressing issues, -rhiza attempts to present the urgent matter of rising …

Shifting Sands., Rachid Tagoulla

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Shifting Sands is a re-exploration of the presentation of North Africans in colonial postcards, an examination of identity, and a critique of the modern Western museum. Since the inception of photography, colonizers used this medium- especially in the form of postcards- to categorize and exoticize Eastern peoples in order to more easily subjugate them. Shifting Sands is a series of reconstructed colonial postcards which challenges colonial-era stereotypes of North African peoples. The colonial gaze, represented by the camera lens, is subverted through a lensless image-making process in which sand is used to remove the subject from the colonial gaze and …

Reclaiming Images Of Black Women: An Investigation Of Black Womanhood In Visual Communication, Taylor Simone Thomas

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

This thesis investigates how Black womanhood has been visually represented in hopes to either recognize Black women as full, nuanced, and legitimate participants of society or to reinforce monolithic representations built from the constructs of social, political, and economic oppression. It also gives an analysis of Black feminism and how Black feminist thought can be applied to the creative process in hopes of challenging visual misrepresentations of Black womanhood. The aim of this thesis is to show that artists and visual communicators do have a responsibility to be conscious of the messages conveyed in their work. In addition, they must …

Trace., Kcj Szwedzinski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Trace utilizes autoethnography to investigate aspects of Judaism to discover how one decides what to embrace, embody, or deny from inherited legacies. Autoethnography attempts to combine quantitative and qualitative data in order to systematically analyze and describe personal experience. The artist acting as Ba’alei Kushiah, or question bearer, uses Talmudic philosophy as a methodology and approach to art making. This research is self-referential; using Jewish thought to ask questions about Judaism. Judaism, often existing in an in between place with outward characteristics that reflect regional influences, facilitates a dialogue about whether there are relative or absolute delineations within and between …

Send Nudes : Art On Social Anxiety And Human Connection In An Internet Driven Society., Lauren A Bader

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My social anxiety is the driving force behind my thesis work. Sufferers of social anxiety often have a hard time forming relationships because their fear of social interaction causes them to refrain from self-disclosure. Self-disclosure is the act of telling others personal details about yourself. This can be hard for people with social anxiety because of their intense fear of judgement. It is quite common for people with this type of anxiety to seek out opportunities to self-disclose online because they have the advantage of anonymity and time to construct thoughtful responses. In my work I seek out participants online …

Thinging : Powerful Objects., Tammy M. Burke

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The works in "Thinging” are inspired by desire, the genuine and the false, systems of real and perceived values, the quest for immortality, the allure of things, our use of them to make ourselves, and imagining pasts and futures via objects. The following concepts are threaded through the work: cathexis, ritual as a value builder, collections, hoarding, display, object history, exchange, use, and sign values, and vibrant materiality. At the heart of my investigation is the quest to examine the origins of object power, and by what measures it can be evaluated: value from belief, market value, and something perhaps …

Title., Douglas Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Title is a series of drawings that explores the aspects of failed projects and the complications of representation within literary and visual practices. This series is informed by preliminary drawings, marginalia, and written notations that are inherent in the formulation processes of both visual and literary compositions. Through an investigation of the 19th Century Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s unfinished novel Dead Souls, I situate this series of drawings as a means to conflate literary theories with visual representation. In this way, the Title series presents fragmentary images, texts, and digressive narratives that demonstrate intermediaries between propositional states and reconciled …

Man/Boy., Nick Hartman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Verisimilitude, or the appearance of being true, is a concept I turn upside down; relating it to a guise I wear as a contemporary male in a society dictated by learned social behavior and gender norms. Cultural iconography and expected gender norms are tropes I confront within my artwork. Drawings of seemingly everyday objects act as meditations or a fetishized repetition of supposed unobtainable objects and ideals that deal with masculine societal norms. Manliness, machismo, masculinity… it is all a culturally learned and expected pose placed on all men. Coming to the realization that I do not necessarily fit …

Traces Of The Hand., Molly F. Passafiume 1989-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This body of work, titled “Traces of the Hand,” consists of a series of mixed media pieces that are made up of one or more clay forms that act as vessels to contain handmade paper. Each piece is a cross section or artifact that I created through abstraction and repetition. The clay acts as a frame for preserving these artifacts. The paper is arranged in a manner which abstracts natural patterns that mimic each other: the flow of water, the grain of wood, the strata of rocks, and the swirls of fingerprints. Each individual work captures and enhances a natural …

The Process Of Curating Trace Of A Body : Creating Relationships And Building Experiences., Bailey Marie Mazik 1990-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As the title suggests, this document details the course of curating an exhibition titled Trace of a Body and addresses larger themes of curating contemporary art. During spring semester 2015 the entire researching, planning, and implementation of the exhibition portion of this Master’s thesis project took place. Trace of a Body was exhibited from March 12, 2015 – April 5, 2015 in Gallery X, Schneider Hall, Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville. The exhibition was a monographic show of work by Chris Radtke, a prominent contemporary artist working in Louisville, KY. It was a great opportunity to bring together the …

Displacement : A Reckoning Of Internal Affairs : Curatorial Practice Following Artist Praxis., Stacey Reason 1987-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By utilizing the flexibility and sensitivity of the curatorial role through possibilities of collaboration and reaction between artist and curator, curating has the potential to explore territories previously reserved for the artist’s studio. The exhibition Displacement, A Reckoning of Internal Affairs was a two-part curatorial project that demonstrated parallels in studio praxis and curatorial process. It was born out of a reaction to and consideration of the increasingly globalized art world, and an application of the multi-layered driving forces inherent to contemporaneity on a local scale. It was developed using a delicate mixture of planning and intuitive response. It models …

Abstractions Of Shapes And Space., Rita Ford Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstractions of shape and space is the theme of this thesis. These prints and drawings were created between September, 1984 and October, 1986. Emphasis was placed on developing a body of work which is expressive, spontaneous, and rhythmical.

Intaglio was chosen as a major area of concentration. I experimented with soft-ground etching, hard-ground etching, machine engraving, scraping, burnishing, open bite, sugar lift, aquatint, and with several techniques for color printing. The project also involved a study of various media with the purpose of finding a technique as artistically satisfying as intaglio but less physically demanding to execute. Colored pencils and …