Raisin Fingers, Sophia Hatzikos

Graduate School of Art Theses

I am a sculptor that uses site reactive interactions, video documentation, and studio-based processes to explore landscape. I investigate my multifaceted relationship of self to my sensorial memory of landscape. Through themes of memory, loss and longing intertwined with my personal connection to water. I identify the intersections of sculpture and landscape seeking ways in which environments shapes decisions in the making process.

Through case studies of two distinct landscapes, Malaki and Tyson, I look at how these environments serve as sources of inspiration and material for experimentation. By identifying the ways in which I researched at each site respectively …

[W]Hole: Journey To Fullness, Joni P. Gordon

MFA in Visual Art

My work raises critical questions about Black history, race, gender, beauty, and privilege. My practice also highlights the intersectionality of colorism and racism. I use materials such as cardboard rectangles with handwritten words, brown paper, doors defaced by scratches, fire, printed images, newspaper, and projected photographs to ask and answer those questions. I also use Work and Travel documents, broom and brush bristle, mop fiber, towels, and audio recordings of oral histories to exhibit invisible scars wrought by racist actions as physical and material manifestations.

My practice began after experiencing racial discrimination for the first time on a US work …

Hidden In Humor: Redefining Abjection Through Implication, Maddy Kish

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Abjection can whisper. It lies beneath the joke; you will find it there if you spend the time. Look at me. Come closer. Are you willing to discover? If you listen, I will confess, I will air out my dirty laundry, I will show you the inside of my body and its evidence.

My thesis is a consideration of my waste, an analysis of the bodily trail I leave behind. I explore indecency as a persistent feature of my art practice and a tactic I use to stimulate interest. My overarching unladylike sensibility is broken down into three categories – …

Good Enough, Haley Levin

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The seven-foot-tall sculptural painting Good Enough explores the cultural significance of trophies in contemporary American society. As an ancient object representing achievement and reward, the irony of trophies’ current junk-status pokes at absurd contradictions embedded in American culture. I offer context on the evolution of “the readymade” from Dada to Pop Art to 90s assemblage, and position Good Enough’s handmade, tender approach as a celebratory twist to that lineage of cultural critique.

Threads Of Connection: An Offering To Re-Tangle Humanity And Nature With The Patterns Of Our World, Emily Shelton

Graduate Theses

In our world there are patterns of self-similarity that serve as evidence of the interconnectedness between humankind and the rest of the natural world. They are reflected in our bodies, behaviors, and environments, both natural and manmade, and can be found throughout systems at every scale, micro through macro. These organic, linear motifs branch into smaller iterations that seem to shape our existence on this planet as we gravitate towards experiences that echo these patterns. During everyday acts like shopping in a grocery store or a crowd at a concert, we unconsciously participate in self-similar collective movements as we navigate …

Embody, Lillian Luna Bennett

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In this paper I will discuss my studio process, material, content and context as it relates to each piece or installation in my thesis exhibition, Embody. My work explores and reacts to the effects that the current political climate has on our physical bodies and identity. I investigate value systems that are embedded into America’s visual language. Often morphing into ruins and relics of an old world while simultaneously being grafted onto contemporary culture. Through large scale textile sculpture, I explore one of my main themes: melding classical architectural motifs that America has adopted, with contemporary textile techniques and material …

How I Came To Jam With The Angels Of The Dirty South: A Journey Into Art And Art Education, Miki Skak

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper dives into my personal journey from a far-left activist youth into becoming an artist. It explains how a poet saw artistic potential within me, introduced me to the world of art and eventually art education. I reflect on the art education I have received from several different art schools and how they try to adapt to the demands of the contemporary art world that has been in a constant condition of reshaping itself since Marcel Duchamp’s readymade. As an artist who is less focused on the techniques of traditional artistic mediums, I investigate how the state of art …

Out In Thin Air, Daiqing Zhang

Masters Theses

My work often takes form in experience-charged installations underscored by phenomenology. The whys and hows behind the work mostly remain unspoken, since I would rather my work speak for itself. This writing project offered me the opportunity to comb through and tell the stories and thoughts that informed the work.

I have built a collection of documentation about the experience of having a sensitivity to moments of wonder in everyday life. These archives recorded sensuous imprints in life composed of mundane phenomena. In the collection there are images/footage of a glimpse of light leaking through cloud crevices; a brush of …

On Autonomy: Personal Agency Under Late Stage Capitalism, Levi Gentry

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Personal agency is the feeling of control over one’s actions. Capitalism is deeply etched into the fabric of America and the world at large. In this paper, I propose that late stage capitalism has forever altered the means by which personal agency manifests, that it has left no room for alternatives on account of its far-reaching scope. My work, through its subject matter and medium, refers to the lack of autonomy under escape or embrace. Failure and futility are both key ideas, as complacency is intrinsic to our current moment, which is evocative of the ongoing metamodern art movement.

Chromaticity, Whitney Anne Hagen

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Chromaticity is an objective specification of the quality of a color regardless of its luminance consisting of two independent parameters. These are often specified as hue and colorfulness, where the latter is alternatively called saturation, chroma, intensity, or excitation purity. These parameters follow how the human eye perceives color, giving us visual cues when navigating the world. In abstract art, where form is not bound by the constraints of representation, color becomes the primary tool for communication. Creating harmony, tension, emotion, and balance, the color relationships in this collection of work communicates to the viewer in a visual language that …

This Side Of Silver, Bennett Wood

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Above And Below, Kristen Brown

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

My recent graduate artwork uses abstraction of form to describe the intersection between humans and the environment while relating the landscape of our skin to the ever-changing qualities of the natural landscape surrounding us. The photographic material is stressed into three dimensional shapes, producing creasing and tears as it is being contorted by human impact. At the same time that I am creating something new, I am manipulating artifactual evidence of something that already exists in everyday life. This is akin to how our bodies are distorted by outer influence, as well as our own autonomy. Above and below the …

