Art and Design Commons^™

Waiting To Exhale, Abigail H. Ogle

Theses and Dissertations

We breathe as a measure of time, it keeps us alive, and fabricates the pattern of our lives. We are punctuated by “snarls,” “glitches,” or moments of irregularity – of trying to catch one's breath, having it taken away, or gasping for it. It is the punctuation of sighs, huffs, sniffs, scoffs, screams, and deep intakes that appear as glitches in the breathing system.

In our daily rhythm of breathing, the presence of the glitch, defined as potentiality, can create space for something unexpected or new to arise. Using the wind from fans and approximately 1,260 square feet of silk, …

Welcome To The Sitting Garden At The Busy Hands Museum, Stacie Sabady

Theses and Dissertations

I wanted to attend VCU to learn how to unravel my mind and find the words to describe it. While I did make progress in that area, my surprise discovery is that I need to unravel my body too. It has become unbalanced from years of neglect. When working, I find solace through escape. I find a positive outlet for my perfectionist tendencies. I find a way to visually illustrate my obsessive qualities. Throughout the years of these findings, I have ignored my body pleading with me to take it easy. I have always honored the materials and the tools, …

The Game Of Absolute, Rupeng Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis paper writing is a collection of short stories. Or it could be thought of as a small magazine or even an instruction manual for my work. There is a loose correspondence between its content and the symbols used in my installations. It is also realistically and physically presented in my exhibition as part of a "game box". The chaotic and contradictory narrative of this collection of short stories stems from my exhaustive pursuit of the elements that I try to approach in each story. This insatiable pattern of compulsive organization is also evident in the content of my …

Half Of Two Hungers, Aida A. Lizalde Rios

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

half of two hungers is an extension of my sculptural practice; a weaving of the ambiguous borders of memory, trauma, disease, identity, assimilation, survival, spirituality, love, erotics, and desire. It is a psychological and sensorial landscape, where I travel consciously and subconsciously to pull shapes and material experiences out into the world of bodies and objects.

Dregs / Lessons From The Things Around Us, Juan-Manuel Pinzon

Theses and Dissertations

The writing in Lessons From the Things Around Us is in support of the work in my MFA thesis show, dregs. I detail the progression of my making and thinking over the last two years. I expand on the material and personal relationships that have manifested themselves in the work and influenced my approach to the things that surround me. Finally, I point to a more expansive definition of Craft, rooted in its material sensibilities, and the possibilities already present in the field that this definition creates.

Until Its Calmness Can Claim You, Gabrielle Mchugh

Theses and Dissertations

This is an invitation to pause //

This is an externalization of my inner landscape, a highlight of what I value in my everyday and what comprises my lexicon of a sacred space. The following is a journey of nets, quiet, the sacred, space, and the in-between; where I share research and questions that are the foundation for my thesis work, Until Its calmness can claim you.

// This is an invitation to find moments of quiet in the noise

A Gun For Every Woman, Gentë Retkoceri

Theses and Dissertations

Six centuries ago in Kosova, my home country, unmarried women known as sworn virgins, were forced to adopt a male persona and carry a gun to protect themselves. But today, guns have become tools of oppression and violence against women. And while the legal system carries penalties for domestic violence, marital rape is excluded. To shine a light on, and expose the topic of hidden violence, my thesis uses artivism to address a sensitive but provocative issue, exhibiting a large-scale sculpture of a gun, designed to provoke raw emotions; to challenge visitors to consider the terror felt by women threatened …

Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen

Theses and Dissertations

Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …

It Takes A Muscle: Wholes, Holes, And Other Voids, Saar Shemesh

Theses and Dissertations

IT TAKES A MUSCLE¹

In the BELLY of the BEAST, the HUMAN

in the deep end of a SWIMMING POOL

in a GRAVE, looking up/out from within

at the base of a CRATER, ABYSS, PIT

the room as a CRADLE, INCUBATOR

architecture as MOTHER MOULD.²

____________________________

¹ Title is borrowed and abbreviated: Spectral Display, “It Takes A Muscle To Fall In Love,” 1982.

² For what American-English delineates as ‘mold,’ British-English uses ‘mould’ and is more specific in its technicality. The former doesn’t distinguish in spelling between mold (fungus) and mold (mould). I’m not particularly a fan of …

Until One Resembles The Other, Chad E. Mundie Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

A written accompaniment to Chad Mundie’s thesis exhibition titled Until One Resembles the Other, conceived during the years 2021-22 and installed at The Anderson Gallery, Richmond from April 9-22nd.

The following writing explores themes of labor within the home, generational knowledge, interiority, exteriority, and emotional residue through a series of essays surrounding areas of interest within my practice. The writing concludes with documentation of the show and an accompanying explanatory text.

Defiantly Childlike: Using Aesthetic Resistance To Heal, Sarah K. Reagan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines an alternative processing mechanism surrounding the act of healing after traumatic experiences in life. Using a methodology of iterative patterning and tool-pathing, a collection of inflatable garments and wooden mannequins analyzes defense mechanisms learned in early childhood development. This work highlights an essential body of recent scholarship that takes cuteification seriously to restore a childlike approach to mastering fear. This paper will review the definitions of cuteness and childlike humor and then describe how visual culture has implemented these components to subvert established power.

