Art and Design Commons^™

Standing On The Edge Of A Dream, Parto Ahmadpour Mobarake

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Standing On the Edge of a Dream delves into the intricate tapestry of lived experiences shaped by relocation, emphasizing the nuanced space that exists between reality and imagination. As an individual who has undergone the transformative journey of immigration, I recognize that the concept of relocation is like standing on the edge of a dream. This notion becomes a living structure, intricately woven with threads from our past, present, and future. My artistic exploration extends beyond my artworks, yet it remains deeply rooted in my personal narratives. The artworks in the exhibition continue to draw inspiration from personal memories and …

From An Unlikely Place, Brittany Borcher

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From an Unlikely Place, a collection of eight ambitious paintings created while in residence at the University of Arkansas, examines the intersections of landscape painting, gendered gaze, feminine experience and the language of abstraction. One of the challenges I faced while working on this project was finding points of connection between verbal and visual language. As an artist, I consider where vulnerability, sensitivity and generosity intersect my work and am curious about the strange potential an individual's visual language; in my case, a concoction of abstract and figurative forms has to communicate the quality of experience. When placed together on …

Dream Border, Pardis Ahmadpour Mobarake

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dream Border is the result of my lived experience of relocation. The exhibition addresses the duality of being on the border between reality and imagination. In this place, the present, past, and future exist simultaneously. By engaging with personal narratives, childhood memories, as well as Iranian cultural and literary visual elements, I search for universal concepts in relocation. These works evoke the imposition of power and the many phenomena that the contemporary world endures despite globalization, such as anxiety, fear, and oppression on a small or large scale, which compel people to relocate. Uncertainty in the process of migration and …

There Are Ghosts In The Machine, Jonathan Green

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are ghosts in the machine is a body of paintings that dare to dissolve the boundaries between my physical body, intimate desires, and paintings. Utilizing the aesthetics of leather lifestyles, the paintings express the transformational potential of desire and transgression. Oriented within my experience as a queer, transgender male, I call upon influences that range from the body horror classics by director David Cronenberg or the transgressive attitude of Nine Inch Nails, to theoretical works on the power of eroticism by Audre Lorde and Georges Bataille.Modified by hardware such as chains, zippers, and grommets, the paintings express the transformational …

As The Sun Yellows The Green Of The Maple Tree, Adam Fulwiler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Sun Yellows the Green of the Maple Tree is a body of paintings investigating communication, improvisation, play, and painting’s capacity for transformation.

Reflecting on my childhood spent with my brother, Austin, who experiences sensory differences due to autism, I establish a painted space that is both forcibly disjointed and meaningfully connected, invoking the uncertainty and complexity of perception and communication. Through chromatic nuance, physicality, representational ambiguity, and visual tempo, I invite the viewer into the act of slow looking—to encounter each work as a living, breathing, individual entity.

In the studio, I invent rules and aleatoric devices, mimicking …

Invisible Until, Markeith Woods

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Invisible Until” explores my personal experiences while working full time at Tyson Foods in Pine Bluff, AR up until moving to Fayetteville for graduate school. The body of artwork comes from reflecting on past a present while drawing from inspiration from Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Casteel, and more. Using history as a tool to break down the American struggle I used conversations amongst my high school classmates to pull from their direct experiences to convey life and what it means to come from Pine Bluff. By using real people and their life events of trying to achieve progress, …

Heartwork, Lance Taylor Loftin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heartwork is a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore the many ways identity is shaped by familial histories and personal memory. Focusing on my time growing up on a pine tree farm in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 90s, Heartwork explores gender, religion, regional traditions, family, and art. Through conversations and collaborations with my family, painting acts as an impetus for strengthening relationships. By reevaluating the past, I am able to create a web of interconnected narratives that inform and shift my understanding of the present.

The Branch On Which The Blossom Hangs, Thomas Sterling Coffey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Branch on Which the Blossom Hangs is a body of paintings which address the relationship between landscape or physical presence and the primary experiences of emotion and perception. Through this examination of phenomenology and the malleability of the perceptual apparatus, the paintings express my feeling of dislocation caused by a cycle between depression, dissociation, and mental well-being. They question how an individual relates to their environment. The paintings seek to elicit the allusive and embodied qualities of poetry, framing and evoking a broader experience without defining it. By using the recognizable visual language of landscape, abstracted to the point …

When They Sing A Song Of Joy With Sorrow, Ziba Rajabi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As an Iranian female artist, my work revolves around my desire to reconcile my relationship with two distinctive places, Tehran (my native land) and Arkansas (where I reside now). In my paintings and installations, I re-create intimate moments culled from my home and neighborhood in Iran. Due to a situation where I am far away from my homeland and not allowed to return without being forced to remain in Iran, I can feel my memories of home fading away. By utilizing memories from my past, I take aspects of images that are no longer recognizable and, therefore, are abstracted into …

