Art and Design Commons^™

The Hidden Power Of Images: An Allegory Of Chaos And Performance In The Digital Age, Livia Xandersmith

MFA in Visual Art

Within this text, I explore the hidden power of images in American visual culture through painting-based installations. I investigate images of the past and present juxtaposed in a surrealist landscape. Through the use of images in the news, entertainment, advertising, and images within the home, I depict how the problems of the past bleed into our perceptions of the present. I find that this cycle of problem inheritance connects us as humans regardless of time, generation, and place. In my work, I explore the complexity of image culture and its shifting presence within the digital age. Using surrealist collage, I …

The Embroidered Tablecloth: How Locale Influences Eastern European Jewish Textile Production, Elena Solomon

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recent scholarship frames craft as distinct from art and as an encapsulation of cultural expression at a given moment. Building on that framework, this thesis analyzes the shifting attitudes towards the production of handmade textiles among Eastern European Jews in the US in the twentieth century, as influenced by their migration. To demonstrate the textile environment at that time, this thesis examines pre- and post-migration primary sources and autobiographical writing, including Mary Antin’s The Promised Land, supplemented with interviews of first- and second-generation immigrants to Chicago. In contrast with stereotypes about craft as historically stable, defining craft as regional …

Ambedo: Immersive Storytelling Through Augmented Reality, Dr. Diane Derr, Law Alsobrook, Sadia Mir

Frameless

The territory of locative media, coupled with augmented reality, offers unique opportunities to excavate and unpack rich historic events, in immersive storytelling. In September of 1943, during World War II, approximately 5,200 Italian soldiers were massacred on the Greek island of Kefalonia by Nazi troops. This massacre is credited as one of the largest ever prisoner-of-war massacres in recent history (Lamb, 1996) and left an indelible mark on the island of Kefalonia. In 2019, Configuring Kommos: Narrative, Event, Place and Memory, an interdisciplinary research project, began an investigation into the triangulation of narrative within the complexity of this tragic …

With Kindest Regards To You And Miss Sparks, Claire E. Kelly

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

This work explores the life of a woman, Katherine Josephine Sparks, who lived in Nashville from 1910 to 1993. Vignettes of her life are revealed through the Katherine Sparks Collection at the Nashville Archives, in which over 18,000 items including letters, photographs, memorabilia, and legal documents house parts of her family’s story. Katherine lived an unassuming life, she never married, and she had no children. There is very little documentation of her life left other than what is held in this archival collection. Without the archive, this record would be lost—a small part of history that would go undiscovered and …

I Hear You Now, I See You Then, Quinn Hunter

Art + Design Masters Theses

In the research driven project I Hear You Now, I See You Then, I refer to the contemporary and historical erasure of the labor of African American women using research gathered from the southern plantation economy to create an art installation. The objects in this installation are primarily made with artificial hair integrations and utilizing labor intensive methods that are similar to those used to install the hair on the Black body. The objects I make reference the luxury items in the domestic spaces of historic plantation sites that have been re-branded to be used in the wedding /tourism industry. …

Intimate Nevada: Artists Respond, Lauren Paljusaj, Anne Savage

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Creative Works Winner

Most of us know Nevada beyond the Strip. It’s a place of houses, of shopping plazas, of movie theaters, and grocery stores. A place of hotels that are also places of work. A place of basins, ranges, vistas, and nature. A place of personal history. For Intimate Nevada: Artists Respond, curators Lauren Paljusaj (ENG BA ‘20) and Anne Savage (CFA BA ‘22), draw on photographs found in UNLV Special Collections to uncover the intimate visuality of a Nevada of past centuries. The exhibition focuses on how the imaged built landscape of early 20th century Southern Nevada …

Never Forgets: Traumatic Trace Within Public Space, Jan Descartes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will interrogate the ways in which ephemera from events affects the human and non- human environment and how the absence, manipulation or presence of traumatic trace weaves itself into the atmosphere of the past, present and future. It will look at space and the ways that trace manifests itself in hierarchal spaces and Lebbeus Woods’ concept of heterarchial spaces, which are organic and/or horizontally organized. A thread throughout is the question that if trace from trauma can exist in the visual field, i.e. the physical or digital landscape, in a way that maintains a discourse without perpetuating oppression. …

