Art and Design Commons^™

Zeitgeist: An Artist's Present Perspective, Danielle Leventhal

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This statement is an analysis of my process in creating a zeitgeist collection of painted portraits. The pieces in this collection began with a live, in-person session with each of my subjects, all of whom are my friends: females ages 18-22 at Wash.U. An interest in the brain and mirror neurons, as well as Susan Stewart’s idea that the face is a “text” that must be read in order to exist, is what enabled these portraits to become a psychological examination of the spirit of our time. The material process of collapsing layers of time, emotions, and thoughts on the …

Wax Bodies: Candles, Queerness, & Taking Up Space, Moya Shpuntoff

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My partner and collaborator Callaway Fox and I use queer surrealist installation, craft practices, and performance in order to address queer and disabled temporality, articulating our experiences as disabled queer femme artists through abstracted and literal exploration of femme bodies in space. In performance and installation works Hospital Performance: Part I and Hospital Performance: Part II, we responded to our experience of marginalization, medical malpractice, and emotional isolation, ultimately exploring queer and disabled temporality through queer surrealism. Hand-poured scented candles became metaphors for queer and disabled bodies, and along with other craft practices used in this work, are a …

The Lifted Shadow, Xinyi Xie

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The Chinese shadow puppet tradition is one of negotiation: where the local (folktales and traditions) meets the national (“culture”?), and the national (??) meets the international (???). It is a cultural practice in which the "masses" create "entertainment," which is then intellectualized and "refined" by social (and cultural) “elites.”

In a nation that has rejected "feudalism" in the past, the shadow puppet tradition is one of many at risk of being commercialized and exported as national commodity. It offers potential cultural “heritage,” soft power to go hand-in-hand with China's economic and industrial might. When a nation has produced everything and …

To Sleep, Perchance To Dream, Carla G. Steppan

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Focusing on the devaluation of monumentality identified by architects in the mid-twentieth century, this paper examines how the reduction of form throughout the history of architecture and how such reduction affects space framed by such architecture. By applying the malleability of symbolic meaning to a closed set of symbols, the nature of the set is re-made and subsequently manipulated to theoretically set the stage for a romantic narrative. A formal interest in reproduction and repetition serves a conceptual interest in allusion of forms in the creation of the illusion of narrative and romance.

Cuba A La Yuma: In, Around, And Millennial Thoughts, Zoe Kline

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The camera phone prompted a new stylistic approach that has created an outlet for inexpensive and democratized photography, seemingly giving anyone the revolutionary ability to be called an artist. It is because of this that photojournalism, as an art practice, is losing its intrinsic ambitions — to employ visual storytelling to, more effectively than written word, foster positive social and political activism. Photographs of war and marginalized people in society have become both exploitative and dehumanizing in their treatment of both photographic style and relationship to subject and have only numbed their viewers to today’s atrocities. I look to find …

Crossing The Divide: Art As Mediation And Pilgrimage, Sophia Keskey

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Founded on my personal experiences of growing up in an interfaith household and my high school semester abroad in Israel, my artistic practice seeks to build bridges between people, connecting diverse communities across divides (cultural, religious, economic, racial, ethnic etc.). Through two process, mediation and pilgrimage to self, specifically in using myself as an active participant, I argue that the process of making can become the neutral ground in which to build relationships and begin to imagine coexistence.

