Art and Design Commons^™

Art That Demonstrates: Action And Contemplation, David J. Baker

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

Our culture is permeated with "noise" that detracts from what really matters: a life of helping others. By making an effort to save time for reflection and contemplation, artists, who actively define our contemporary culture, can greatly benefit society and offer an alternative to this "noise." By focusing on ethical considerations and transforming one's core values, artists can begin to demonstrate the self-sacrificing qualities that assist and enlighten a society. This thesis examines some crucial spiritual and artistic works that counter the distractions that keep people from living the lives they were meant to live. Further, it describes how …

Violence Against Women: An Artistic Intervention, Kathryn Douglas

Graduate School of Art Theses

We have many tools available to impede violence against women. Legislative circles, educational systems, and advocacy groups all work tirelessly to eradicate these heinous crimes and serve the victims of abuse. However violence against women is still described as “‘the most pervasive human rights challenge’ in the world today”.¹

For some it can be difficult to view socially engaged art making as an essential component of women’s advocacy compared to immediate housing, legal counsel, help hotlines, and the education of women. Blurring the lines between activism and art history, this relatively new art form is often embraced by marginalized …

A Face With A View, Cassie S. Jones

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis serves to examine my practice as a visual artist. In its contents I consider both the internal image and the external image and the constant negotiation that happens between these two sets of images. What comes to represent the internal is my own image, in particular, my face. What comes to represent the external are prevailing images of socially idealized beauty. Likewise, I argue that the face becomes especially important in this negotiation as it is the intersection between the internal and the external; the self and the social. Using artists such as Vito Acconci, Orlan, and Andy …

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 …

Suppressing My Inner Caravaggio, Nathan A. Childs

Graduate School of Art Theses

FULK ART is a body of work that stems out of the divisions and segments of the constructed narrative germane to the notions of "art world" and "art worlds". In his theses Nathan Childs argues that his contemporary studio practice is not rooted in the post production criticism of his objects. Rather his art is a "techne" that hybridizes his daily habits as rituals of making. These rituals are self reverent inspections of multi sided issues, set into a dynamic state. The "third side" of the coin device is a habit of life style that allows Childs to reach deeper …

Reemit Vexing Truces Struck, Defiled, And Rehung, Sean E. Fitzgibbons

Graduate School of Art Theses

Within his studio practice Sean FitzGibbons imposes limitations upon his processes, methods of sourcing materials, and fabrication of artwork. He relies on the viewer to apply their personal narrative to his work. Through a bricoleur approach to creating artwork, he uses signifiers to clue the viewer into his intended narratives, but people come to his work with varying life experiences, and therefore generate their own stories. The act of constructing a narrative within Sean’s work is a rigorous and performative process; the rigor he applies to creating a fictional universe gives his work authenticity. Treating his studio the same way …

You Can't Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd, Daniel Stumeier

Graduate School of Art Theses

Works and writings from various fields will be discussed throughout the following thesis, including those from contemporary art, anthropology, ethnology and literary theory. Particular attention will be paid to my studio practice as well as the work of artists: Amy Sillman, Eva Hesse, Richard Tuttle, Jackson Pollock, Donald Judd, Mary Heilmann, Haim Steinbach, Mike Kelley and Marcel Duchamp. Other important materials and texts that will be used to support my argument include: the 2007 group exhibition “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21^st Century” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, poet and art critic Raphael Rubenstein’s essay, “Provisional Painting,” …

Silence And Slow Time, Steve W. G. Byrnes

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis explores abstract painting from the perspective of a material based production, drawing parallels from poetry to augment its position. Building upon existing material-driven painting traditions such as Abstract Expressionism, and examining their physiological affects from a scientific perspective, it aims to substantiate a more corporeal approach to understanding and interacting with painting.

Mechanical Communication Guts -- . -.-. .... .- -. .. -.-. .- .-.. / -.-. --- -- -- ..- -. .. -.-. .- - .. --- -. / --. ..- - ..., Cole (Pei-Yu) Lu

Graduate School of Art Theses

Aesthetics can be proposed through language. Metaphysical experience through technology is an accumulation of information. My practice accentuates the failure of languages that are mediated through technology. Using readymade objects as a signifier for collective experience, I create sets for films that have never existed. Rooted in the conceptual terrain, I seek to concretize the intangible, my sculptural installation was assembled by objects conceived as unknown, or coded messages, and largely applied the color matte black. Matte black, for its non-color, accomplishes openness – freedom. The immersive experience of darkness also echoes with the cinematic environment. Ultimately, my work functions …

Artificial Landscapes: Reflecting Interior Worlds, Vivian Zapata

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this study I examine ideas of nature, human nature, and artificial nature that are relevant to my work. I explain that the natural realm is a physical presence in the world and that it is also a cultural construct. My work is concerned with metaphorical representations of nature and I contextualize my artwork within the work of modern and contemporary artists who create artificial representations of nature that reference landscapes. I relate that I am disturbed by our current culture’s inharmonious relationship with the natural realm and explain how my work opposes our cultural anthropocentrism and the collective assumption …