Art and Design Commons^™

Paul R. Williams At Work In Photographs: Tarrying With Cites/Sights/Sites Of Trouble, Denise M. Johnson

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Ariella Azoulay and W. J. T. Mitchell have called for a new users’ manual for photographs, urging that theory finally wrest itself from the authoritative singular gaze of the patriarchal imperial photographer so that the plurality inherent within the ontology of viewing photographs be engaged. Azoulay cogently argues that the photographer is not the only person to act when a photographic event takes place. By turning critical analysis to the photographic subject and advising viewers to both watch and listen to photographs rather than gaze, a space of appearance is activated in which the photographic subject engages in dialogue with …

For Everyone's Eyes Only: Digital Art As Public Art (Agency, Accessibility, And Aura), Linda Dai

Pomona Senior Theses

Should digital art qualify as public art? This thesis aims to explore the significance of this question in a contemporary context by cross-examining the two genres in terms of creative agency, accessibility, and aura. Through various interviews and case studies with global artists, I examine similarities and differences in materiality and engagement in public and digital art and the implications of my findings under broader, theoretical frameworks. I further seek to understand how the relationship between technology, art, and society has shifted over time. Ultimately, I argue that the fluidity of digital art allows to exist in public and private …

Re-Imagining Design For Affordable Housing In Mexico, Kenza Fernandez Dominguez

Scripps Senior Theses

Since the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, affordable housing developments in Mexico have been produced in a massive, unsustainable scale. The speed at which these developments are produced equates to the carelessness that goes into their planning. At large, the developments’ monotonous design is aesthetically dehumanizing and fails to promote a sense of community. These developments lack basic infrastructure, and their residents have abandoned them, which has incentivized increased criminal activity.

In this paper, I will be looking at successful models of affordable housing globally, exploring the histories of communal living, and function of architectural collages. Based on my findings, …

Popping (Post)Modernism: Joaquín Torres-Garcia & Latin America's Pop Art Movement, Alexandra Branscom

Scripps Senior Theses

Even though the canon of Western Art History has attributed the Pop movement to the US and the UK, artists from around the world have made significant contributions to pop art and formed their own Pop movements. This includes the Latin American pop artists Felipe Ehrenberg (Mexican), Antonio Henrique Amaral (Brazilian), and Juan Dávila (Chilean), who, between the years 1968 and 1974, fled right-wing political unrest of their respective home countries and gained artistic education in dominant, imperialistic countries. These artists subvert the capitalistic, adverting language of pop art to promote the localized political sensibilities of their home countries and …

Capacity, Rachel Baydian

CGU MFA Theses

This Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition by Rachel Baydian is an installation of ceramic sculptures that function as a stand-in for the human body, touching on relationship, interconnectivity, and imperfection. Using abstracted forms that derive from the earth, these art objects are sculpted to mimic nature and its processes. The work highlights our human connection to nature as integrative and vital. Through experience and tactility, there is more of an awareness of space and heightened senses. The work taps into the awe and seduction of the mystery of nature through seemingly ordinary elements of the physical world.

Foster Rhodes Jackson And The Visual Conquest Of The West, Eve Kaufman

Scripps Senior Theses

Colonizers settled the Los Angeles and the Southern California region in part by using Modernism’s visual rhetoric and propagandic implications during the time of suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl refers to the mass single family home development which took place from the 1920^[1]s until now but peaked from the 1970s to the 1990s. Los Angeles sprawl grew particularly in the 1950^[2]s as soldiers returned from WWII. It was a way for middle class white families to accrue generational wealth and follow through on the American Dream^[3].