Liable To Change, Jody Travis Thompson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Liable to Change is a body of paintings in which I explore diverse approaches to the representation of visual space. Depictions of space and movement change throughout the pictures by combining various artistic conventions, such as trompe l’oeil realism and non-objective, geometric abstraction. Oil paint, resin, beeswax, and other materials create built-up surfaces which contain the history of their making. Interaction between various finishes and light on these surfaces changes based on the viewers' proximity to the painting. Images of monkey bars, lattice, golden ratio and flower of life patterns provide a structure through which line, form, and space are …

Give Up The Ghost, Hannah T. Mcbroom

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Give Up the Ghost is a series of six paintings created in Fall 2018 and Spring 2019. The paintings are an introspective examination of transgender subjectivity in visual narrative.

In this paper, I separate the personal and research through first and third person, similarly to how I separate imagery and mark making in my paintings. The paper is broken up into a description of the project, the history and theory which informs the work, and why painting is used to describe bodies and spaces.

Give Up the Ghost refers to giving up social expectations as determined by gender. The paintings …

Subject To Change, Alexis Kurtzman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Subject to Change is comprised of a series of self-devised, ritually practiced free-associative action-mark-making strategies. Each procedure explores various degrees of chance operations and seeks to question and explore the roles of intuition, intention, interpretation and human participation. A hybrid of fixed method with variables of the unknown explores and investigates performative mark-making methodologies, in-person and internet collaboration, control and working under pre-fixed intervals. Alongside chance, time-based procedures are concurrently determined to achieve work on paper whose marks are not initially foreseen. This practice of working addresses the disconnect between the maker engaged in active activity of doing versus the …

Off The Grid, Matthew Owen Buffington

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Off the Grid explores the messy relationship between public and private perceptions of our urban spaces, especially the tensions created when lived experience runs up against the physical and conceptual networks of cities: street grids, construction tape, and property lines. Incorporating different modes of spatial representation, from cartographic diagrams to isometric illustrations and Renaissance perspectives, this exhibition examines the role drawing plays in how we conceptualize the divisions and definitions of everyday space. The drawings engage the often overlooked detritus of city life, from layers of old graffiti to overgrown dirt piles and unmoored electrical wiring, that complicate our understanding …

To The Moon And Back, Michael Tyler Pennekamp

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Almost fifty years after the Apollo 11 mission, the moon landing remains one of humankind’s most remarkable technological achievements. On the lunar surface, the Eagle’s flight crew left behind an American flag, mementos honoring those who lost their lives in the quest for such an achievement, and a plaque reading, “Here men from the planet Earth set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” Despite overwhelming proof of this achievement—radio transmissions, photographs, film, rock and soil samples—a sizable minority of Americans continue to view the Apollo 11 moon landing as a hoax. To …

Fragmentality, Elena Volkova

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary art is dedicated to the conversation between the past and the present, the established and the experimental; it becomes more and more trans-border, as life itself. Nowadays, people live in the world, where their beliefs, ideas, politics, and religion are constantly colliding. The more people expand boundaries and develop connections, the more complex and tangled our society becomes as a system.

FRAGmentality presents a set of mixed media pieces incorporating painting, weaving, embroidery and three-dimensional elements dedicated to these contradictions in the modern society. It deals with structures within Social relations and human nature.

Being a representative of a …

Breaking Wind, Todd William Pentico

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Breaking Wind is a research project and thesis exhibition composed of a series of ceramic objects in conjunction with paintings that explore the systems that dictate belief, the motives that drive curiosity, and biological connection to our surroundings. The work uses the context of the gallery and devices used in museums such as plinths, shelves, and wall text to reinforce the idealized and fictive into something believable.

In the work, Breaking Wind refers to a clumsy breakdown and rethinking of the seemingly simple natural phenomenon, wind. Wind is understood as a natural occurrence that has no origin or any innate …

Synthetic Constructive, Jonathan Wade Mcdaniel

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Synthetic Constructive is an exhibition of paintings and collages, both reflect the building and managing of synthetically constructed places and expose the human condition of struggle in both the physical world and the emotional world. I view these works as synthetically created arenas that inform my understanding and experience of natural forces that cannot be rationalized or neatly ordered. Though inspired by and constructed from the imagery of the after effects of devastation they become more than that as they explore these relationships. It is important that these works, both as collages and as paintings, reflect the search and process …

Toile, Dilenia Garcia

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Toile is a painting series that explores constructions of taste and the semiotics of manufactured fabrics. Through the use of irony, paradox and deconstructions of rhythm, shape, color and form, the paintings are a response to the formal and historical content in the fabric. The idyllic landscape, notions of identity, sexism and liminality are some of the themes considered in the series. The paintings in this exhibition attempt to correct and mediate outdated models of representation through the exploration of painting as a process that is open and malleable.