Art and Design Commons^™

The Twilight Zone: The Confluence Of Childhood Scenes And Future Anxiety, Jongwon Bae

Theses and Dissertations

Jongwon Bae’s paintings reflect his childhood memories as an archive that is to be repressed until it manifests itself in uncertain ways as it becomes confluent with the anxiety about the future.

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.

Inside The Aviary, Nikki Mehle

Theses and Dissertations

Modularity and movement of energy are two key concepts in the construction of Nikki Mehle's paintings. Painting is an act of both processing and creating reality – the duality of reflection and invention.

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.

Domestic Disturbance, Tanner J. Mcguire

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My work explores domesticity, the role reversal happening in the family dynamics, the banality of home life, and the common escapism that occurs in parents. Men play a larger role in the home and women play a larger role outside the home blurring the lines of responsibility and changing expectations. This emasculating process often creates a power struggle within the home. These common issues are the fodder for my artistic practice. Domestic pattern, utility, sexual frustration, chaos and contentment all play a part.

Surface, Object, Space, Susan Doe

Masters Theses

Considered primarily a form of painting, my practice adopts the languages of sculpture and installation to explore abstract constructions of personal and societal hierarchies. In this current body of work, I am crocheting architectural forms that blur the distinctions between surface, object, and space. Whether occupying pictorial space or actual space, simple patterned units coalesce into emergent forms through repetition and accumulation. I am drawn to malleable materials that allow for an indexical registration of the force of my hands and body. Working in a wide range of materials including paper, mylar, fabric, foam, plastic, sheet metal, wire, monofilament, and …

The Farce Of The Frame, Dominic Musa

Masters Theses

Both argument and joke, this series of works offers a critical inspection of the world. Characters trace their steps through the scene of each painting, questioning their place within the appearance of things. The central character is the artist-as-critic. Through this character, with his looming magnifying lens, we are implicated as readers of the faux world—an absurdist play intoxicated with scribbled lines, decorative patterns, and conflated histories—as we embark on a quest for an understanding of human existence. Emptied of any emotional concerns, the characters investigate the world they live in, searching for any indication of hope or a reason …

Art Loser, Laura Jasek

Masters Theses

In my work, I aim to historicize the mechanics of misogyny. Through appropriation and re- authorship, the work interrogates and exposes the discreet erasure of contemporary gender inequalities and the societal attempt to obscure the historical origins of these inequalities.

My thesis work has been focused on Frederick W. Macmonnies, a predominant beaux-arts sculptor responsible for many early-twentieth-century American fountains and monuments. Many of his sculptures were embroiled in controversy, on grounds ranging from their aesthetic competence to their alleged misogyny. Macmonnies’ staunch academicism ran parallel to the birth of modernism, effectively expelling his name from the contemporary canon of …

From Florine To Flocking : Observations Of A Painter - Printmaker - Embellisher, Elizabeth King

Masters Theses

I am a painter-printmaker-embellisher. The hierarchy of these labels shift to best suit the needs of each piece. Making an image that encourages looking takes precedent over how it is labeled. A quickly read painting is the enemy. I weave together complex passages on the surface to function as a speed bump, to slow down the viewer’s navigation of my paintings. I value color, pattern, and texture above a narrative. Borrowing the palette of Florine Stettheimer and the repetitive touch of Edouard Vuillard, my paintings teeter dangerously between being about the idea of decoration and being decorative. Domesticity, femininity, and …

Humor And Allegory, Christopher Goodale

Masters Theses

This series of works proposes the merging of aesthetic interests that undermine the self-seriousness of the artist and the idea of labor in painting. Painting’s slowing of time can hopefully extinguish the peripheral noise of the outside world and provide space for thought. These paintings propose different ways to help the viewer understand visual depth, narrative, and formal decision-making. The optical depth of red, the spatial depth of glazed paint, and the spiritual depth of the figure can provide multiple meanings and possibilities. Another metaphor for the development of this series of paintings would be one comedian telling a joke …

A Theatrical Life : Negotiating Biracial Identity, Timothy Lai

Masters Theses

My paintings and drawings use autobiography, fiction, and theatricality to examine biracial-identity formation and the negotiation of different cultural ideologies. The personification of these ideologies in narrative accounts pose questions to which the characters must answer and respond. This leads to humorous, sad, problematic, empowering, and chaotic compositions that become an intimate chronicle of my own endeavor to find those “perfect” answers.

