Art and Design Commons^™

Words With God, Krista Fassett

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

As a studio artist using multiple media, I investigate subjectivity of the female body as depicted within the context of evangelical doctrines and traditions. I explore misogyny and the absence of bodily autonomy in the bible, which designates women as property to be owned, purchased, and sold. Some overlapping themes include religious trauma, domestication, submission, and virginity. The intertwining of topics allows me to share my lived experience, and ignite conversation into certain religious doctrines that simultaneously live among cultural and political lines.

Emphasizing ‘holy’ scripture, my art varies through domestic materiality and includes crocheted textiles, oil paintings, installation with …

An Empirical Study On The Efficacy Of Llm-Powered Chatbots In Basic Information Retrieval Tasks, Naja Faysal

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The rise of conversational user interfaces (CUIs) powered by large language models (LLMs) is transforming human-computer interaction. This study evaluates the efficacy of LLM-powered chatbots, trained on website data, compared to browsing websites for finding information about organizations across diverse sectors. A within-subjects experiment with 165 participants was conducted, involving similar information retrieval (IR) tasks using both websites (GUIs) and chatbots (CUIs). The research questions are: (Q1) Which interface helps users find information faster: LLM chatbots or websites? (Q2) Which interface helps users find more accurate information: LLM chatbots or websites?. The findings are: (Q1) Participants found information significantly faster …

Away From Keyboard: Practical Applications Of Antifascism, Amber Sarelle Easley

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My work sits uncomfortably between and across the disciplines of activism and art. This tension is typical of Socially Engaged Art: a social interaction proclaiming itself as art. I aim for these interactions to center antifascism in interrogating the complex interrelation between digital spaces and the streets outside our front doors, as antifascism is the only appropriate response to the blatant fascistic aspirations that is both digitally and physically present.

Fragments Of Forgiveness, Sarah Hayashi

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Trauma lives in the body, with or without conscious memory of the events that placed it there. To cope with the pain of trauma we might disconnect from our bodies, choosing to view ourselves as some separate entity living within the body. Disconnection offers a sense of protection by allowing compartmentalization of pain, grief, and trauma, but the harder these emotional fragments are fought, the more they demand acknowledgment.

Referencing my torso for size, I handbuild biomorphic sculptures from clay, finishing them with glaze that mimics the dewy texture of raw clay, using a palette derived from my skin tone …

Show & Tell, Mia Jae Tiffany Hutchinson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My work examines the concept of the fetish through subject and materiality. By weaving together elements borrowed from Baroque and Pop art, I intentionally disrupt historical norms. The overarching Camp aesthetics serve as a vehicle for subverting established references, while simultaneously imbuing them with a queer sensibility. By recontextualizing classical representations of the figure, I put myself into the work to examine how identity is the Subject but is conflated with the ideas of Objecthood.

References to pornography and sex work play a pivotal role in this body of work. For many trans women, sex work becomes a pragmatic choice …

Things That Are Long, Frankie Gutierrez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Bigfoot has become an important motif for Frankie Gutierrez, especially since his transition in 2021. The characters in this exhibition showcase the deeply personal exploration of transness and non-mainstream trans identities, the in-depth observations of others, and their interactions with transgender people. He compares transness to the likeness of bigfoot, typically an elusive and hard-to-find character that everyone suspects, but has rarely been seen. Evidence of their existence surrounds us, but only those with open minds can truly see them. The characters in this show look like you and me, and no one at all. This exhibition is not meant …

Master Of Fine Art Project, Jeanne Holbrook, Jeanne Holbrook

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Currently, I am exploring how American culture has formed our understanding of the reality of the concept of happily ever after. How did the pursuit of the American Dream evolve to be a hegemonic influence transforming America into a consumer society that exists only as advertising images of happiness?

The exhibition is a collection of approximately 9 paintings. The subject I am exploring is the American dream, as presented through suburbia and the belief in a consumer society to bring us happiness. My imagery is based on generations of stories given to us through fairytales, myths and religious icons.

My …

The Space Between, Alexander Dixon

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Space Between investigates the intricate relationship between perception and reality. By integrating graphic design principles with the optical qualities of glass, the exhibition creates visual distortions that challenge and redefine our understanding of the world. The pervasive use of black throughout the exhibition signifies the vectorized image, a vital element of graphic design and the technological abyss prevalent within our society. The fundamental geometric shapes, coupled with minimalist sculptural forms, employ a graphic approach to highlight visual communication's influence on perception.

Graphic design has a history of shaping public perception. The basis of graphic design is the act of …

Extended Substance, Danielle Brensinger

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Artist Statement:

“One of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the [viewer] in uncertainty.”

