Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Art and Design
Defiantly Childlike: Using Aesthetic Resistance To Heal, Sarah K. Reagan
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.
Straight Through My Heart, Raul A. Aguilar Canela
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.
A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King
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 …
Pebbles Is A Girl That Doesn't Know Anything, Grace A. Kubilius
Pebbles Is A Girl That Doesn't Know Anything, Grace A. Kubilius
Theses and Dissertations
I am not quite sure how to be a woman. It’s complicated, contradictory and highly surveilled. I make videos, sculptures and wearable objects that attempt to rationalize my female identity. The body is a sustained fixture in my work: as an armature, as an absent actor for constructed environments, as fragment and as the literal inclusion of my image. It is through these various modes of dis/embodiment that I negotiate the complexities of gendered existence. Crumbling ceramic and paper objects, pieced fabric forms, videos, beauty products, and delicate flowers reference splintered narratives and unwieldy terrains. I consider the idea of …