Mediation is expressed by Homi Bhabha’s definition of negotiation: “The ability to articulate differences in space and time…to intervene in the forest …

“I Would Save You, But My Boobs Keep Getting In The Way”: An Examination Of My Art Through The Lens Of The Heroic Myth And Alternative Comics, Barrett Hollingsworth

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My artwork challenges the masculine, violent idea of the hero through utilizing the visual language of comic books, as well as autobiographical themes. In this examination of my work, I explore conceptual and visual precedents and relate them back to my own practice throughout. My essay establishes the idea of the contemporary American heroic myth by looking at Joseph Campbell, as well as more contemporary re-examinations and criticisms of his ideas, relating the modern myth to the superhero comic genre. Next, I explore the history of underground comics, specifically feminist autobiographical comics, and relate the works of artists such as …

A Borrowed Language, Yvonne Osei

Graduate School of Art Theses

Art has the potency of mediation: bridging human differences, questioning voids in historical trajectories, negotiating spaces of relevance, and most importantly, being signifiers that embody the absent. I speak in a borrowed language, a multilingual visual tongue, inspired by a culmination of Western and African Art modes of practices to create charged platforms for multicultural communication.

My art presents visual portals that allow for intercultural and interracial mingling as issues of colorism, present-day colonialism, gender inequality and the politics of dress are foregrounded for collective deliberation. The essence of the work is often activated and brought to its full potential …

Yung Ladies, Leah Nordman

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Yung Ladies began as an investigation into female representation and has expanded into a brand and even lifestyle. Founded as a space for female solidarity, Yung Ladies works to break down notions of what a young woman should be and simultaneously spreads our ideals and attitudes through our clothing line and social media presence. This paper spans the ideological movements, various forms of artistic media, and artist precedents that have inspired this project.Yung Ladies includes investigations into new media identities and notions fad ideological movements, consumerism and conspicuous consumption, and brand identity as a means of personal representation. These ideas …

Artificial Infinite, Brandon Daniels

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis examines the complex history of the sublime, specifically the sublime Void of the Romantics and the newer concept of the technological sublime. From there, I examine the genre of science fiction and it relationship to the sublime, the Void and the grotesque. I use specific examples such Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and a few others to better understand and apply these concepts. Beginning with these examples, I start to posit what role special effects play in how these films embody these philosophical concepts.

Building on this foundation of research, I go on to …

Talking To Boxes, Hugging Robots, Vita Eruhimovitz

Graduate School of Art Theses

Relationships between humans and technology are at the core of my artistic research. Human-machine communication is defined by the technological level of the machines, but even more so by the way they are perceived by humans. Concepts of artificial life and artificial intelligence gradually have become part of the everyday life of growing numbers of people, and while there is an ongoing effort to design an increasingly anthropocentric technology, our minds also adapt to the new technological reality. Through immersive installations and sculptural objects my practice explores this reality. My artwork is designed to communicate with and stimulate the viewers, …

Landmarks For Sleepwalkers, Isaac S. Howell

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Abstract:

In my recent work I have been interested in thinking about notions of instability. In order explore these notions, in this paper I will like to explore the relevance of postmodern literary theory and the color black in my work, as well as think about the importance of the grid as a tool for organization and ontological delineation.

I will be examining writing by Alain Robbe-Grillet, as well as art work by Mark Manders, Giorgio de Chirico, Kay Sage, and Ad Reinhardt.

"Am I Winning?", Diana J. Casanova

Graduate School of Art Theses

Mesmerized by horror, my artistic practice investigates traumatic stories of history, myth, personal narrative, and fiction. The serial narratives are imposed upon two decapitated historical queens, Marie Antoinette and Anne Boleyn. Represented through opposing sides, the women’s facial planes fracture and stretch and erupt in oral infestations. Stories of rage flood the compositions, fabricating an epic battle and argument. Through influences of Catholicism, I construct disputes over the feminine body. Monstrous forms are the effect of combining oppoisiton terms, formulating humanistic and sympathetic symbology. Mirror Theory and the myth of Medusa defend a destruction of self through reflection.