The primary result however disenfranchised already marginalized groups. This …

Woven By The Grandmothers: The Development Of The National Museum Of The American Indian Throughout The 1990s, Lucy Winokur

Scripps Senior Theses

In 1994, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) opened the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, the first of what would be three campuses. Ten years later, in 2004, the NMAI opened its main campus in Washington, D.C., already having cemented their place as leaders in a movement to center indigenous voices within museums housing indigenous material culture. By examining the history of the NMAI from the first acquisition of George Gustav Heye to its earliest approaches to exhibition design and collections management policy in the 1990s, it is possible to track the development of the …

The "Postmodern Geographies" Of Frank Gehry's Los Angeles, Katherine Shearer

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the ways in which Frank Gehry’s architectural contributions to Los Angeles’ social and built environment have shaped the region’s “postmodern geographies” throughout the 20^th and 21^st century. Through a focused exploration of three of Gehry’s postmodernist structures in Greater Los Angeles—a house, a library, and a concert hall—this thesis analyses how Gehry and his designs reflected and affected the artistic and socio-spatial development of Los Angeles’ “decidedly postmodern landscape.”

Spreading Seeds: Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds And His Performative Personality Received In The West, Wei Wu

Scripps Senior Theses

In 2010, Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds made its debut in Tate Modern, which promoted Ai to be one of the most famous and respected contemporary Chinese artists. This Conceptual art work has multiple layers of meanings, which all corresponds to the Western expectations for a successful contemporary Chinese artist. In fact, the Western art world has long held bias and stereotypes towards international artists. Ai chose to perform his personality to conform to the expectations and Western ideologies, which brought him international fame. On the other hand, other Chinese artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang and Zhou Chunya, don't totally agree with …

Iain Muirhead, Iain Muirhead

CGU MFA Theses

Artist IAIN MUIRHEAD seeks possibility in a world of massive change. His work cultivates instability and chases an ungrounded experience. Systemic complexity and creative destruction are characteristic. Muirhead uses paint, objects, photography, installation, and video to break apart and reconfigure form and space. Terror often looms. Entropy gives way to emergence.

Pineapple, 022, Conversation – Behind The Cover Art, Jesse W. Standlea

The STEAM Journal

Many sources date the pit-firing process as a 30,000 plus years-old ceramic firing technique. Every year I take my AP 3D Design class to the beach to fire ceramic pieces using this method. Being a contemporary sculptor who shows in Los Angeles I have always appreciated pit-fired pieces but never used one in my own art practice until now. A connection between the first method of firing ceramics and my art practice seemed unrelated. The title for my piece might add to the disconnect; and yet these seemingly unrelated elements force the work into a place where the artistic process …

Women Surrealists: Muses Or Seekers?, Noor A. Asif

Scripps Senior Theses

Surrealism has often been labeled as a misogynistic movement that sought to provide man with an avenue into a higher reality at the expense of the humanity of women. By perceiving the opposite sex as their muses, Surrealist men rendered women as mysterious sources of the marvelous, the name given to the higher realm, which they desired to attain. I propose that Surrealist women were empowered by the fact that ‘woman’, as an abstract concept, and femininity were synonymous with the marvelous. This entailed that Surrealist women had the advantage of being “sources of revelation, as provokers of wonder, dreams, …

Nostos: On Recollecting Loss And The Physical Manifestation Of Loss, Stephanie M. Huang

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper examines nostalgia in photo-poetry book Nostos, and nostalgia’s existence as a theoretical global condition arising from displacement, looking at nostalgia specifically not as a yearning for home, but a yearning for a lost sense of feeling at home. It traces the lineage of image-text hybrid art practices and examines the significance of conveying meaning through both synergistically. It studies the psychoanalytic process of transforming loss into object, or absence into presence, ultimately using the object as a lens to view oneself and the way in which nostalgia manifests itself.

Ecotones, Chas Schroeder

CGU MFA Theses

My work explores the intersection of pastoral, urban and idiosyncratic visions. It may reveal the aesthetic and emotional possibilities inherent in the broad-ranging subjects I employ: game animals, advertising, colonialism, love, numerals, textiles, drugs, abstraction, competitive sports, displacement, architecture, gender-bending, civil-rights movements, transgressive literature, social media, indigenous peoples, graphic design, glamour, fashion, hip-hop, rock-n-roll, graffiti, cowboy, exhibitionism and other niche cultures in America. Pieces emerge intuitively via personal narrative and lodged memories as guides. The disjunctive compositions are a breed of contemporary formalism mated with abstraction.