In my practice, painting and drawing are ways to explore a broad range of topics that stem from personal and familial stories. Using allegorical personifications, symbols, and metaphors derived from my family, I see the home as a …

The Little Girl (Kinda), Hanna Kim

Masters Theses

My work has always been about the personal relationships I've had in the past. It is driven by the

nostalgia of what was, and how it came to be within the present. It is not the act of languishing in a better time or the need to replay a scenario from when life was thought to have been easier. It is replaying the past that makes me chuckle, even if at the time the said event was not so hilarious or amusing. While I am heavily influenced by the psychological workings of the human mind and sociology, I ultimately decided …

Welcome To My Dream – Quasi Queer Fiction, Christian A. Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

Roseate and bodacious, the hand formed surfaces of Christian Rogers' paintings explore gay culture and history though a quasi-fictional lens. While utilizing folk like imagery, Christian depicts dramatic moments of love, lust, sex and violence as he takes us to queer realms.

Ripple, Tyler P. Haney

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My work leverages the dynamic processes the brain uses to compute visual stimuli to influence how viewers experience my work. My aim is to create a ripple effect as the brain processes the visual information I provide.

My process begins with a camera. Focusing on the face, I see how much contextual information I can remove while still capturing the emotional expression of the subject. Before long, a photograph ends up next to a canvas where I will rebuild the image from the photograph using a myriad of expressionistic marks and colors to amplify the emotion.

Recognizing human emotion is …

Beginner's Mind, Martin L. Benson

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My art distills my relationship to spirituality, digital culture, and the practices and side-effects therein, into a simplified visual language. The work manifests in the form of paintings, drawings, and light sculptures. Meditation and mindfulness training are a large part of my influence and interests. I often wonder how mindfulness practice can be mirrored in my artwork, not only in my process for creating the work, but also with what the resulting imagery does for the viewer. My intention is to provide an art form that invites one to look and experience one’s own capacity to observe, without the need …

Remembering Virtual Worlds: Painting And Video Games, Nathaniel M. St. Amour

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Video games create the feeling of great achievement and place the player into a role that turns them into a great hero. These experiences feel significant because they require great time and emotional investment. The monumentality of these experiences, however, are at odds with the transience of the electrical virtual worlds. The medium of oil painting helps overcome the sense of transience because of oil painting’s durable permanent way of image making and stillness. Painting’s inherent nod to history also creates a dissonance between the newness of the video game medium and the antiquity of painting, a contrast exacerbated by …

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 …

Sexual Assault Victims And How They Cope: A Creative Thesis From A Survivor’S Perspective, Taylor C. Campbell Ms.

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis shows the creative process that fine artist Taylor Campbell went through while completing a painting show about the sexual assault epidemic on college campuses. Because she has been a victim of both sexual harassment and assault while attending college, she dives deeper into how she and other survivors cope with their trauma and uses her creative outlet to help get conversation started about the epidemic. She hopes with her research and her paintings that other survivors will realize they are not alone in their battles and are surrounded by people who are ready and willing to help. She …

Xxvii, Ciara Neve Connell

Senior Projects Spring 2017

This show XXVII is truly a testament to the changes I have made through these last four years. My art from a few years ago was unsure of its identity and style. When I started using a technique of staining and liquid paint I felt as though I was more articulate through my art. I had found my language and my words. The large gestures like phrases and the smaller marks and the staccato of the sprays of paint were like a reply.

In my artwork there is a strong emphasis on process and spontaneity. While I learned to understand …

The Long Goodbye, Sidney Meret Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Lifecasting & Ubiquitous Relationships, Alexis Charlotte Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2017

My subjects do not know I exist. They do not know who I am, and they do not know their lives are the center of my painting series. But I know them - at least, I think I do. My acrylic paintings depict people in domestic spaces in specific moments in time. The relationships of person-to-person, person to space, paint to canvas and voyeur to subject drives my obsession to watch and to paint what I see. What I am seeing are a collection of pixels that make up human forms, living rooms, and kitchens. These digital bodies move through …

( D I S E M ) B O D Y, Jessica Leigh

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

Painting The Persona, Reed Dean White

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

I am an oil painter who paints the human form as a subject. My technique varies between loose transparent glazes to more realistic impasto, revealing the process in which I paint. My colors are often exaggerated and unrealistic. I choose to paint people in my community because it reveals a story about the time and place I live in. I enjoy painting people because we are interesting as physical objects: color, form, the way our bodies change as we age, what we chose to wear, etc.. We come in many different sizes, colors, shapes, our postures and facial expressions articulate …