Influenced by …

Presence-At-Hand, Eric Lyle Schultz

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

The writing that follows is intended to provide a theoretical framework for the motives behind my practice. The primary concerns addressed are the reception, transmission, and physical shape of knowledge. I will discuss a human condition that exists as a byproduct of both the legacy of representation as well as the innate biology of the brain. I will argue that as a society we are governed by the residue of an extreme logic, and that this condition places severe margins on our potential for creative solutions. I will propose that our ability to create meaning is stifled by the …

Mfa15 (Mfa 2015), Sam Fox School Of Design & Visual Arts, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Heather Corcoran, Patricia Olynyk, Andrea Coates, Margaux Crump, Brandon Daniels, Addoley Dzegede, Vita Eruhimovitz, Carling Hale, Amanda C F Helman, Michael A. Helms, Ming Y. Hong, Sea A Joung, Stephanie E. Kang, Dayna J. Kriz, Thomas C. Moore, Jacob Muldowney, Laurel Panella, Caitlin Penny, Eric Lyle Schultz, Jeremy Shipley, Emmeline Solomon, Kellie Spano, Michael A. Williams, Austin R. Wolf

Books and Monographs

Catalogue of a culminating student exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, May 1 - August 2, 2015 . Introduction / Heather Corcoran and Patricia Olynyk -- Diana Casanova / Emily J. Hanson -- Andrea M. Coates : in the operating theater / Stephanie Dering -- Margaux Crump -- Brandon Daniels -- Addoley Dzegede : do you prefer answers or truth? / Aaron Coleman -- Vita Eruhimovitz -- Carling Hale -- Amanda Helman -- Mike Helms / Ming Ying Hong -- Ming Ying Hong / Emily J. Hanson -- Sea A Joung / Ervin Malakaj -- Stephanie Kang …

Breaching, Margaux Crump

Graduate School of Art Theses

I make objects that behave like bodies—graceful hybrids that are effortlessly cultural and natural, masculine and feminine, plant and animal. Shifting and slipping between unfixed identities, they exist as multiplicities. When these bodies touch, power and pleasure are fluidly exchanged. However, power is not structured here as a binary and pleasure is not finite; both have the potential to flow between bodies, blurring boundaries and rendering individuality delicate.

My work is primarily rooted in the relationship between desire, intimacy, and control, with the body acting as a site of power play. This body may be plant, animal, sculpture, or material. …

Re-Enchanting The Spectacle, Shayna Cohn

Graduate School of Art Theses

“Re-Enchanting the Spectacle” explores guiding notions and central themes within the art practice of Shayna Cohn. Cohn’s installation spaces and sculptures within them, evoke a type of fabricated aura and melodramatic attitude of entertainment sites. By isolating the affect outside of the original environment, Cohn references the perceptual duality of entertainment sites within this “post-sacred” era. Entertainment venues become sites of potential transcendence, yet are also inextricably tied to their automated mechanization. Drawing on the Peter Brooks’ analysis of the historical and poetic relationship between melodrama and the sacred, Cohn argues that contemporary notions of melodrama can be found within …

Seth Czaplewski Thesis, Seth P. Czaplewski

Graduate School of Art Theses

My work investigates the history of production and how human interactions have been affected by shifts in production over the course of the past two hundred years in the United States: the pre-industrial, Industrial Revolution, and the post-industrial age. The changes that occurred in society as a result of how production shifted from era to era informs my artistic practice and productions, which address areas neglected in the wake of progress. At the onset of each era, the technological advances initially appeared to be beneficial to society and people shifted from being locally oriented to being globally oriented.

My historical …

A Composed Space, Adam S. Hogan

Graduate School of Art Theses

My practice is invested in expanding our conscious scope—revealing phenomena and observations, and presenting the information to the viewer through auxiliary channels. Using the language of minimalism, cinema, and abstraction I create technologically sophisticated systems to produce spaces of contemplation (a meditative space challenging the ephemeral relationships between our sensorial perceptions, space, and time).

Material, space, and technology become instruments for composition manifesting as silent experimental cinema (created and controlled sonically). My work seeks to illuminate our conscious scope through the succession of frames.