-Sigmeund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’”

I’m interested in making people uncomfortable. Through the exploration of the uncanny, I exploit the unexpected and the psychological to embrace personal reactions. Like conversations we have with ourselves in the mirror, there’s an uncomfortable nature in looking beyond surface value. Utilizing beauty as a strategy and the laws of attraction, my work intends to entice a visual response only to be met with ambivalence. I try to establish a state of uncertain worlds, partial …

Through The Kaleidoscope, Andrea Simpson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Andrea Simpson, a California-based artist with a BA and MA from the California State University of San Bernardino, draws inspiration from the transformative power of psychedelics. Her artistic style merges vibrant colors, rhythmic patterns, and abstract forms, showcased across diverse mediums including ceramics, glass, and painting. Simpson's dynamic and experimental approach to art invites viewers on a mesmerizing journey that merges music, psychedelia, and contemporary art, providing a unique and immersive encounter.

Espacio, Edgar Perez Peña, Edgar Perez Peña

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Edgar Perez Peña (He, Him, His) is a Queer, Chicanx contemporary figurative painter, who lives and works in the Los Angeles County. A native of Los Angeles, California, his paintings, and assemblages are a strong combination of process, materials, and content that displays his fascination on how physical/psychological space (from where he resides), reflects on the Queer Brown body and its comfort/discomfort in relation to public and private space.

Peña looks at his artistic practice as an opportunity to explore the human condition from the Queer and Brown perspective as well the beginning of healing through the meditative process of …

When I Grow Up, Maria Trinidad

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Ever since I was a kid, I have had this fear that still lingers today: the fear of being an adult. It’s my ongoing fear.

I look back to my childhood. I find comfort. I was happy and stress-free. In my childhood, I was unrestrained and enjoyed my innocence. It was my “happier times”. I did not have the worries of responsibilities and burdens. That mindset changed when I realized my father had two full time jobs. I stopped acting my age and became more independent. I didn't want to trouble my parents with school or personal issues. Now I …

Visibility, Jamie Valdez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

I am a woman, activist, artist, mother, and wife. My art practice questions the role of

institutions in disseminating outdated traditions and unfair rituals in relation to women. Bringing

visibility to what is ignored, I create works that are critical to the unfair expectations that society

fosters, expectations which ultimately oppress women vis- -vis the (art) institution. Through

different conceptual strategies, my work questions what society has taught us about gender

roles and explores the pedagogies that our institutionalized education has systematically

perpetuated for women and girls from early educational experiences.

100 Seconds To Midnight, Melissa Medina

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My artistic practice focuses on the concept of mortality and investigates the human condition. Through my work, I often personify the concept of death and investigate the several forms that it may take across several cultures. The skull is most often used as a symbol of mortality, and it serves as one of the key elements in my work. I am drawn to the elements portrayed in classical memento mori paintings, and as a result, I have borrowed certain objects commonly used in these works and have paired them alongside more modern elements to create a new narrative. With this …

Kindred, Marlee Uggen

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My work is driven by my experiences as a woman, mother, in pregnancy and giving birth. My work investigates the censorship of women’s bodies, and explores the ways in which we can reconnect with and reclaim our power as autonomous beings in society. I employ storytelling to create space to acknowledge my own trauma, make space for people to tell their own story, and focus on healing through normalizing and de-censoring my body. By illustrating things like birth, menstruation, and miscarriage I ask the audience to even consider them. I am mindful of the idea that the things that we …

Future Proof, Melanie Asalde-Smith

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My work can be distilled into two major points of inquiry: perception and technology. I render minimalist interactions between reflective planes, shapes floating in space, and portals into the void. Driven by color, light and space, my work warps its environment through the illusion of illumination and dimension, and invites viewers to lose themselves in the altered space. This work is reflective of my life experience, caught between the real and the unreal.

Technology is both a muse and a tool in creating my analog work. The screen both heightens and distracts from my anxiety. Like many in my generation, …

God Is Gay, Ordando Prieto, Ordando Prieto

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The major life of The Christ are well known among Christians and have been depicted throughout art history and contemporary media.

The juxtaposition using gay pornography is meant to question the ideologies of homosexuality. The choice life events and fetishes are to juxtapose terminology and show possible sexual innuendos.

These seven works of art are mixed media paintings; made up using works from art history, gay pornography, photographs I have taken, and drawing and painting by myself. The exhibition is an alternative perspective of the major components of Christian Messiah, Jesus Christ. These events include: The Nativity, The Baptism, The …

Pink Fantasy, Andrea Clary

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

“I do my hair toss check my nails, baby how you feeling? Feeling good as hell”– Lizzo, “Good as Hell”, Cuz I Love You, 2019.

My work is about self-acceptance and body positivity. I am learning to love and accept my own body and channel this personal growth into my ceramics.

Reacting to media images of celebrity culture and the movement of fabric in Couture runway fashion shows, I am deeply impacted by contemporary American beauty ideals. Utilizing Hip-hop’s cultural messages of defiance and historical platform for presenting underrepresented voices, song titles and slang become titles for my work, in …

Washing The River In Relation To Interpellation, Theatricality And Spectatorship, Patricia Miller

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Patricia Miller's Master of Fine Arts Thesis Paper

Master's Project, Patricia Miller

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Patricia Miller is an Inland Empire based artist, who was born and raised in San Bernardino, California. She creates abstract plywood sculptures that promote mental health awareness. Her work is an investigation of the unhealthy relationships that many people have with society, the fine art world, their environment, and themselves.

