Ms-288: Creation And Preservation Of Martin Puryear’S Sentinel, Merlyn I. Maldonado Lopez

All Finding Aids

This collection includes records from Gettysburg College’s application process to the NEA, the selection process of the artist, images from the installation process of Sentinel, correspondence and an interview with Martin Puryear, newspaper cutouts of Sentinel’s reception. As well as records from Molly Hutton’s efforts to seek awareness and funding for the preservation and conservation of Sentinel in the early 2000s. Records from the application for an assessment award under Save Outdoor Sculpture! (SOS!), and a manuscript for a story on Sentinel to be featured in the GETTYSBURG alumni magazine are also included.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids …

My Sitayana: Sewing Seeds Of Empowerment, Dhea Kothari

Honors Theses

This thesis is an exploration of sculpture and installation. My project depicts a narrative of generational emancipation of women. The narrative was inspired by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel, ‘Forest of Enchantments,’ in which she rewrites the ‘Ramayana’ with Sita, the female character, as the protagonist instead. The Ramayana is a popular Hindu mythological story that revolves around Prince Rama’s quest to rescue his wife Sita from the perils of the villain Raavana. This story encapsulates the undertones of the patriarchal culture in India. This My thesis installation stands as a symbol of generational transformation of love and what it means …

Conceptual Chair Designs: Study Of Materials & Craftsmanship, Aram Festekjian

Honors Theses

This thesis is a study of different chair concepts made with various techniques and

methods. Usually, when taking a seat, people do not take a moment to appreciate the architecture and design thinking incorporated into a chair. The objective of my project is to have the viewer take a moment to appreciate and feel a particular way before taking a seat. I am inspired by many different architects and designers who have created chairs within their artistic careers. The thesis work includes four different conceptual chair sculptures made from steel, plywood, expanding foam, bullet liner, and bungee. When bringing my …

Entities: A Field Of Imaginary Games, Thrasyvoulos Ioannis Kalaitzidis

LSU Master's Theses

With this body of work, I am looking for visual symbols that help communicate unuttered meanings through storytelling and stimulate an affectual response to the viewer. This exploration is presented in two different forms: a surreal sculptural installation and a board game. The installation consists of large-scale sculptures made from light and soft materials (polyurethane foam, plastic waste, paper) that are available to move inside the gallery, while the board game is presented as a set of 3D prints with instructions on how the participants can play it. The materials used in the installation suggest a way to transform waste …

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

Echoed Sites And The Unknowable Object, Joseph Canizales

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis will discuss the expanded field of sculpture, simulacra, digital technology, and two terms I’ve devised: the unknowable object, and echoed sites. Within these two terms, I’m concerned with the complicated relationship between humans and geology and how we extract material from the ground without reflecting on the geologic history of the site. In echoed sites I create sculptures with and without a geologic site or object, by way of digital technology. These forms display two states paradoxically in balance, where what’s presented leaves more questions than answers. Thus, as part of echoed sites, exists the unknowable object. …

Nest, Camillia Elci

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The major themes in this body of work are time and layers. These themes are linked by the materiality of the work. Intentional destruction and recreation, perpetually. The work is constantly being made, destroyed, and remade. It is always partly past and partly future. Nest is a self portrait displaying objects acquired and made over the past several years.

Bare: The Modern Female Nude Uncovered, Tasha A. Determan

Honors Thesis

My honors thesis criticizes representations of the female nude and advocates for diverse expression of the female body. The research encompasses two series of artwork and a written component examining and reflecting upon the artwork. The first series is Venus of Fruit, which assesses past depictions and associations of the female nude specifically objectification and sexualization in western art. The sculptures are four cast bronze nude figures within an apple, a banana, and a pineapple. The figures are Venuses trapped within nature, beauty, fertility, and sexualization. The second series is Venus Anew, which examines the naked and the …