In Pursuit Of Distant Horizons, Whitney Polich

Graduate School of Art Theses

Our lasting human desire to rationalize the phenomena of nature manifests as ceaseless attempts to fix fluid landscapes within the rigid boundaries of an image. Each landscape with its own physical language, rooted in the temporal and subjective particularities of sense—taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight—requires a lived immersion to be read and as such, eludes static interpretation or expression. The physical horizon provides both a physical and metaphorical reminder of the limits we constantly find ourselves confronted with—those limits of perception, language, and knowledge—as we seek to expresses the immediate experience and profound vastness of a world far exceeding …

Paiting, Lucas Page

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

My work is motivated by the painting “as such” – as an inquiry into and intervention upon what constitutes a painting, how they are constructed, how they function, etc. Through an investigation of painting as a genre, both in its historical canon and contemporary forms, I deconstruct the formal and cultural elements surrounding the field. Four major axes serve as the basis for my inquiry and intervention of painting: Painting, Abstraction, Representation, Control. Taking as a point of departure the comment, “Your work is a representation of abstraction,” I aim to figure out how “the painting” (in all of its …

The Thing You Are Looking For, Jessie Shinn

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis document explores the influences and content of visual artist Jessie Shinn’s work, in particular the photography she has done as part of her Master of Fine Arts degree program at Washington University in St. Louis. Ideas discussed include phenomenology, phenomenophilia, affect, defamiliarization, the everyday, space, emptiness and boredom. Important artists and movements mentioned are Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner and Romanticism; Alfred Stieglitz and Modernism; and contemporary artists Hiroshi Sugimoto, Uta Barth and Wolfgang Tillmans. Writers and philosophers Samuel Coleridge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rei Terada, Kathleen Stewart, David Markson, David Foster Wallace, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze are …

Desire And Fantasy: The Conditions Of Reality Between The Self And The Other, Raleigh M. Gardiner

Graduate School of Art Theses

The human condition is constituted by the fluctuating operations of desire and fantasy, which emerge in response to one's fundamental differentiation between 'Self' and 'Other.' As infants, we exist in an expansive realm of sensational “sameness” with the world around us; but as we develop, we quickly learn to differentiate between our internal and external worlds, and are forced to divide and organize our once primordial experience of unity on the basis of isolated exclusion of difference. As we slip into the structures of our social and cultural reality, we absorb language, and are taught to construct our own identities …

Fuck Yeah, Thesis!, Marianne R. Laury

Graduate School of Art Theses

Fandom is a feature of American popular culture that takes elements from specific genres, and reworks them into an individual to formulate an identity. Clothing, music style, meeting places, and even drink choices can be the defining factors for determining which particular group one might associate with. Focusing on groups within fandom culture, I work to disprove the phrase “you can’t judge a book by its cover” by discussing embedded stereotypes common to dedicated fans. As I am not elevating or undermining these groups, I describe their attributes in a non-discriminatory way, and relate them to my own work.

I …

Painting And Stuff, Lol, Sopearb Touch

Graduate School of Art Theses

Our own human experience is a distinct realm which can never be precisely duplicated in another lifetime. It frames our whole view of existence and, as artists, affects our art making process. The theory of the Tabula Rasa functions as the inspiration of my work and this writing examines my personal view of growing up in the internet age and America, and how my view of life, as well as artistic practice, is shaped by a consumerist culture that has gone global. Additionally, as a figurative painter, I create a context with other artists who create work about their own …

Mfa14 (Mfa 2014), Sam Fox School Of Design & Visual Arts, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Buzz Spector, Patricia Olynyk

Books and Monographs

Catalogue of a culminating student exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, May 9-August 3, 2014. Contents include Introduction / Buzz Spector and Patricia Olynyk -- David Baker / Katie McGinnis -- Amber bloom ; Mop cask ; Sullen fluff ; Frothy Shiraz ; Aquatic jaws ; Smoking trumpets ; Lake feigned goose flap / Steve Byrnes -- Nathan Childs : the affliction a strange weight, the weight a plume of pain, the pain a shrill desire / Aaron Coleman -- Christopher Chrome / Marianne Rosa Laury -- Shayna Cohn / Cassie Jones -- Alyse Cole / Nicholas …

