Art and Design Commons^™

Encumbered By Stage Fright Or I’M Not Sure Why I Did That, Chris Scott

Graduate School of Art Theses

I hope to be as honest as possible. I’m hoping to be the star of the show. This is a series of onanistic musings, a rambling narrative that oscillates between truth and fabrication. There are instances of earnestness paired with ostentatious exaggeration. The frequent leaps from subject to subject, often seemingly unrelated to one another, reflect the ineluctably scatterbrained headspace that dictates how I operate in the studio, in every facet of life. Through this lens of storytelling I delve into a few artists, like Bruce Nauman, and rock and roll musicians, like Lou Reed, who I have been unable …

My Favorite Things, Alexander Klein

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this thesis I discuss my material practice as it relates to a history of still-life painting, and the cyclical recurrence of assemblage in western art history. The traditional still-life object is examined through the lens of my material-gathering process at estate sales. Objects reconstituted at these sales are the impetus for an investigation of the still-life object’s connection to magic, the mutability of meaning, and the fading American middle class. The use of these objects for assemblage sculptures in the studio prompts a discussion of the history of assemblage and found-object sculpture in Dada, Merz, Surrealism, and contemporary practice. …

The Darkness Needs To Cry, Damaris Dunham

Graduate School of Art Theses

I construct large-scale, layered, three-dimensional paintings that symbolically allude to both body and landscape. I attempt to use my hands and embodied self to form a space of contemplation for the viewer as she walks alongside the work, experiencing it. The work exists in the realm of the sensed and the sensorial and creates both spaces of excess and of lack that correlate with my thinking of philosophical notions of the grotesque and the void. In a way, I blend elements of psychoanalysis and art making together. I discuss the origins of the term, uncanny, as one of the few …

Crystal Queer: Fracturing The Binaries Of Matter, Creation, And Landscape, Sarah Knight

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this thesis, I compile a series of fragments consisting an analysis of my artwork in the gendered contexts of landscape, self-identity, mythology, and philosophy. I develop my concept of a “queer mark” in my art that serves as a form of queering, a disruption of visual and conceptual cohesion. I form a picture of how our contemporary selves are influenced by our gendered understanding of the landscape through the analysis of philosophical, artistic, and mythological concepts of creation. I see my sculptures as an atlas to an alternative means of understanding identity, a queering of these historical and exclusionary …

Pleasure Is All Mine, Lola Ogbara

Graduate School of Art Theses

One’s identity is shaped by many factors such as race, culture, physical appearance, nationality, and religion—amongst many more. As an artist, the subjugation of identity in the context of race, gender, and sexuality is a world I examine closely. Subverting myths of sexual deviancy and racial inferiority that perpetually pathologizes Black feminine sexuality, I often use and reference my own body to create avenues of power through physical and intellectual pleasure. Through material use of clay, metal, photography, and installation, I emphasize on how contemporary Black social cultures are able to write their own narratives in order to further progressions …

Big Girl | Little Girl, Emily Mueller

Graduate School of Art Theses

In my thesis document, I unpack the relationship of my photographs to space, bodies, language, and childhood through a feminist lens. The interaction with these various aspects alludes to larger societal structures that inform identity. I am interested in the negotiation between gender and the way it informs the occupation of space, both photographic and physical. The intersection between subjects and objects is dissected using the definitions of these terms set forth by Judith Butler. Becoming a subject does not indicate that one is free from the power that creates it. The figure in my photographs wonders if attempting to …

The Always And Never Seen, Linnea Ryshke

Graduate School of Art Theses

In my art practice, I strive to recover the value of non-human animals as fellow beings with whom we are in relation. In the last decade, “the animal question” has gained momentum across disciplines, and I situate myself as part of the effort to challenge the denigration of nonhuman animals that has led to the widespread exploitation of their labor and bodies. In my practice, I create paintings, drawings and mixed-media collages that recover the genesis of the word “animal” as meaning one with breath, one with soul. Through expressionist mark and material tactility, I create intimate and large-scale works …

In Search Of Place, Aleida Hertel

Graduate School of Art Theses

The work I make as an artist is visceral in its form and poetic in its expression. I work with minimal materials through installation, sculpture, video, sound and public projects. My work responds to personal memories of displacement and diaspora, as well as socio-political events.

Ultimately, my art centers its attention towards the Other and the understanding that resides in the ethical, philosophical and political conditions of Otherness, hoping for empathy and transformation.

Tracing The Past, Drawing The Present, Sixue Yang

Graduate School of Art Theses

The group of work, Rising Water, Floating Islands is inspired by traditional Chinese scroll landscape paintings. Such landscape paintings combine meticulous technique, compositional complexity, and tension between representation and abstraction to reveal an alternative universe that waits discovery amid our mundane existence. In “Rising Water, Floating Islands,” I explore the political and social ramifications of the ongoing cultural conflict between traditional and emergent contemporary values. By combining traditional Chinese elements and techniques with my own markings and gestural adaptation in my painting, I give the audience the opportunity to contemplate the implications of our present digital condition through traditional esthetic …

The Work Of Art In The Age Of Surveillance: Towards A Society Of Civil Power, Grace Eunhae Cho

Graduate School of Art Theses

State and corporate power have expanded and enforced their dominant territory and influence through the development of visual technology. Art and visual technology are inseparable. Thus, art has been utilized as an essential tool through which power glamorizes and visualizes its authority. Over the course of the modern age, power has increasingly adopted different strategies in order to conceal its appearance. In particular, the development of information and communication technology has enabled power to be not only invisible but also intangible. This thesis, "The Work of Art in The Age of Surveillance: Towards A Society of Civil Power," explores how …

A Jungle, A Dream, A Wallowing Thing, Liz Moore

Graduate School of Art Theses

I view my creative process as jumping head first into material, laboriously wringing it dry, and wetting it again until it transforms into its own. I use felt, silicone, family heirlooms, and embroidery, which contend between each other materially and connote feminine and fantastical landscapes and characters. I drench the felt in pastel colors and excrete silicone filled paint through cocoons of lace, to call forth associations of beauty and the grotesque. I am very interested in the tension held between two and three dimensional space, and how teetering on this line allows me to question reality, expectations of language, …

The Complexities Of Intimacy, Brie Henderson

Graduate School of Art Theses

Through my research I have discovered there are many complexities that exist within the topic of intimacy. Of these complexities, I chose to explore the topics attachment and codependency in my final series. Attachment and codependency are deeply rooted in psychology, poetry, and many artist’s practices. The relationship between poetry and my work has become deeply intertwined. I combine poetry with my work as a way to document my feelings and to inspire the titles for my paintings. Through a series of intimate watercolor paintings, I reference bodies, intimate interactions and the ambiguity within the two. This ambiguity asks viewers …