Art and Design Commons^™

Shinners, Alexis E. Mabry

Theses and Dissertations

Shinners is a project that aims to examine the position of women in subcultures and capture conversations of women in subcultural sports. Within feminism, sociological constructs, campy horror, and personal experience I am manifesting the physical and mental obstacles faced in the subcultural sport of Bicycle Motocross (BMX) through photography, painting, collage, video, and sculpture. I interpret images posted to social media of injuries obtained while riding BMX as forms of empowerment, bodily gore as extreme evidence of participation, performative violence, valorizing the understanding of both the physical and psychological pain of failure, and the use of failure as a …

The Dream Of Being Totally Open, Frederick Greis

Theses and Dissertations

This essay details four major themes in the paintings of Frederick Greis: spiritual experience, nature, pleasure, and humor. These themes are described within the context of the artist's main goal, which is to create an experience of profound unburdening.

Sex Is Always On The Table, Jordan D. Artim

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines my work parallel to the formal and symbolic qualities of Renaissance painting, specifically the work of Bronzino. Through understanding the visual representation of the queer community throughout art history, harkening back to specific artists such as Paul Cadmus and Robert Mapplethorpe, my work attempts to find new ways of representing queer experience that extends beyond eroticism and the sexual gesture.

On Memory And The Radical Black Imagination, Todd Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

On Memory and the Radical Black Imagination is an exploration of the personal, sociological, and historical elements contained within the art of T. Eliott Mansa (Todd Eliott Thomas) Mansa examines the memorialization of black death and the radical black imagination. included are illustrations of specific art works and descriptions.

Quotations Like The Sharpest Claws, Johanna Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

Quotations like the Sharpest Claws describes a multimedia installation composed of paintings and sound that explores the theory of cognitive dissonance, a controversial psychological model that attempts to explain how we deal with inconsistency in incompatible beliefs. Imagination is given primacy as a source for truth-seeking and world-building. The uncanny and surreal are used as entry points into this topic.

The title is derived from a description of Eileen Myles’ poetry I once read in an anonymous review. Their writing was described as beyond poetry in a way that it could only be described as such when surrounded by “quotations …

High-Di-High-Di-High-Di-High, Low-Di-Low-Di-Low-Di-Low, Daniel Figueredo

Theses and Dissertations

I am a believer in our image culture and its capacity to be liberating, exploratory, and critical. I also believe in its ability to overwhelm. My own work is a reaction to this over saturation. It is equally influenced by childhood exposure to remedial computer graphics and cartoons, as well as formative experiences traveling, an in-depth Art Historical education, and a love for art developed over time.

Invisible Invisibility, Eugina Song

Theses and Dissertations

White America assumes its culture is the default, and Asian culture as foreign and irrelevant. I address Asian invisibility by using canvas structure as a Western framing device of painting, and make this cultural barrier visible by breaking out of the frame. Deriving from Dansaekhwa, I challenge the Western painting structure with materiality.