Art and Design Commons^™

All At Sea, Yangyang Mao

Masters Theses

What is the reality of young people born between 1985 and 1995 in China? How do they feel about themselves? As one of the generation, I feel like I’m often haunted by futures that failed to happen. Reasons are multiple and are closely influenced by the social context, such as the implications of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and One Child Policy (1980-2016), which has marked each individual’s growth in this age with unfading recollections.

Holding Spaces, Zibby Jahns

Masters Theses

I’ve focused my graduate studies at RISD on the conceptual and social function of chairs as an investigation into comfort and grief. Grief is an apprehension: defined both as “to grasp” and as “anxiety/loss”.

With the multitude of deaths due to the inadequacies of our government and healthcare system, and the general anxiety everyone has been feeling through this pandemic, it has felt difficult to grieve for any individual person, in person. We have to grieve in the ways capitalism has taught us: silently, behind closed doors, without much time or fuss or drama, mourn with dollars and move on. …

Traveling Troubled Wallflower, Julius Cavira

Masters Theses

Cavira is an interdisciplinary Conceptual artist... nuff said.

Your New Best Friends: An Exploration Of Furby, Siri, And Other Sociable Electronics, Avery Forbes

Masters Theses

Your New Best Friends: An Exploration of Furby, Siri and Other Sociable Electronics is focused around interactive electronic systems and the effect these systems can have on our human psyches. My work focuses on two particular periods of development: the late 80’s to early 90’s, and the 2010’s to present. One period represents my childhood and the other my early adulthood. By comparing the two I can examine trends in the ways we engage with robotics and can better understand the ubiquity of electronically mediated interactions today. I utilize these new understandings to manipulate the capabilities of devices from both …

Dissonant Forms: Landscape, Nature-Love, And Art, Taylor F. Benoit

Masters Theses

As artists continue the long and storied lineage of Landscape, are there aesthetic responsibilities that come with representing the forces that afford you the capacity to do so? As we delineate spaces into places, endless interconnectivity into knowable “systems”, and living matter into thing based taxonomies, who do these delineations serve and with what intentions do we proceed? My studio art practice explores what it means to give form to our Former—the Former being that from which we came, the here and now, our explicit ecological reality, the stuff of what we call nature. …

Is It Real?, Hana Al-Saadi

Masters Theses

The architecture of Doha, Qatar is defined by skins of glass. When the sun shines upon the layers of glass, it creates a shimmery reflective grid across the surface of the city. These reflections, while visually intriguing, conceal many private realities behind the surface.

As a multidisciplinary artist, I attempt to maneuver in the space between the opacity of the facade and stories that lie behind. Specifically, I use this space to directly expose the contradictions that I encounter here.

Phefumula Nami, Ndivhuho Rasengani

Masters Theses

Cosmos: Building a cosmology (mid 17th century: from French cosmologie or modern Latin cosmologia, from Greek kosmos ‘order or world’ + -logia ‘discourse’,) which mirrors and exhumes hidden narratives from our current reality. It is in this tracing that I teeter between visual codes in the form of memories impressed upon my mind from generations of old and Aesthetic symphonies from the present.

The Body Extended, Yi Yang

Masters Theses

The book isn’t meant to have a center. The book is not meant to be read in order.

A book is made up of different dates and different speeds.

The chapters of the book delve nonlinearly into a range of philosophic, scientific, and political subjects connected by threads of ideas that go off in different directions at different speeds and different intensities.

Accompanying my research, memories, and project documentation, I record personal anecdotes that reflect my passion and my obsessions, as well as lay the foundation for the included work.

The book is a map book, a roots book, an …

The Passing Show, Kathryn Fanelli

Masters Theses

The Passing Show, examines the interface between contemplative practices and the destabilizing effect of the carnivalesque. A repurposed early 20th century merry-go- round is reconfigured as a conceptual vehicle for renewing our attention to removing hindrances. The site-specific installation, titled Vimoksha, is viewed through the lens of the radical imaginary, investigating notions of karmic inheritance through a heuristic approach to material processes, personal history, kinetics and sound.

Cumulative Grief, Xuan Pham

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition Cumulative Grief, in which the artist's personal and familial narrative explores the complexity and nuances of racial grief.

