Art and Design Commons^™

A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper consists of a series of scenes in which various narratives with proximity to the truth plays out. within it I aim to articulate the dispersed subjectivity and forensic aspects to my work, as well looking at the perverseness in the desire for proximity to the fantasy, utilizing the self as a vehicle of desire.

Song From A Chamber, Miguel A. Martinez

Theses and Dissertations

My work weaves a biomythography through figurative reimagining of syncretist religious iconographies. This thesis installation is composed of a mural reliquary in which a collection of twenty works on paper is displayed. The project exposes abstract dimensions of body and spirit in relation to my experience as a gay immigrant.

Bonded By Nature: The Prevalence Of Landscape Subjects Within Abstract Expressionism And Their Sources In American Art, Aileen F. Marcantonio

Theses and Dissertations

Landscape subjects reappear throughout Abstract Expressionism. Although it is often overlooked, landscapes were perhaps a natural subject for a group of artists that were known to work from their environment. When we focus on the landscape subjects, we gain a better understanding of Abstract Expressionism and its place within the canon of American art.

Dog Leading A Dog, Ariel Ld Mitchell

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the artist's relationship with paint and painting, and maps it out in a semi-chronological way. It includes fragment of memories, a breakdown of her process, and other painters she relates to.

Creating Home, Ludovic Nkoth

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores and conceptualizes the idea of a world where my people were never colonized, a world where we are still existing with our culture, our powers and the idea of voodoo. I place myself, friends, and family in positions of power, in spaces the world took away from us due to the color our skin. This is the world my practice aims to create.

Appropriation Of The Highest Order: A Study Of Harry Smith’S Master Work, Film No. 18 Mahagonny In Relation To The Brecht-Weill Opera The Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny And Duchamp’S The Large Glass, Rose V. Marcus

Theses and Dissertations

Harry Smith’s Film No. 18, Mahagonny, 1970 – 1980, is a transmutation of the original Brecht-Weill opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a 1930, into a feature-length experimental film. This paper shows how the original opera and Duchamp's The Large Glass prove inherent to Smith’s double-pronged homage to both original works of art. The failure in the opera narrative and the chance shattering of The Large Glass inform Smith’s complex methodology to approach and spatialize cinema. Harry Smith’s use of the tools of the screening apparatus are traced in order to study Mahagonny in detail. The …

Meditations, Adrian D. Mosby

Theses and Dissertations

Adrian Demarco Mosby (b. 1991, Bronx, Ny) is a figurative painter focused on the use of allegory and narrative. His stone like figures depict a modern day apathy and disillusion. The narrative content is meant to formulate a moral philosophy that might combat such apathy.

Memories As Old As Outer Space, Nicholas Benfey

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings draw from personal memory, as well as the nostalgic longing and nightmarish foreboding of the irrational psyche. Cosmic ruptures, cliffs, cemeteries, and parking lots appear alongside snowglobes and canopy beds. I aim to suggest things to be wary of, while giving space for optimistic fantasy and reflective wonder.

To The Studio, In The Studio, Home, Miquel R. Veldkamp

Theses and Dissertations

A curated series of poems and mini essays that reflect on personal life, politics, art history, folklore, science, identity and race. It addresses the questions that inform my work, and echoes its ethos of play, exploration, curiosity, vulnerability.

A Draft: Up N’ Upper Or Sisyphus Lounge; Notes, Poems & Essays From The Road & The Cabin, Andrew M. Foster

Theses and Dissertations

This text imagines a reconciliation where the slick, sterile nature of contemporary objects and conditions might offer a sort of soft retreat. Sisyphus Lounge, a modular installation of light, near-defunct-technologies and carefully cluttered “stuff,” attempts to locate and explore value systems fogged by dis/information and the impossibility to articulate is-ness.

Painting The City In Flux, Simon S. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, Simon Smith describes the way in which the cityscapes of New York serve as a source of inspiration for his painting process. The paper focuses on New York City's warping of time and space, and lays out how Smith sees abstract painting, grounded in a kind of not knowing, as an apt extension of or response to the experience of the city.

Ivan Puni's Berlin Period: 1920-1924, Elena Kakuriev

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is dedicated to the work of the Russian Avant-Garde artist Ivan Albertovich Puni (1892-1956): an artist, a theorist and writer, an organizer of exhibition, a teacher of art, and above all, an innovator. This thesis presents an account of the artist's Berlin period (1920-1924), which has so far lacked scholarly attention.

The thesis begins with a close analysis of Puni's Russian period (1914-1919). In this time span,

Ivan Puni demonstrated his ability to adopt a wide gamut of diverse artistic styles. Puni first elaborated works akin to Cubist constructions. However, starting from 1915, the artist became a major …

From Here And Now: Monuments Of Today And Everyday, Adam Shaw

Theses and Dissertations

The arc of my educational narrative was drawing to a close. I was a month out from my thesis exhibition, the culmination of a three-year experience. The studio was full of an energy I had been longing to feel. I was just beginning. Then came the Pause.

Membranes And Frames, Nurya Chana

Theses and Dissertations

Nurya Chana (b.1988, Bronx, NY) paints, sculpts, and performs to grapple with discontinuities between self and other, the inner and outer self, physicality and feeling. Her practice aims to expose the non-mental voices of the body, reconciling life sciences with the complexity, enormity, and potency of livingness.

