Art and Design Commons^™

Carbon 碳, Mengyuan Li

CGU MFA Theses

Death is the one certainty in life. This fascinates me and I cannot stop thinking about it. When it comes to life and death, the cemetery is a more realistic place than heaven and hell, and it is also a place to feel life and death more directly. A simple gravestone separates life from death. Cemeteries let people come face to face with life, death, and even love.

In a cemetery, there is a tranquility that is different from the city or nature. In a cemetery, people take off their masks and face their emotions. I believe that when we …

The Home As An Object: Material Culture In The Age Of Ikea, Maxwell Harling Fertik

Senior Theses and Projects

The curiosity of everyday objects looms large in every human’s life. And naturally, these objects are almost as diverse in character as the person who bought them. This variation can be in style, period, shape, origin but also in the arrangement it is given in relation to other objects or persons in a space. On one level, the objects we surround ourselves with are meaningless, purely functional, utilitarian and banal. Especially on a budget, one may not consider aesthetic or design issues at all and purely buy a toaster because they want toast. Why would one buy a SMEG+Dolce and …

Threaded, Madeline Arnault

CGU MFA Theses

This group of works is taken from my drawing practice. I have always been fascinated by the variety of line and color you can play with on fabric. For that reason each piece in this exhibition is image and line centric. I love the way a fabric can blend from color to color in the weave and yet contrast so sharply with a line placed on top. These works are a testament to that love.

Behind Closet Doors: Horror And Dislocation In The Queer Closet, Corey C. Allen

Theses and Dissertations

“Behind Closet Doors: Horror and Dislocation in the Queer Closet,” is composed of a collection of sculptures, videos, and sound works that are directly associated with themes of horror and anxiety derived from the precarious space of the queer closet as detailed in this thesis of the same name.

Warped Gates, Christopher Roberson

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in the ambient conditions that are filtered through our bodies and our relationships with the built structures positioning us. I am combining experimental material approaches with a sensitivity to the spaces around an artwork to create sculptural situations that are dissonant and precarious.

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

Theses and Dissertations

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.

North American Data, Joseph A. Burwell

Theses and Dissertations

North American Data fractures and reconfigures pre-existing narratives into new, unauthorized forms of storytelling. Core samples extracted from various narrative sources are reassigned new roles according to their proximity to each other. This paper functions as an introduction to the essential actors and their dramatic inclinations within fluctuating scenarios.

Generative Movements, Cabbage Juice, & Habitats Of Selfhood, Jason Michael Rondinelli

Theses and Dissertations

The content of this essay is a reflection on my practice as an artist. A summary of text includes an analysis of my attraction to certain materials such as drywall, cabbage juice and coconut oil, all materials are the extensions of my memory, intention and pleasure. From warm memories of bathhouses and the flesh of others to managing illness at home, my artwork distills a lived experience into material reality. These materials take the shape of sculptural networks that serve as biographical biomes. The architectural and organic components of the work are sourced from my own experience and the surreal …

Capitalism As Readymade: 5.5 Case Studies, Nathan S. Rayman

Theses and Dissertations

Rayman makes an argument to repurpose capitalist systems as readymade artworks to shift the existing flow of capital from speculator to art producer.

Dress Up, Ye'ela B. Wilschanski

Theses and Dissertations

Dress Up (Performance, 40 minutes) is a dress that functions as a floor, blanket, tablecloth, book and walls. It tells a visual story about domestic care giving rituals, referencing different times and places.

The Social Role Of The Artist, Gabino A. Castelan

Theses and Dissertations

Gabino A. Castelán, tells a personal story of loss that influenced his artistic practice. He embraced this narrative to create two projects “Practice of Everyday Life-205 (PoEL-205) and the formation of a temporary collective called, Cultural Workers. He presents two case studies of twenty-first century artists, whose projects have business models that allow them to function in social roles during political and social turmoil. "Conflict Kitchen" and "Rebuild Foundation" provide context about running for-profit and not-for-profit artistic practices. Castelan writes about these projects' influencing his artistic practice in general.

Archaeology Of Social Patterning, Chase Bray

Theses and Dissertations

The episteme that created the grid as a structure for logic has been usurped. We compose meaning from an adulterated grid, or pattern. I process meaning through the abuse of acrid patterns and the grid, the reduction of imagery to silhouettes and by referencing both cultural and classical mythology.

The Wild Beasts, Peter Cochrane

Theses and Dissertations

The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to …

How To Be Okay, Isabel G. Van Den Heuvel

Senior Projects Spring 2019

I began this line of thought with the desire to understand human connection. I want to know how people operate both as individuals being perceived as well as how they connect to each other in small, casual ways. Acts like introducing yourself, or navigating in a crowded place seemed like skills that everyone had learned on the day I had skipped class. This began as a private venture, an intensifying of my day to day attempts of applied observation. My result, rather than gradual mastery of interpersonal relations, was deeper confusion and frustration. I wanted instruction, but the construction of …

Sanguine Salvation: Pilgrimage And Penance At The Sanctuary Of Chimayo, Isabella J. Spann

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

Iteration, And The Iron Theater, Kurt Breshears

Master's Theses

Sculpture is produced with considerations to aesthetic appeal using mathematical patterns and physics. Both avenues of sculpture, the static sculpture and the performance art, have their foundation in this approach to creating artworks. The work in the catalog is a visual representation of this process.

