Art and Design Commons^™

Or To Be Eaten Alive, Christopher Williams

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

“or to be eaten alive'' is a multimedia exhibition in which I merge my own coming of age story with a mythological ecology. In this work I reclaim my queer identity by communing with my past selves in a fantasy world created through the lens of Queer Ecology and Queer Eco-Futurism. The visuals in this exhibition obscure reality. They are abstractions of the landscapes I occupy—particularly the Tallgrass prairie and Ozark ecoregions. Through a speculative, fantasy world the exhibition introduces moments of adoration, death, fracturing, growth, joy, and failure. I form, draw, color and arrange the work embracing mistakes and …

In This Time And Place, Christy Aggens

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

I seek out and spend time in relatively wild outdoor locations and create art based on my observations. The resulting work explores time and place, while the creation of the work increases my engagement with the environment. This process serves as a reminder that time is relative and life itself is continuous.

I start by finding time in locations where nature has been given a chance to thrive and where the sound of human activity is at a minimum. During these retreats, I use my senses to absorb information and document the experience by journaling, making recordings, taking photographs, drawing, …

The Ghosts Shed Tears, Sarah Jentsch

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

Before I was taught what made us different, I thought my brother and I were the same. The only difference between a doe and a buck was the antlers. As I grew, I noticed differences—in the way people spoke to us, in what was expected of us, in the questions we were asked. In what our futures were supposed to look like. The difference between the doe and the buck was still the antlers, but those antlers made one a trophy and the other venison.

Many of my formative experiences I came to understand through animals. My family home, cradled …

Idylls, Madison Aunger

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

An “Idyll” is defined as a happy, peaceful, or picturesque scene. The term references poetry that describes a small intimate world, and scenes from everyday life.

This exhibition, Idylls, showcases the little world of my home here in Lincoln, Nebraska. The paintings mirror my experience of the domestic spaces in my life, and the peaceful moments I encounter. In Idylls you are encouraged to be idle. We do ourselves a disservice when we don’t take the time to slow down.

My work begins as an excitement about a specific formal quality, a shape of light, a hint of color, repetition …

Tomorrow Is The Worst Day Since Yesterday, Matthew Carlson

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

Susan Sontag wrote: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other space”.

This work addresses aspects of that citizenship. I used my experiences as a person living with a disability and as a parent to a son with Autism to explore the dichotomy of this dual citizenship. The …

Short Stories, Tall Tales, Chance Lure Allen

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

It is often said that the truth should never get in the way of a good story. I use painting and drawing to override truth, open a door to imagined lives, reflect on the past from a new perspective, and look to the future from my current perspective. Thedrawings and paintings in this exhibitioncombine elements of personal history, historical art references, popular culture, and music, drawing heavily from American iconography. I use the format of the still life to create idiosyncratic parings of objects and images documenting memories of growing up in Missouri. Some of the images are short stories. …

Things Change, Julia Leggent

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

The paintings in Things Change are pieces of my life; they follow my routines, thoughts, and worries, but these topics are experienced by many. The images of flesh, knobs, and pills are painted at life scale and are meant to be widely relatable. With each of my works, I hope to bring awareness to social, political, and feminine themes while drawing the viewer in and inciting interest in the ever-changing visual aspects of everyday life.

Examining routine, ritual, and time is always fascinating to me; I work to show this through my paintings. Practices change throughout the years. Strangely, you …

Crushing Caution, Lindsey Day

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

I am preoccupied with the nuances of ordinary risk. I view this not as paranoia, but as prudence. To live without fear is a privilege, to be arrested by it is paralyzing. I often encounter two competing ideologies, two lenses, through which risk is evaluated. The first lens is for the victim, the person being crushed by, or blinded from, cautiousness. They see life as something happening to them, and avoid active risk-taking. The second lens is held by the person dominating apprehension, taking action in spite of consequence. I am inclined to find and maintain a balance of these …

Malleable Perspectives, Erik White

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

I attentively paint hastily formed figures, symbols, objects, and scenes that were modeled with never-dry clay onto stretched canvases of various sizes. I paint the malleable character of the clay by depicting its bumps, marks and dents, which emphasizes the fragility, impermanence, and the physical construction of the forms. Those visual attributes serve as a metaphor for the social construction of the concepts within the chosen imagery. To create my images I build clay up and physically move it around—in a similar way, ideas and concepts get built up, manipulated, and changed over time. These paintings serve as a cultural …

It Can't Leave You The Way It Finds You, Kyle Nobles

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

There’s a beautiful innocence in childhood where, although the world is large and new, it feels as though your place in it and the roles that you play are stable and unchanging. In our youth, outside of extraordinary circumstances, we are unburdened by the awareness that everything and everyone is subject to radical change—including our own sense of self. As we grow older though, looking back it becomes clear that this was never the case. In a matter of years, you can change so dramatically that you did not even notice as you became an entirely new person. For me, …

Whitetail, Michael Steven Villarreal

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

When I was growing up, both my parents worked at a U-Haul from which they brought home discarded objects to the house my dad built with his own hands. This home, interior and exterior, was not designed to fit an explicit aesthetic, but all aspects of the house were in harmony and completed by the objects brought into each space. The house became a repository for abandoned domestic American culture— beds, window blinds, couches, appliances, and other products made it into the home in irregular but frequent intervals. For me, each item was an opportunity to have something new to …

Maybe The Gate Could Be A Fan, Erin L. Schoenbeck

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

I notice with quiet thrill an individual object or shape such as a railing, an odd pattern in the cement, a handle that does not match the rest, or a surprisingly decorative form intended only for a useful purpose. Choosing a form for its potential function, strange shape or particular color, I filter it through my aesthetic. My mental repetition of the day’s stresses is changed into lighthearted wondering. Maybe that gate I passed could become a beautiful fanned shape, its silhouette in gold and pale green. It could be so tiny its functional life outdoors is transformed into delicate …