Wrung From Grave Architectures, Megan Solis

Masters Theses

Found or imagined findings... notes, diary entries, texts, prayers and poems

Disasters are avenues to gain intimacy glory is the constant

What is the skeleton made of, if not to be filled with meat to be piled and molded to bring back life.

pain and memory to be grave architectures, the stuctures that fall,

a plea for humanity: “Am I just a phantom waiting to be ripped from shady ground?”

desperate melancholy we realize that she is

I am

you are

tragic.

guilt to perform, to retraumatize is a punishment and is masochistic. to violently reenact, like haunted ghosts, to …

Watermarks : The Catalogue For Home Enthusiasts, Susana Oliveros Amaya

Masters Theses

Not just when tricks are revealed as tricks, but also when they become something else and materials still push one direction but then take a different turn. The wardrobe does not quite fit in your Ford Ka, the shelves are not exactly straight, the bed does not fit the mattress and the cabinets do not line up. The tension between ideals and use opens a space for re-appropriation, one that can reveal and turn its socioeconomic codes against themselves. Perhaps these are precisely the moments of friction when these ideological watermarks can be disrupted.

I - 0, Sanghyun Koh

Masters Theses

This pack of cards is a provisional collection of encyclopedic thoughts and knowledge selectively hoarded for the artist’s comprehension of the world. These cumulative writings, packaged in a distributive form for intellectual play, cover the artist’s past workings, current studies and dormant plans, amassed in the responsible attitude of selection as well as in the irresponsible method of organization. The content of this 144-card deck is basically oriented to the oscillating status of a self seeking the ‘Grasping Totality’ as a human desire and of the ‘Improbability of Reach’ as a human limitation, whether true or false, proven or unproven, …

Madrepora, Elizabeth Burmann Littin

Masters Theses

Exploring materiality and how we’re inextricably entangled with it, this thesis dive into bodily, aqueous, and political engagements for dissolving the human project of separating nature from culture and bodies from environments. This dematerialization practice driven by discursive means has served as an excuse for the industrial exploitation and abuse of the less seen.

Infused by the material turn in feminist theory, I propose to think with materiality in all its wet, slimy, and dusty ongoingness as a way to craft from the living and dying processes that we embody as current wanderers among contamination, scarcity, and ruins.

Proposing a …

Recycle Bin (Trashure), Eunhyung Chung

Masters Theses

I am inspired by painful and exhausting situations, fragile or impermanent things that break easily and do not last long, so most of my works are installation or performance which changes as time goes by. I think a lot about the sense of loss and there are two kinds of loss in my work. One is the loss of precious moments and emotions of the past. Since I have so many blissful memories of my childhood related to art, they are the driving force of my artwork and they form the core of my identity. The loss of direction and …

I Speak As One In Doubt, Margaret Hazel Wilson

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition I Speak as One in Doubt. Blending epistolary format and visionary narrative, the artist addresses her complex relationship to her Catholic upbringing.

Fielding, Emily Tareila

Masters Theses

Fielding is an ongoing exploration of place-making, spaces of learning and relationship building in formal and informal learning environments. The project is comprised of a series of events and workshops that are embodied, multimodal, olfactory and engagement-focused and a mobile cart that helps to facilitate these happenings both in and out of the formal gallery space. I regard my art practice as pedagogical, a blurring of art and life into intentional ways of being in the world; an experience of sharing practices with others and a form of what is regarded in institutionalized art as social practice. I find art …

Transit, Christopher Janke

Masters Theses

This written thesis, transit, accompanies an exhibition by the same name and serves to contextualize the exhibit. The written portion begins with an inquiry into the nature of the contextualization itself, questioning the nature of the relationship between the written thesis, the exhibit, and the University which explicitly requires and connects the two, especially the ways that the written word as granted authority through an institution of higher education might undermine the exhibit’s intent to provoke thought into other forms of knowledge and other avenues of legitimacy than those presented by this institution.

The thesis discusses the philosophic question sometimes …

Circle, Loops, Straps, Tracks, Towels, Laura Thatcher

Masters Theses

When running, thoughts come and go and disappear otten before I can solidify them. I can only really hang onto a few but it's liberating because it allows my mind to leap from one thing to the next by way of lucidity. This brings an experience of felt time or the sensation of time passing. I can slide rhythmically from the haptic to the elusive while passing quickly through places and ambiences.