The Poet's Corpus: Memory And Monumentality In Wilfred Owen's "The Show", Charles Hunter Joplin

Master's Theses

Wilfred Owen is widely recognized to be the greatest English “trench poet” of the First World War. His posthumously published war poems sculpt a nightmarish vision of trench warfare, one which enables Western audiences to consider the suffering of the English soldiers and the brutality of modern warfare nearly a century after the armistice. However, critical readings of Owen’s canonized corpus, including “The Show” (1917, 1918), only focus on their hellish imagery. I will add to these readings by demonstrating that “The Show” is primarily concerned with the limitations of lyric poetry, the monumentality of poetic composition, and the difficulties …

Remembering Vietnam War Veterans: Interpreting History Through New Orleans Monuments And Memorials, Catherine Bourg Haws

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This thesis is concerned with the question of how America’s citizen soldiers are remembered and how their services can be interpreted through monuments and memorials. The paper discusses the concept of memory and the functions of memorialization. It explores whether and how monuments and memorials portray the difficulties, hardships, horror, costs, and consequences of armed combat. The political motivations behind the design, formation and establishment of the edifices are also probed. The paper considers the Vietnam War monuments and memorials erected by Americans and Vietnam expatriates in New Orleans, Louisiana, and examines their illustrative and educational usefulness. Results reflect …

1916 Easter Rising And The Reconceptualization Of Memory, Siobhan Doyle

Academic Articles

Like many countries, Ireland has a chaotic and tumultuous past which results in challenges for the state in presenting history to satisfy the education and expectation of both national and international audiences. The years between 1912 and 1922 were arguably the most transformative in modern Irish history as it was a decade of war, revolution and rapid social change. The 1916 Easter Rising- a failed rebellion against British rule- is synonymous as a moment in the past which represents Irish history, characterizes Irish culture and amplifies national identity. My paper will explore how the centenary commemorations of this historic event …

Voz Alta: The Sound Of A Collective Memory, Sarah E. Kleinman

Graduate Research Posters

Voz Alta is a participatory, voice-activated public light installation designed by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer as a memorial for the Tlatelolco massacre, which occurred on October 2, 1968 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, Mexico. In the Plaza, Lozano-Hemmer has synchronized a megaphone with a 10 kW Xenon robotic searchlight. As each participant speaks into the megaphone, the searchlight shines to the uppermost floor of the towering Centro Cultural Tlatelolco (CCT) building where three additional searchlights instantaneously strobe, dim, and brighten, illuminating the nocturnal landscape in horizontally fixed, tangential beams. Although the aesthetic, social, historical, and political aspects of …

The Praxis Of Horst Hoheisel: The Countermonument In An Expanded Field, Juan Felipe Hernandez

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This paper examines the work of German artist Horst Hoheisel in Latin-America. I open the conversation by including Hoheisel’s provocative participation in the 2005 memory debates in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Here, I introduce the nature of Hoheisel’s reasoning and the dialectical self-reflectiveness that is at work in his artifacts. In each project, I look for the way in which Hoheisel lays down the “memorialistic substance” of a specific site together with the self-critical rationality that characterizes his creation. The second part of this essay attempts to construct the theoretical parameters for the expansion of the definition of the countermonument. This …

A Memory Forgotten: Representation Of Women And The Washington D.C. Arsenal Monument, Melissa Sheets

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

The Arsenal Monument in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington D.C. commemorates the twenty-one women who died while working as cartridge makers in the Washington Arsenal on June 17th, 1864. It utilizes both traditional and idealized memorial imagery, represented by an allegorical figure of Grief who stands atop the Monument’s shaft, as well as a realistic representation of the Arsenal explosion carved into the base. Erected only a year after the incident, the Monument can be interpreted as commemorating all twenty-one women by the inclusion of their names on the sides of the base. From this listing of names and the …