Living Tangent, Cornelius Alexander Hugo

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

A living tangent is how I am known by many and how I have lived my life for some time. I think in tangents and my life and art seem to evolve through them. Everything I make is connected by multiple thoughts or tangent lines that run from something as simple as the color red, to the idea that I believe communism has invaded my family’s homeland. This then leads to the recollection of childhood games, taught to me by my family in Venezuela and the importance these games played in my psychological development and in my presence as an …

Beauty In Imperfection: Post-Hyperreal Cosmetic Containers, Se Hee Jang

Theses and Dissertations

An unhealthy reliance on vision alone, fed by pervasive, doctored, hyperreal imagery in the mass media, suppresses a more balanced use of other senses, reinforcing superficial beauty standards. Trapped by an uncritical preference for the visually “perfect” and harmonious, people increasingly seek to remove physical attributes they consider “imperfect,” without first considering how these “imperfections” benefit and distinguish them as unique individuals.

This thesis addresses superficial beauty standards by shifting focus from singularly visual experience to a more nuanced sensory aesthetic that also considers haptic qualities. Through a combination of research writing and targeted making, my work examines society’s understanding …

This Must Be The Place, Eve White

Theses and Dissertations

This publication is the companion piece to “This Must Be the Place,” a 3D realization of my conceptual photography work exhibited in the Anderson Courtyard at VCU's 2019 School of the Arts MFA Show. I photograph scenes from nature and reproduce these images onto flattened plexiglass planes, arranging them in new, natural environments and photographing them again. The outcome is a scenic collage in which two unfamiliar locations become superimposed. It is my hope that as people experience the work they become a part of the texture of it.

Lotion In Your Lungs, Raul H. De Lara

Theses and Dissertations

This is a document explaining in detail my artistic practice from childhood to the day I graduated VCU. It will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already felt such ways, or similar ways – words and ghosts are mostly invisible.

Nigga Is Historical: This Is Not An Invitation For White People To Say Nigga, Sandy Williams Iv

Theses and Dissertations

Over the past several years I have been on a quest to locate a world beyond the one I’ve been presented. I am interested in the history of atomic particles - like everything that radiates off of a monument (both literally and those things that are metaphorically reified) - invisible things, and the ways in which these things insect beyond our knowledge systems. This inquiry takes many forms. Mine is a conceptually based practice linked to record keeping and time, and the ways in which these concepts find plurality within our culture; or more pointedly, the importance that we attach …

Vox Machinal : The Voice In The Machine, Phoebe Hiltermann

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

A radio play and foray into the psychosis of a woman through sound, dance, and puppetry.

I Thought The Earth Remembered Me, Hannah Bates

Theses and Dissertations

The forest is teeming with activity: fungi transform dead logs into nutrients, roots entangle themselves with the earth, and strong winds break resilient boughs. Like the forest, the human body functions according to a complex system of agents - from the micro bacteria in the gut to the pores of the skin. The built world has often been rendered in opposition to these processes of nature. As a vessel through which the world is experienced, the body is an intermediary between raw matter and fabricated things. The planet is suffused with human life, and there is a critical tension between …

Generic Of, Nicole Levaque

Theses and Dissertations

generic of is a creative text paralleling the creation of my thesis exhibition. I use fragmented layers of narrative, description and prose in the same way each handbuilt ceramic is fired multiple times, allowing the glazes to build upon themselves. This is a close study of the still life, the intimacy of consuming, and how trauma is passed through the gut.

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …

Greetings From..., Casey Mae Schachner

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Greetings from... is a reflection of my roots in the tropical vacationland of Florida, a place for which I feel both nostalgic and conflicted. Growing up in southern tourist destinations, I was confronted daily with the extreme contrasts of living in paradise. In my artwork, I am translating the cacophony of Florida through the lens of materiality. By re-configuring commodified objects of the tourism industry, the sculptural works in this show exhibit my consideration for the paradoxical relationships that exist between materials and place. Much like the avant-garde Surrealist object, or the assemblage of found materials in provocative combinations that …

Neo_Fluxus & Dragons, Zachary A. Kelley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What is a viewer? Who can be a viewer? What is the purpose of a viewer? Is viewing an artwork a process? How does a viewer interact with an artwork? What is an artist? Are the formal elements or conceptual natures more important in art making? Why is that art? These questions and more direct me in how and why I make my art.

I will be discussing the relationship between the viewer and the artwork in an artwork experience. I will define an artwork experience using an analysis of Michael Fried’s notion of theatricality, relating the viewer to the …