Between The Map And The Territory: Taking The World Apart In The Age Of Un-Discovery, Carla Lacey Fisher Schwartz

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

The map is demonstrative of a basic human impulse, the desire to understand our surroundings and our position within the world. Through the activity of mapmaking, we aspire to comprehend comprehensively, but the very nature of the map allows for only partial understanding. Despite this objective for total knowledge, the blank space of a map is a necessity; in order for a map to be useful it must leave some aspects out. This blank space, along with other blanks in visual representation, is an active silence, and holds meaning in its absence.

While the map attempts to represent a territory, …

Mfa13 (Mfa 2013), Sam Fox School Of Design & Visual Arts, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Buzz Spector, Patricia Olynyk, David Schuman, Lyndon Barrois Jr, Sarah Bernhardt, Hsuan Ying Chen, Serhii Chrucky, Janae Contag, Carrie Debacker, Erin M. Duhigg, José Garza, Eric Gray, Meghan Allynn Johnson, Hoa Le, Christine Eunji Lee, Lavar Munroe, Jon A. Orosco, Michael Powell, Bridget A. Purcell, Malahat Qureshi, Natalie Rodgers, Carla Fisher Schwartz, Zak Smoker, Laurencia Strauss, Lili Yang, Vivian Zapata

Books and Monographs

Catalogue of a culminating student exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, May 3-July 29, 2013. Contents include Introduction / Buzz Spector -- The collaborative turn : new models of thinking, making, and learning / Patricia Olynyk -- [Introduction] / David Schuman -- Lyndon Barrois, Jr. / Rickey Laurentiis -- Sarah Bernhardt -- Shifting Shanghais / Hsuan Ying Chen -- Serhii Chrucky / JaNae Contag -- JaNae Contag / Emily Hanson -- Carrie DeBacker / Gabriel Feldman -- Erin M. Duhigg -- José Garza / Serhii Chrucky -- Eric Gray / Ariel Lewis -- Meghan Allynn Johnson : …

Delicious-Ology: The Science Of Delicious Food, Sasha Yan

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

You can read this book two ways. If you want to “just cook,” flip to the recipe index, pick a recipe, and skip straight to that page. The surrounding text will explain some aspects of the science behind the recipe. While the recipes in this book are chosen to complement and provide examples of the science, they’re also recipes that are fantastic in and of themselves.

Mfa12 (Mfa 2012), Sam Fox School Of Design & Visual Arts, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Buzz Spector, Patricia Olynyk, Ifeoma Ugonnwa Anyaeji, Je Baker, Natalie Baldeon, E. Thurston Belmer, Lauren Cardenas, Megan Sue Collins, Adrian Cox, Maya Durham, Erin Falker, Jieun Kim, Howard Krohn, Robert Long, Marie Bannerot Mcinerney, Nikki Mcmahan, Michael T. Meier, Katie Millitzer, Reid G. Norris, Kathleen Perniciaro, Emily Squires, Jamie Presson Wells, Whitney Lorene Wood, Andrew Woodard, Kelly K. Wright

Books and Monographs

Catalogue of a culminating student exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum May 4-Aug. 6, 2012. Contents include Introduction / Buzz Spector -- Think, make, show and tell / Patricia Olynyk -- Ifeoma Ugonnwa Anyaeji -- J.E. Baker / Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt -- Natalie Baldeon / Emily Hanson -- As in a turning gear : E. Thurston Belmer / Rickey Laurentiis -- Lauren Cardenas / Nicholas Tamarkin -- Megan Sue Collins / Catherine Chiodo -- Adrian Cox -- Maya Durham / Dolly Laninga -- Erin Falker / Melissa Olson -- St. Louis dreamscape : Jieun Kim / Caitlin …