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 …

My Sitayana: Sewing Seeds Of Empowerment, Dhea Kothari

Honors Theses

This thesis is an exploration of sculpture and installation. My project depicts a narrative of generational emancipation of women. The narrative was inspired by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel, ‘Forest of Enchantments,’ in which she rewrites the ‘Ramayana’ with Sita, the female character, as the protagonist instead. The Ramayana is a popular Hindu mythological story that revolves around Prince Rama’s quest to rescue his wife Sita from the perils of the villain Raavana. This story encapsulates the undertones of the patriarchal culture in India. This My thesis installation stands as a symbol of generational transformation of love and what it means …

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 …

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 …

Nest, Camillia Elci

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The major themes in this body of work are time and layers. These themes are linked by the materiality of the work. Intentional destruction and recreation, perpetually. The work is constantly being made, destroyed, and remade. It is always partly past and partly future. Nest is a self portrait displaying objects acquired and made over the past several years.

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.

Boring Magic, Madison Svendgard

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Boring Magic encompasses an interest in labor, boredom, and exhaustion. Simultaneously, I am exploring what relief and escapism from these things look like. Escapism acts as the core of my work- what escapism looks like and what creates the need for escapism. I create narrative pieces that are always slightly removed from reality as a way to reflect on what I view as present-day dystopias. The worlds built to create this work are a combination of my lived experiences and invented characters and stories, which culminate in an alternate timeline set in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Relating to …

Crying At Nothing But Colors, Maryalice Carroll

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

crying at nothing but colors is an installation of ceramic works that explores the abstraction of feelings, both physical and emotional. The installation itself is a house made out of tension cables that stretch wall to wall in the gallery space. Inside the house are 7 ceramic objects placed on wooden pedestals paired with tufted rugs.

Throughout this essay, I will describe the abstract ceramic objects as Beings. They are colorful and have textured glaze on the surface with a gloopy opalescent glaze oozing out of holes that cover each piece. They are an extension of myself. They are the …

Choppy Forgeries: A Vr Sculpting Game, Jonah Warren

Frameless

Choppy Forgeries is a fast-paced sculpting game made for virtual reality headsets. The game is intended to give players the opportunity to practice and appreciate the skills associated with artmaking and sculpture (Seeley and Kozbelt, 2008, 163–166) in a fun, light- hearted, competitive context. The game also requires players to closely examine and engage with famous classical sculpture from art history through its gameplay.

It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. In It Won’t Be Easy, Arkush places and piles her multimedia sculptures throughout the gallery to create installations that overlap ­with her writing and poetry, sometimes layering in (or extending out to) audio and video components. This approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate—though no less lively. Her work meditates on and ‘vendiagrams’ things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic. The exhibition title acknowledges that the …

I Want To Go Home, Amber Boris

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

The significance of a home lies within the memories of the space. I Want to Go Home is a body of work that explores this idea through a collection of sculptures and drawings depicting my childhood home. This house holds meaning to me not only because it is where I grew up, but because it was also my mother’s childhood home. Six generations of our family have passed through the house, creating a long history of associated stories, memories, and emotions.

I have constructed scaled down sculptures of rooms for these memories to live in. The spaces are left empty, …

Water Bearer, Whitney Harris

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores fantasy and mythological archetypes. The exhibition features works on paper depicting mermaids, and a fountain featuring two figures submerged in water, one spitting into the other's mouth. I use black ink and glazes to create variegated surfaces. In these works, I reimagine ideas about power and intimacy.

Play Among The Shadows, Xiong Wei

Theses and Dissertations

This article elaborates Xiong Wei's inspiration and experience from different cultural, political, social systems and art environment as a Chinese artist living in the United States, and the logic and methodology of how he went from a social realist sculptor to a contemporary artist.

Long Time, Jacob V. Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Jake Reed’s work is driven by the idea that architectural ornament can be imbued with meaning not native to its construction or use. To find that meaning, he deconstructs and reassembles elements from the architectural and ornamental histories he studies, using the growing climate crisis as a generative framework.

"Illumination The Sculpture Of James O. Clark" Catalogue, T. Michael Martin

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

It has been a challenging journey to mine and sift through the body of work of James O. Clark to select a representation of his studio practice and 50-year career. While curating "Illumination: the Sculpture of James O. Clark," I encountered more than the common curatorial concerns such as artwork availability, scale, aesthetic and conceptual themes, transportation and presentation issues. During my conversations with Clark, we found ourselves in an unprecedented pandemic – impacting travel, shipping, and studio visits.Throughout this process, Clark and I remained flexible to ensure a representation of his career could be exhibited without compromise. Selections for …

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. …

Heartwork, Lance Taylor Loftin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heartwork is a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore the many ways identity is shaped by familial histories and personal memory. Focusing on my time growing up on a pine tree farm in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 90s, Heartwork explores gender, religion, regional traditions, family, and art. Through conversations and collaborations with my family, painting acts as an impetus for strengthening relationships. By reevaluating the past, I am able to create a web of interconnected narratives that inform and shift my understanding of the present.

Sculpture As Memoir, Tirzah Reed

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Questions guide my art practice, so they naturally guide the structure of this thesis.

Remember?

If I remember, what then?

What makes a memoir?

What is the work made of?

Nouns and adjectives—why have both?

What’s the role of sound?

How does the form of installation relate to memoir?

How do we take an installation from situation to story?

What happens in the studio?

What gets me to the studio in the first place?

What matters?

Objects have power. They hold the histories of their owners—or if they have not had previous owners, they at least carry the connotations of …