Brick Collage, Dehmie Dehmlow

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

bricolage: construction or creation from a diverse range of available things

I create abstracted modular sculptures, assemblages, and collages that playfully reference utility, using salvaged materials and carefully fabricated objects. My sculptures are considerately composed, elevating the materials with a determined focus on how each disparate part connects to the next to become a meaningful whole. I have a reverence for all of the objects and materials I use, no matter their origin, and thoroughly consider how each of their forms, textures, colors, weights and other formal and physical qualities integrate into a whole. With the use of recognizable utilitarian …

Boring Magic, Madison Svendgard

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Boring Magic encompasses an interest in labor, boredom, and exhaustion. Simultaneously, I am exploring what relief and escapism from these things look like. Escapism acts as the core of my work- what escapism looks like and what creates the need for escapism. I create narrative pieces that are always slightly removed from reality as a way to reflect on what I view as present-day dystopias. The worlds built to create this work are a combination of my lived experiences and invented characters and stories, which culminate in an alternate timeline set in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Relating to …

It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. In It Won’t Be Easy, Arkush places and piles her multimedia sculptures throughout the gallery to create installations that overlap ­with her writing and poetry, sometimes layering in (or extending out to) audio and video components. This approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate—though no less lively. Her work meditates on and ‘vendiagrams’ things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic. The exhibition title acknowledges that the …

I Want To Go Home, Amber Boris

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

The significance of a home lies within the memories of the space. I Want to Go Home is a body of work that explores this idea through a collection of sculptures and drawings depicting my childhood home. This house holds meaning to me not only because it is where I grew up, but because it was also my mother’s childhood home. Six generations of our family have passed through the house, creating a long history of associated stories, memories, and emotions.

I have constructed scaled down sculptures of rooms for these memories to live in. The spaces are left empty, …

Water Bearer, Whitney Harris

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores fantasy and mythological archetypes. The exhibition features works on paper depicting mermaids, and a fountain featuring two figures submerged in water, one spitting into the other's mouth. I use black ink and glazes to create variegated surfaces. In these works, I reimagine ideas about power and intimacy.

Play Among The Shadows, Xiong Wei

Theses and Dissertations

This article elaborates Xiong Wei's inspiration and experience from different cultural, political, social systems and art environment as a Chinese artist living in the United States, and the logic and methodology of how he went from a social realist sculptor to a contemporary artist.

Long Time, Jacob V. Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Jake Reed’s work is driven by the idea that architectural ornament can be imbued with meaning not native to its construction or use. To find that meaning, he deconstructs and reassembles elements from the architectural and ornamental histories he studies, using the growing climate crisis as a generative framework.

Les Six Continents: An Exploration Of Political Visual Rhetoric In Public Sculpture, Olivia Liu Guillotin

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Les six continents series stands as remnants of the 1878 Exposition Universelle and as a visual marker of the cultural, social, and economic culture of the time period. The series, serving as public art, continues to inform and participate in its environment and space, as it is on display by the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay today. Personified representations of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania as allegorical female figures, the series offers insight into the colonial world where it emerged, and how its impact has visually been ingrained in contemporary society. By using these six statues …

She Is Clothed With Strength And Dignity; She Can Laugh At The Days To Come!, Immanuel J. Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Motherhood in the words of Aunt Brenda.

See, we look at our parents first as these godlike figures like they're going to figure it out, not realizing that they were children. They were people. They had dreams and aspirations and all that. And when you strip that away, the title of mother– parent– this woman…. Who is that person?

Well, they're a person. They bleed just like you. They had dreams and thoughts and all that, just like you.

You know, I challenge everybody, you know, take your mother or father off of that godlike pedestal because you'll find that …

Barking With The Dog, Cameron Orr

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Artist Statement

“Barking With The Dog” got its’ title from a poem by Leonard Cohen:

I never really understood

what he said

but every now and then

I find myself

barking with the dog

or bending with the irises

or helping out

in other little ways

“Barking With The Dog” is a series of illustrative collages, linocut prints, an upcycled bench containing personal artifacts, drawings and collage on the walls and floor. These pieces are connected through visual content, physical medium, and artistic intention. The collages are made using upcycled prints and drawings. These pieces represent the early stages of …

Current(S), Austin Raye Navrkal

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Current(s) addresses my perspective of the subtle changes that happen as the seasons slowly transition to act as a metaphor for the subtle changes that have happened to me over the course of my time in graduate school.