Typographic Interventions: Disruptive Letterforms In Public Space, Clark A. Goldsberry

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

We are surrounded by typography—on billboards, aluminum cans, pill bottles, and pixelated screens—but artists and art teachers, seeking out the materiality of their lived environments, should be able to look at text in different ways. Many artists utilize letterforms as a medium of juxtaposition and recontextualization (Gude, 2004) by placing text in places we don’t expect to see it, or they subvert the messages we expect to read. Typographic interventions can be seen everywhere, by all types of artists, makers, activists, and dissidents. These interruptions could be framed as forms of socially engaged art (Helguera, 2011; Mueller, 2020) that “suspend …

Fatal Softness, Mariah B. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

my work is about my teeth falling out, the fatal softness in the earth, a monster tattoo on leathered skin, the bliss of not-knowing, revelation, reveling, the ship and the shipwreck, a fire that knows the naming of you, its dark flame acquiring every part of you, smelling a bad candle at tj maxx, handing it to your mom to smell too, a darkness of that which is golden, a god-shaped hole, the petals of a monstrous flower,1 and frog spawn and at the middle of each jelly pearl is a little secret i don’t have to tell you.

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.

Pase Perdido Missing Pass, Larissa M. Garcia

Theses and Dissertations

This paper contains the following terms: colonialism, ghost populations, natural occurrences, global positioning, poetic relation, confrontation/vengeance, mapping, graphs, models, warfare, bio warfare, magic, mystery, migration, memory, mutation, ghosts, and esoteric systems

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 …

Form Follows Culture, Nada Raafat Elkharashi

Theses and Dissertations

We all use everyday objects as part of our daily routines, but the way we use them varies from one culture to another. Using George Herbert Mead’s study of human conduct and Louis H. Sullivan’s credo, “Form follows function,” this thesis examines the cultural meanings and implications surrounding the fundamental act of drinking water. Using a methodology of iterative, exploratory making, a collection of glass vessels explores philosophical and physical manifestations of Islamic cultural principles derived from the Sunnah of Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم. With the goal of restoring cultural integrity to our daily activities, the work highlights …

Earth Tone Sigh Spell, Martha Glenn

Theses and Dissertations

A written accompaniment to the artist’s thesis exhibition titled Earth Tone Sigh Spell, conceived during the years 2020-21 and installed at The Anderson Gallery, Richmond from May 1–15, 2021.

The following thesis explores themes of personal memory, geo-theory, myth, symbol, and historical event. The artist uses research and stream of consciousness writing methods as a way to weave these concepts together and tie them back to her own practice with installation, sculpture, and new media.

Sweet Fruit, Daa Guy-Vasson

Theses and Dissertations

The writing and images in Sweet Fruit are an exploration of my creative works. In the first section, memory, making, and poetics come together to help the reader feel the nuances of my experience. In the exhibition works section, images allow an extended look at the work. Accompanying text describes the relevance of my childhood and my parent's Caribbean upbringing to my creative practice.

Reanimator/Reflection: 
Creating Mirrors Through Time 
With Ai, Sound, Video And Live-Generated Art In The Dark Age Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Eric Millikin

Theses and Dissertations

For my MFA thesis exhibition entitled Reanimator/Reflection, I used artificial intelligence to create three new works of sound and live-generated video art, each based on mirror reflections and 100-year-old racist post-pandemic horror literature by early 20th century American author H. P. Lovecraft. The themes of these writings mirror the issues of our current time. The primary works of Lovecraft that I referenced in the exhibition are “Herbert West: Reanimator,” (1922) a serialized tale about graduate school experiments which attempted to return the dead to life during a plague, and “Nyarlathotep,” (1920) a prose poem that suggests even our dreams …

Ties That Bind Us, Christine M. Orr, Christine M. Orr

Theses and Dissertations

when objects converge in a space

they start a dialogue of their lives

lives that become entangled with your life

your memory

objects are the narrators of memory

a stain, a chip, a tear

materials embed meaning and metaphor within the process of creating

woven cloth, throwing lines, squeezed and pressed coils

all become remnants of the hand

as I make, play, and collect materials and objects

questions are brought forward

How do these components talk to one other?

What are they saying?

How do I listen?

knowledge is generated in the transformation of material through the process of

making …

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo, Luis A. Vasquez La Roche

Theses and Dissertations

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo is a series of works--sculpture, installations, and performances--that explore themes of shame, failure, commodity, ephemerality, ritual, resilience, erasure, race, and death. The research and interest in these themes stem from a page of the Trinidad and Tobago Slave Registry. I use the research that surrounds this document to highlight different moments in history, in my personal life, and to imagine near futures.

...And Yet The Devil Exists, John Hee Taek Chae

Theses and Dissertations

...And Yet the Devil Exists is a project that explores the ways in which ideology determines reality. It is an installation that plots and connects the historical and personal narratives that have defined my sense of identity–narratives in which perceptions of reality shatter, mutate, or hybridize when confronted with power, opportunity, or coercion. The installation component of the project consists of three parts. The first is an infrastructure made of wooden beams upon which paintings and images are installed; I call this the lantern. In the center of this is a round table on top of which is a nonsensical …

Rubin Peacock: 50 Years Of Bronze Sculpture, Rubin Peacock

Books and Book Chapters

“Rubin Peacock: 50 Years of Bronze Sculpture” is an autobiographical account of Peacock’s career as a sculptor, tracing the enduring influences of his Native American ancestry, upbringing in the rural South, and educational experiences abroad.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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.