Mes-Ti-Zo, Aeleen Jacinto

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Meztiso is an exploration of the artist’s identity as an individual born and raised in Guatemala; which is a country rich in natural resources where the majority of the population is native Maya yet the ruling class is majority white and poverty is widespread. The artist takes on this stunning contradiction using her own influences and views which were shaped by the political and economic upheaval and instability of her youth in Guatemala. The artist comments on her own identity as a person of mixed ancestry, a Meztiso, and because of her own family’s involvement in the capitalist government that …

Defining Moments / A Life Portrait, Timothy Haerens

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Defining Moments / A Life Portrait

In his MFA Thesis Exhibition, Defining Moments / A Life Portrait, Timothy Haerens explores and celebrates our connectedness to one another as members of the human race. “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” Haerens chose this quote from the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, as the inspiration for his show because it affirms his belief that we are linked to one another by virtue of our humanness.

Through his abstract paintings on canvas and plexiglass, as well as through his prints and collagraphs, Haerens …

Existential Flux, Heather Roessler

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My wok is a place for meditation (through play and ritual) to grapple with ideas around what it means to be alive. I explore my own history, psychology and the nature of things, to better understand myself. I create because of the need to build a familiarity with the unknown and the uncomfortable and to accept that which is out of my control. While seeking to understand and learn from my own personal confrontations with death, I also find my own form of spirituality.

Losing my hold on graspable things, as time and change tend to bring, witnessing the dualities …

Domestic Disturbance, Tanner J. Mcguire

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My work explores domesticity, the role reversal happening in the family dynamics, the banality of home life, and the common escapism that occurs in parents. Men play a larger role in the home and women play a larger role outside the home blurring the lines of responsibility and changing expectations. This emasculating process often creates a power struggle within the home. These common issues are the fodder for my artistic practice. Domestic pattern, utility, sexual frustration, chaos and contentment all play a part.

Prevail: In The Moment..., Nicole Stahl

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This body of work is composed of sculptural mixed media objects and scenes that heavily utilize cast glass. These pieces are physical representations of my quest to seek mental balance by focusing on what brings me happiness and comfort while still honoring mortality.

Moldmaking and repetition of process innate within casting and other aspects of this work makes me focus and revisit an idea, repetitively, like a meditation or a prayer. The intense focus required helps combat my anxiety and translates anxious energy into more positive, productive, balanced way of living.

Part of this balance requires the acknowledgment of the …

Anthropo-Scenes, Ibel M. Sinohuiz

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ARTIST

My work is a melding of mythology and personal experience. Growing up in the harsh desert of the Coachella Valley, I found refuge in music and art. My desire to become a drummer has leaded me to create a persona called Baby Lamb. Baby Lamb is a symbolic representation, as well as a physical manifestation of this desire and she is slowly evolving, eventually becoming my alter ego. Currently, the artwork that I create is a chapter in the life story of Baby Lamb.

BABY LAMB

Baby Lamb's art shows have included a collection of relics that have been …

Light Sensitive, Andrew Thompson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

I am an excremental artist. I do not mean an artist who works with feces or is interested in manure but one whose artwork is expelled through the results of process. As a photographer, I am not as interested in indexing a location, a person or a moment as I am dissolving the structure of photography through the manipulation of photographic materials. I typically photograph landscapes that catch my attention for a myriad of reasons. The commonality between these images is anonymity of place. Hints of location are always present but never accentuated, instead their purpose is akin to a …

The Hero's Journey, Alan Van Fleet

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My ongoing series of assemblages are an expression my modern mythology through the juxtaposition of esoteric symbols and my collection of beloved action figures. Though myth is founded in partial truths and allegories, it has the unique capability to speak about our relationships to one another and the universe. My artwork conceives of anime, comics, and videos games as part of our contemporary mythology.

Inspired by a fusion of pop culture and spirituality, I also draw on the magical properties attributed to flowers, gemstones and other materials to create shrines, altars, and other objects. Juxtaposing these properties, found in my …

Performing Binaries, Humberto Reynoso

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

I take a critical view of sociopolitical and cultural issues dealing with homoeroticism andgay politics. I explore gender theories in order to further understand what it means to bemasculine or feminine and how it affects my placement in society. I use art as a tool forexpressing sexual freedom while questioning traditional sexual identity. I'm interested in exploring ideas of the oppressor and the oppressed, and how power becomes an inevitable force (in every society) that creates a hierarchy, consequently establishing control. But what is power? According to various definitions, power is an entity that possesses and or exercises authority or …

Transmutation: One Thing Becoming Another, Price Hall

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My art emerges from decades of the experience of building myself, sensitively aware of accumulated experience and the weight of accrued memory. Responding to this life I so deeply appreciate the longer I live, as sculptor, painter and poet, I merge these individual aesthetic observations into a layered work of many reads. Offering poetic observation as a visual sensation beyond the ears’ hearing carried on a field of color connects at some interior emotional level which is absent or very different in the uniformity of type. Time is present in my current work. “Corrugations”, not only in the poetic images …