Mfa Thesis Exhibition - Enormous, Wendy (Suat Huay) Tan

Master's Theses

Artist Wendy (Suat Huay) Tan

MFA Sculpture

Artworks Statement

We all see the world in different ways and we all see it from a human scale. Observing small creatures in nature has always fascinated me. There is a small world that exists just below our feet which is full of beauty and excitement. These seemingly insignificant little creatures such as ants can represent a microcosm of human existence.

Ants live with us on every continent and their existence may seem valueless but in fact their lives have enormous ecological importance. One in every thousand insects is an ant. Their total …

Assimilating Antiquated Attachments, Brittney Wegener

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Intention is a stage set for all the world to perceive. I intend to shake the status quo, I intend to break loose from that which I think I know, I intend to learn, and yet unlearn, I intend to make and be the most liminal that I can be bridging the spaces in between. I hope in the following lines that you too may come to believe in the we. Down the rabbit hole she goes, into the deep confines of her mind. Upon approaching the curious, contorting caterpillar she’s asked, “Whoooo are yooou, I said AGH WHOO ARE …

Mother Water, Crystal J. Hammerschmidt

Master's Theses

Water is life. That which nurtures, sustains and nourishes. My mother is truly my water. The one who gave me life and has supported and nurtured me though and through. While wading through the challenges and adversity of graduate school, she has been there every step of the way; and while I struggled to find what I was trying to say, I was quietly toiling over thoughts of my own fertility, maternal instincts and desire to nurture something and I began to acknowledge the mortality of my own mother.

The materials and images I combine are deeply connected to my …

Ouroboros, Haley R. Biere

MSU Graduate Theses

My work uses both painterly and sculptural elements to convey my personal transgender experience. My work is for the little girl who I was, who was incapable of speaking out or expressing themselves. I create work for others that face similar situations, as well as for those who face feelings of gender dysphoria, as I did and still do by not conforming to the gender I was assigned. Working the way that I do is a way for me to rediscover myself after years of shoving my identity to the side for the sake of others. Growing up in rural …

Stations Or There Goes Nothing, Jeremy D. Lawson

Theses and Dissertations

Jeremy Lawson uses bright, expressive, abstract painting in conversation with minimalist sculpture to encourage a meditation on the death of the self, the potential for it's transformation, and the struggle to maintain the tools beyond language necessary to experience the sublime.

"Illumination The Sculpture Of James O. Clark" Catalogue, T. Michael Martin

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

It has been a challenging journey to mine and sift through the body of work of James O. Clark to select a representation of his studio practice and 50-year career. While curating "Illumination: the Sculpture of James O. Clark," I encountered more than the common curatorial concerns such as artwork availability, scale, aesthetic and conceptual themes, transportation and presentation issues. During my conversations with Clark, we found ourselves in an unprecedented pandemic – impacting travel, shipping, and studio visits.Throughout this process, Clark and I remained flexible to ensure a representation of his career could be exhibited without compromise. Selections for …

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. …

Tools For Wellbeing, Barbara Knezevic, Michael O'Hara, Claire Louise Bennett, Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll, Linda Quinlan, Suzanne Walsh, Maja Ćiric, Maeve Connolly, Sue Rainsford, Peter Maybury

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

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.

Neverending Loop, Joseph Nivens

LSU Master's Theses

The intention of NeverEnding Loop is to depict the trauma of queer adolescense contrasted by the shadow of the closet that follows LGBTQ+ children into adulthood. The reality for queer people is that coming out is a process that never ends and a task that can create a lonely existence for those that are different from the norm. The artwork aims to convey the very real and confusing struggle of finding your identity as a queer person existing in a heterosexual world.

NeverEnding Loop explores loops and cycles in short animations, sculptural forms with repeating imagery, and mixed media forms …