Art and Design Commons^™

Unfurling Blue Carpet Memories, Sara Ahli

Masters Theses

Glass is an amorphous solid, existing in a liminal space, embodying indeterminacy. Its states of transformation from viscous flow to structural solidity carry the imprints of bodily influence. With the direct intention of using glass as a conduit to explore materiality, memory, and self-awareness, I construct a language of embodiment that arises through a series of performative encounters between my physicality and glass in the hot shop.

The mediating process I employ to create and arrive at the glass artwork I make is as necessary as its final form. Motivated by the desire to claim agency over my personal narrative, …

Modern Times, Will Beattie

Masters Theses

At the intersection of glass, photography and sound lies issues of perspective, framing, and information. These factors as well as the conceptual space between object and image offer an opportunity to explore the way we register narrative through contradicting signifiers. Glass historically has been used as an instrument to reveal spaces, moments, and phenomena previously imperceptible to the human eye. This rendering of previously unseen spaces through language, technology or vision, may work to reorient the viewers’ perspective and allow for a new understanding of the world. The power of disruption as a potential catalyst is central to my studio …

Garden Etiquette, Kai Wasikowski

Masters Theses

Garden Etiquette is an ongoing project concerned with landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the way they have both served the settler colonialist agenda. I focus specifically on the conservation ideologies shaped in New South Wales (NSW) Australia and New England, United States of America (USA) in the late nineteenth century and the settler visualities that underwrote them. Both countries’ histories were marked by photography and conservation’s common function of mythologising land as empty space—to be invaded, extracted and occupied, and wilderness—to be territorialized and protected, albeit, in distinct ways.

With British, German and Polish settler ancestry, born and raised on …

I Buried The Fireworks Under The Tree, Sihan Zhu

Masters Theses

Unreachable memories always surround me. I've been trying to extract logical parts from my chaotic memories, hoping to find a connection with the world within the soundless, intangible black fireworks stored in my retina under the grand fireworks display. When I first encountered intaglio printmaking, I impulsively drew subconscious memories on the plate, arranging them along some chaotic storylines. Gradually, I realized that I needed to create my own logical structure. So I started using specific visual symbols and repeating them, using the repetition of the printmaking process to search for logical clues. Printmaking with its special rhythm allowed me …

Retelling A Landscape Through The Alchemy Of Recasting, Amanda Lee

Masters Theses

This project is an acknowledgment of reshaped landscapes while also understanding that this moment of time is only relevant to my own human lifespan and perspective. The work embodies unmet expectations when one confronts a memory landscape of their, or my, childhood. Specifically, I am discussing the chasm between reality and memory through a recent return to my childhood home in Colorado, and was met by two of the largest wildfires in the state’s history. This project takes a moment to digest that loss, of what was known, what was not, and can no longer be known: forests, trees, and …

Unfold The Body, Fan Su

Masters Theses

I was born into a physical body of flesh and bone, so I thought that I was one with it. As a carrier of my mind and soul, I believed that it was singular to me; that I had full ownership of it. So, why was I refusing womanhood? Was this devaluation of women a legacy? Was this a legacy unique to Chinese women?

As a woman born and raised in a metropolitan center in China, I proceeded through childhood and adolescence questioning my power as a woman. Feminine maturity and the societal pressure to follow the expectation of being …

An Invitation, Ashley Harris

Masters Theses

I am currently navigating between the concepts of body, material, space, and surface. I’m exploring ways to document and understand the full extent of my physical body in relation to the boundary and extent of my personal space. Each of my works displays strategies to understand my body and personal space. My intention is to confidently advocate for myself, particularly when my presence is questioned. At a time in which my body and presence are inherently political, I’m finding an urgency in how I articulate what my body is, the spaces my body navigates, and the surfaces to which my …

Balancing The Tangible And Intangible, Shiqi Wu

Masters Theses

I love reading stories, but until now, I had never written my own. Balancing the Tangible & Intangible is organized around my experiences and stories, which are inseparable from my work. Together they constellate a narrative of remembrance. Memories surface, and so do connections, allowing for assurance and conviction during a time of personal flux and global unsettledness. As a choreographer and composer of relationships between the tangible and intangible, I rebuild networks of connections linking memories of my relationship to China, my home country, to my experience of living in the West.

In today's global society, population migration is …

Journey Through The Wasteland, Songlin Li

Masters Theses

I started planning this book at the end of last year, because I had to write it for my thesis, and also because I saw this as an opportunity to create, like making artwork. But the difference is that this does not look like my usual art, being only a book comprised of words and images.

From the end of last year to the beginning of this year, I experienced a terrible spiritual disillusionment and was caught in a cycle of depression and anxiety. Even though I was prepared to write this book last fall, I only really started in …

How Long Can You Hold Your Breath?, Felicia Leroy

Masters Theses

I began freediving, a sport in which one dives as deep as possible on single breath hold, as a way to approach the inaccessible space of the deep, to expand my understanding of the unobtainable.

This space (the deep) seemed to me to be representative of something that is totally unknown, its power existing in its inaccessibility, in its un-know-ability.

Through training/experiential data collection and using human physiology at depth as a framework, this thesis work book explores a single breath hold to the other side.

Work made in support of this exploration touches on darkness, depth, the edge, the …

Multiple And Moving, Maia Chao

Masters Theses

This document maps my negotiation of the art practice as experienced in school. It is a record of development, evaluation, narration, articulation, reflection, argumentation, and continual redefinition. I consider the physical and social realities of the studio practice as they relate to my needs, values, and desires on a personal and global scale. Flitting between the mundane and the fundamental, the center and the margins, this thesis reflects my mental topography as a series of parts whose relations to each other are multiple and moving.