Mantle, David Hannon

Masters Theses

Through a large-scale installation called mantle, I explore how the queer body becomes uncanny to the home through a human sized dollhouse and using scenic design ideas. Home for many is a safe place, but for queers, it can be a difficult one, wrought with not belonging in a childhood of heteronormativity. Being stuck in that heteronormative space is what I communicate through a stage set, composed of four theater flats, printed and collaged wallpaper, free-standing photos mounted on MDF, a giant necklace in a separate room, and impromptu pieces made in the space.

Thesis, Robert Joseph Anspach

Masters Theses

This is a seemingly didactic account of the nature of the mind, art, and the end of the world. It is probably not very good and the author does not stand by what is stated within it, but has to turn something in in order to graduate. Maybe do not read it.

Dermis, Julia Betts

Masters Theses

I create situations that hold onto spaces or things. That psychic energy can be transferred to a viewer. I’m curious about this transference and The Aesthetics of Disengagement and the empathetic nature of making work.

I often engage the viewer through overwhelm (such as: texturally, amount of objects, length of performance, mark making…) to create anxiety/tension around a body or around how a body relates to space. To create this overwhelm, I use ritual, repetitive labor that is between obsessive and meditative. In this boundary, I wonder about whether art is healing or can be. I’m interested in creating spaces …

Tendrescopic Endeavors And Other Dynamics, Jared Akerstrom

Masters Theses

Tendrescopic Endeavors and other Dynamics is an attempt to coalesce the ideas and skills that have been flying around my studio over the course of the last year into a single project. A trip to Storm King Art Center and ideas of modular making began a cycle of exploration into the way custom fittings could create light-weight and transportable sculptures. Developing a greater ability to digital model and create my own unique parts has been the charge that I have built this work upon. Science and the devices that facilitate scientific discovery act as the embodiment of the desire to …

I Am Come Back To You, Eleanor Tomlinson

Masters Theses

Through various forays into psychological science and affect theory, this work attempts to understand how quick and simple commodities might coalesce into a complex portrait of individual and collective memory.

Sight Lines, Makia Sharp

Masters Theses

Through investigations of liminal phenomena, this written thesis explores the direct and indirect effects of time, light, architecture , and metaphysical space. Along with the work, it is an attempt to create a framing around these phenomena which are both banal and transcendent, and which exist of the edge of perception.

Two Sculptural Fabrications That Utilize Tension, David Robert Olson

Masters Theses

The problem chosen is one which utilizes the fabrication of parts to be constructed into a unified sculptural whole. The documentation of the fabrication of two sculptural statements is presented in this paper. A personal process of finalizing a finished piece will be presented. The works in the following pages are from similar ideas, yet different in their approach because of the two separate materials utilized--mild steel and quarter-sawed white oak. The first documented piece discussed is in steel; the second, in wood. What guides the approach to the works as sculptural ideas will first be encountered.

I am involved …

One Artist’S Experimental Approach To Sculpture, John J. Smith Iv

Masters Theses

This paper is intended to reflect the creative sensibilities of one artist-scientist as he experiments with media and his perceptions of nature as an approach to growth. His philosophy revolves around the relationship of his experience, his natural instinctive sensibilities, their affection upon his intuition, and the resulting creative process. The stimuli for the process are found in the natural realm around him whether perceived scientifically or artistically. Due to the intrinsic nature of the creative phenomenon, it is very difficult for the artist to separate the scientific and artistic modes from the naturalistic or experiential stimuli. So he goes …

Cold Connections As Used By The Metalsmith And Sculptor, Deborah A. Rohr

Masters Theses

Metal may be joined to metal and non-metal materials by many techniques. It is my intent to discuss one group of such techniques--that of cold connections, and illustrate them with art works. Although there are many types of cold connections, this study will concentrate on the use of rivets, screws, bolts, adhesives, nails and wire as cold connectors.

A proper definition for cold connection is attachment of one piece of material to another piece of material without use of heat.

Historical reference of the uses of cold connections by prehistoric man, early civilizations of man, through modern times is included …

Fibers And Fabrics In Stuffed Sculpture, Carol Ann Haskell Kessler

Masters Theses

This thesis is a report of my experiences with fibers and fabrics in producing sculptural forms. They begin with my use of fibers in unstuffed sculpture and proceed to the use of stuffing materials in many varieties. To give an historical perspective, included are a number of related works, both primitive and recent. For the purpose of critical analysis, each sculptural form is pictorially presented and discussed.

The Use Of Fiber To Create Sculptural Forms, Christine Danner

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.