Bernice Lee Bing’S Art And Spiritual Practice, Lin Ma

Theses and Dissertations

Living and working in northern California between the late 1950s and 1990s, abstract painter Bernice Lee Bing practiced Zen, Nichiren, and Nyingma Buddhism. This thesis studies what the visual and conceptual impact of these spiritual practices had on her abstract and visionary paintings.

Difficult Paintings, Hao (Damien) Ding

Theses and Dissertations

The sublime as a concept has a fraught and racist history. However, it remains the single most helpful idea in describing the deeply felt state of being when one comes across something ineffably powerful. From an art-making perspective, this thesis, and the accompanying exhibition of installations and paintings, proposes an alternative construction of the concept of the sublime. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as a conceptual point of departure, a painter can manipulate the relationship of the viewer and paintings to create paradoxical moments of simultaneous intimacy and distance, which interact to create an alternative path towards the sublime. Through descriptions of …

Straight Through My Heart, Raul A. Aguilar Canela

Theses and Dissertations

Straight through my heart is an exhibition that explores the concept of heartbreak as a socio-political phenomenon. Through the affect of sadness the thesis analyses the way in which subjects are formed under cognitive capitalism. Paying particular interest to the collateral effects of neoliberal culture —hyper-stimulation, self-exploitation, competition, and obsession with productivity—and the pathologies they create —depression, anxiety, body aches, fatigue— this work shifts the burden of sadness from the individual to the community. By doing so it proposes heartbreak as a public feeling.

An Escapist Utopia, Sara Eh Denney

Theses and Dissertations

As an active pursuit of avoiding excellence, my work acts as a space for failure, play, experimentation and imperfection. This document and final installation acts as a pause along a lifelong journey of object-making, creation, and spirituality. My work, specifically my working practice, rather than any one object or moment, is an escapist utopia for myself. My work is the process, the journey, not the ending or the completion of any one thing. The repetition, distortion, and production that I engage throughout my working practice acts as a spiritual exercise of meaning—making through creation. I fall deeply in love with …

Tomtom Oracle, Grant B. Wells

Theses and Dissertations

TomTom Oracle explores the conceptual and material processes throughout my body of work as an expression of a psychological tethering to a digital visual experience that removes us from the physical world.

L, M, N, O, P, Matt Jones

Theses and Dissertations

A meditation on my painting and drawing practice in relation to the work of Philip Guston, Nancy Spero, and Frank Moore, among others, just before and during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Several Houses, Anthony L. Cudahy

Theses and Dissertations

Within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the thinking that informed my painting practice fixated on the purgatorial temporal space of waiting, a questioning of utopian and apocalyptic impulses, and the preservation of deceased artists' archives.

For The Love Of Existence, Paul Joseph Vogeler

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, artist Paul Joseph Vogeler discusses his influences and current art practice. He covers topics like Catholicism and mortality, BDSM and erotic art, Tarot, spirits and the afterlife, photography and painting, and bones and relics.

Daphne Odjig: Indigenous Art And Contemporary Curatorial Practices, Lucy Kay Riley

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the history of curatorial practices and scholarship regarding the work and life of Daphne Odjig (1919-2016), a self-taught Canadian artist of Potawatomi and English ancestry, in order to situate her at the crux of the contemporary Indigenous art movement in Canada.

Don't Forget Me, I Can't Hide It, Thomas H. Morrill

Theses and Dissertations

Memory, technology, and space are the metaphorical and material players in my work. The video represents an emerging consciousness stuck in a nostalgia-laced, self-referential, emotive loop. It weighs the probability of its experience of life as solipsism. The walls are facsimiles of walls.

The Potency Of Emptiness, Kennedy L. Bailey

Theses and Dissertations

I investigate language and neurology by integrating intangible personal experiences with painted manifestations of rupture within structures. I utilize a hyperbolic translation of white and black to investigate the dismantling of a structure as an explicit quotation of space, matter, existence, and mind.

Turning And Turning, Nicola Stephanie

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores Nicola Stephanie’s works in painted and shaped canvas, which investigate sensation and visual awareness of motion. Inspired partly by clothing forms, her vocabulary of color, shape and surface articulates a sense of the body and its boundaries. These spatial drawings evoke perceptions of gravity, rotation and orientation.

Hey Boo, I’Ve Been Lonely. What’S Good With You?, Khari Johnson-Ricks

Theses and Dissertations

I explore the interlacing macro and micro implications of capitalism on interpersonal relationships. In an attempt to reconcile that problem I use storytelling, painting, and performance to imagine radical futures when love safety and abundance are easier to access.

Feminism And The Staged Uncanny, Jessica C. Mensch

Theses and Dissertations

In my Thesis, I work towards a new definition of the uncanny and show the transformation of its sense in the modern period. I will then show how this transformed sense appears in the media of mechanical reproduction—stage theatrics, photography and film—and, then, specifically in my art practice.

Not Much ∆, Patrick C. Mohundro

Theses and Dissertations

In the paper, Patrick Carlin Mohundro processes his relationship to the loss of his father, painting, and mythologies filtered through his mother and female-identifying conceptualist, artists, and theorists.

Who's Mess?, Jordan Stohl

Theses and Dissertations

Sculpture, Video and Painting have become tools for mediating a hyperactive society fetishizing sensory overload.