The Fragile Bee: Nancy Macko At Moah, Kathleen Stewart Howe, Carole Ann Klonarides, Stephen Nowlin, Nancy Macko

Pomona Faculty Books

“The Fragile Bee” was exhibited at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA and is an outcry to the plight of the bees in relationship to the environment. This accompanying catalog critically examines the work in the exhibition beginning with a foreword by Andi Campognone, museum manager and curator at MOAH. Artist Nancy Macko established a garden for native bee-attracting plants in order to document them throughout the year. The resulting series of photographs, "Botanical Portraits", are the subject of the essay by museum director Kathleen Stewart Howe. Contemporary art writer and curator Carole Ann Klonarides writes in …

Art Meets Science! Get Over It . . ., Stephen Nowlin

The STEAM Journal

The news headline, when such projects garner attention, usually goes like this – Art Meets Science! Or perhaps Art Merges with Science! or maybe they combine, or art collides with science, or they fuse, join, bond, or unite. And ‘art’ in the phrase usually precedes ‘science’, perhaps because their integration is more typically initiated from the art side of the equation. But whatever the order of the two terms, and whatever verb is used to link them, the tenor of the declaration is typically the same – this is a story worth reporting on, it announces, because …

Bleach, Kim E. Alexander Jr.

CGU MFA Theses

The work in this exhibition investigates the unique potential for drawing to articulate the ideas and attitudes of architecture and objects. Accepting drawing as operating in conceptual space, I explore experimental loops within the visual logic of that territory. The work asserts the material fact of drawing and its connection to forms of fabrication in other materials like wood, paint, metal, and plastic. Like painting and sculpting, the drawings occupy an intangible state between objects and ideas. I embrace this irresolution. Please see Download button in top right corner for the full statement.

Textual Apparitions: Power, Language, And Site In The Work Of Jenny Holzer, Peter Holden Fox

Pomona Senior Theses

Jenny Holzer's text-based projects have attracted the attention of critics, historians, and curators from Des Moines to Dresden. An understanding of the complex interplay between language, gender, power, and site within Holzer's work demonstrates how a singular interpretive approach is insufficient for discussing the multitude of meanings her projects produce. Perhaps most significantly, a fresh analysis of Holzer's work and critical reactions to it challenges the story of modernism and postmodernism and the relationship between these two terms.

Aboriginal Art- Warlpiri, Paul Faulstich

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Indigenous Australians produce rich and diverse art expressive of their relationships with the land and the cosmos. By way of example, this entry focuses on Warlpiri graphic art of the Western Desert region of Australia.

Rock Art – Australian Aboriginal, Paul Faulstich

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Aboriginal people of Australia have a rich heritage of carving and painting on rocks, extending back well more than 20,000 years. Rock art, Australia's oldest surviving art form, expresses the Aborigines' social, economic and religious concerns through the centuries

A Linear Perspective To Art, Sarah Littler

Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal

No abstract provided.

X-Ray Rock Art Of Australia And Southeast Asia, Paul Faulstich

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Throughout the world, cultures have expressed social, economic, and religious concerns through art. As the oldest surviving artistic form, rock art illustrates mankind's continuing effort to understand his place in the material and immaterial worlds. The study of rock art can lend an important insight into prehistory, as it provides the earliest illustration of beliefs, technologies, and activities.

Dangerous 'Preservation' In Malaysia, Paul Faulstich

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

A recent article appeared in a daily newspaper of Kuala Lumpur reports on alarming preservation measure that the Muzium Negara intends to implement at the Gua Tambun rock art site. They must be halted immediately if the rock paintings are to remain in a pristine state.