Art and Design Commons^™

Objects In Mind, Leah Kenttämaa-Squires

Masters Theses

Daily distractions and interruptions are abundant and often cause anxiety, irritability, and impatience. The world is constantly in a battle for our attention making it difficult to be in one moment. Our continuous motion of both body and mind to combat these constant disturbances cause us to lose perspective, become quick to make judgments, and unable to recognize errors. We no longer take time to fully consider where our thoughts are leading, nor do we allow for a moment to let our thoughts go.

An object can promote open-minded thought by altering our perception or perspective of it, preventing automatic …

The Self Reconfigured, Soe Yu Nwe

Masters Theses

In my work, I explore different ways of narrating my experience of alienation, confusion, pain, and psychological confinement as a cultural outsider. I seek to create narrative spaces that explore the spatial relationships between the fragmented and dislocated self with the surrounding environment along with a yearning for connection. I convey these experiences through the use of symbols (house, shrine, vessel, and snake) as metaphors for the self. As a third generation Chinese immigrant in Myanmar, I look back to Buddhist and Animistic practices in my native country, in addition to Chinese cultural practices, for inspiration in my work. The …

Make Every Day Count: Longing, Vision, & Painting, Sarah R. Pater

Masters Theses

Images are non-verbal holders of narrative and meaning in Western culture. Historically, painting served this function—a job that we now generally give to digital photography and cinema. One task for contemporary painting, then, might simply be as a self-reflective metaphor for the experience of vision that is mostly lost in photographic technologies: seeing as looking plus touching. Paintings are simultaneously objects and images—corporeal material constructions and visceral illusionary fields. Given the current state of rapid image production, consumption, and instrumentalization, painting’s insistence on singularity and a more ‘composed gaze’—one that asks the viewer to re-read—stands out as significant and potentially …

Handle, Wei Lah Poh

Masters Theses

Handle pays homage to the everyday object. Since Duchamp’s appropriation of the porcelain urinal with his work The Fountain (1917), we have been conceptually challenged to prod the notion of what art can be. While Duchamp denied utility, my process shifts and redefines originally intended utility in the context of enamelware. Through my work, I re-situate these everyday objects made from enameled metal, onto the body as jewelry.

Historically, the objects that comprise enameled domestic kitchenware objects—from pots and pans to spoons and forks to bowls and plates—were common objects, and were handled and utilized everyday. Once massproduced and ubiquitous …

A Slight Hysterical Tendency, Allison Baker

Masters Theses

Sexuality, sculpture, and sadness as sites of female subversion.

A woman's internalized suffering and sadness is deployed as an act of resistance. Women have a long lineage of historically tragic female figures, particularly authors and artists that disrupt the status quo by relishing and thriving and they wallow in their sorrow. Women's collective and overwhelming sadness is both a singular and unified protest against cultural and social systems of oppression. Sad girls are bad girls.

Speculative Politics -Fictionalized Spectacle, Prin Limphongpand

Masters Theses

Speculative Politics—Fictionalized Spectacle posits an alternate model for design practice. Borrowing from the genre of science fiction, this design approach activates consideration of possible realities and cultural forms. It raises questions and invents problems instead of solving them. By imagining technologies, policies, laws, and conditions that do not yet exist, design becomes an agent of investigation to highlight current and future social, cultural, and political conditions.

The projects within this thesis reconsider our present situations through methods of speculative documentation. The act of documentation becomes a process of manipulating notions of truth to render fictions from reality. Using subversion, instigation, …

Mealspace : Beyond The Table, Lauren Tedeschi

Masters Theses

This is a chronicle of a tableware enthusiast who set out to share her ideas by designing for the everyday eater. The quest began with questioning what an ideal meal experience is and why it revolves around a static, flat table. What are the aspects of present-day eating scenarios that could be improved upon? I considered the conventions of dining, studying traditional forms, materials and spaces related to this practice, and proposed new ways of eating. I designed props for establishing a new kind of mealspace, the objects and events paired together as performances. Each project or act is documented …

Untitled, Esme Choi

Masters Theses

‘I’ is the most difficult entity for me to identify. The meaning of self, as I get closer, slips away. Sometimes I feel akin to one identity, and at other times, another. None of them feels completely accurate. In these moments of uncertainty, I remind myself that possessing multiple selves is acceptable and that in the spaces between them resides the power and possibility for eventually finding and defining my true self. My parents gave me four different names at different times due to our religion, Buddhism. At present, my name is Esme here in the United States, while in …

[Nos]Otros, Lucia Monge

Masters Theses

Environmental issues are part of our daily conversations but not as common in our everyday considerations. The times call on us to approach things differently. We must find alternative ways to relate to each other and to understand the real issues of our ecology. We cannot perceive the whole through our accustomed senses, so we must open and expand our perception. Art offers that possibility, allowing for points of contact across distance while physically representing that space in between.

How do we relate to other living beings around us, determine what is living, and decide who is part of our …

Multiple Influences: From Witnessing Language To Performing It, Viviane Jalil

Masters Theses

5The relationship between language and tools has always been one of influence. Our devices—pens, keyboards, smartphones—make language visible and affect its form and structure. But this exchange goes both ways: all acts of reading and writing are mediated by our expectations of content, and the instruments used to access it.

As modes of communication evolve, so too do the ways in which we think through language, creating a dynamic of perpetual adaptation. With the growing impact of technology upon our behaviors, this dialogue is becoming imbalanced, affecting how we engage with others, how we approach our machines, and how we …