Art and Design Commons^™

But They Are Not Real, Takura Suzuki

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text discusses how my art explores the relationship between humans and contemporary digital technology and investigates how this relationship shapes today’s society. With the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and more data-driven technologies, the interaction between humans and digital technologies has become more intimate and complex. Today, machine automation is an essential development factor in society. An increasing number of industries will benefit from the automation of goods through digital technologies such as AI-driven tools. As automation continues to develop, machines will gradually become indispensable and closely integrated into our lives. In an increasingly automated and data-driven society, digital …

Pero...Maybe, Adrian Gonzalez

Graduate School of Art Theses

Through collage, assemblage, and object making, I fit unlikely fragments that I call manchitas—stains—together. In my paintings and mixed media assemblages I incorporate references to Spanglish as un acto of making. To me, it’s like the visual work that I make: thinking in one language and speaking another, words start with English but end in Spanish. They sound like English but are Spanish or vice versa. The words look misspelled but are used in everyday conversation. Spanglish is idiosyncratic and is what I build my practice on. I collect materials around me, some I find and some I make. …

The Garden Of Extraterrestrial Deee-Lites, Jessica Bremehr

Graduate School of Art Theses

I present a delusion where you, the reader, are a hitchhiker on a journey toward an alternate realm guided by a god-like buffoon. While I take you on a journey through my daydreams and my musings on an alternate existence, a tour guide will lead the way to an otherworldly realm called The Garden of Extraterrestrial Deee-Lites, reflective of a tourist experience to a faraway destination. The tour will culminate in an uncanny space where curious life forms converge with familiar objects to encourage a sense of wonder while promoting ideas of interconnectedness within the world around us.

The Feeling Of Foam & Other Essays, Ryan Erickson

Graduate School of Art Theses

I create conceptual drawings, collages, sculptures, and installations to humorously destabilize and ultimately question how human language, formal methodologies, and social institutions function. While seemingly embracing an aesthetic of rationality, I undermine it with absurdity. In my work, I take a fundamentally dialectical position by skewering the rational to the illogical as neither can exist without the other.

Suture...Harm And Remedy, Amanda Casarez

Graduate School of Art Theses

My artwork centers its attention on treating the body as a sacred and vulnerable vessel that needs protection, healing, and repair. It is informed by my technical training (in garment construction) and my personal traumatic memories. It responds to the embodiment and transfer of traumatic memories through textiles.

Through my haptic process of destructive transformation, I seek to replicate the embodiment and transfer of trauma. The textiles are imprinted, inhabited, and transformed by traumatic memories in a continuous process that is followed by a harming form of repair, the suture. It is my hope that by exposing the wounds of …

Blessing, Liu Weike

Graduate School of Art Theses

Blessing is a black-and-white graphic novel which explores fate and bravery through a love story. The story is divided into five chapters, beginning with a bank robbery and ending with an escape facing failure. After a note from the artist, the "post-credits scene” shows another ending.

Songs In The Gutter: Writing And Authorship In American Comics, Jonathan Marshall Smith

Graduate School of Art Theses

An exploration of authorship and writing for comics understood through the divergent history and conventions of mainstream and alternative American comics paralleling the writing and development of a graphic novel.

The Digital Grimoire, Benji Snyder

Graduate School of Art Theses

Adigital website that houses written narratives & visual works. Its contents cover Occult topics and narratives in a diaristic fashion and visual storytelling. The website acts as a Digital Grimoire of the creator Benji Snyder.

Demystifying The Penny Valley Files, Austin Ickes

Graduate School of Art Theses

This article focuses on the historical antecendents and development processes of the independent comic, The Penny Valley Files.

The Freakiest Dungeon In The Castle: The Interiority Of Confinement, Madeline Valentine

Graduate School of Art Theses

Series explores toxic fertility and the interiority of psychic trauma.

Bad Baby Lich Lords: Narrative & Cartooning In Card Games, Taylor Dow

Graduate School of Art Theses

Overview of thesis project Bad Baby Lich Lords and its historical place in card gaming.

Hunkidoree Resort, Stephanie Gobby

Graduate School of Art Theses

Hunkidoree Resort opened in the summer of 1960 as a middle-class leisure resort for an often-marginalized community: monsters. Monsters including the likes of vampires, lagoon creatures, mummies and other figures appearing in Cold War era films, which served as personifications of American anxiety over nuclear annihilation, this project seeks to reimagine mid-century illustrated posters with unexpected monstrous figures in leisure settings.

Fantastical Creatures: Folklore, Fact, And Fantasy, Leah Kurth

Graduate School of Art Theses

Notes on the Existence of Illusive Critters is a collection of creatures that blend into contemporary urban life, framed as a set of notes produced by a young woman seeking acceptance into the local naturalist society. This project is comprised of notes and drawings from a nature journal presenting these fantasy creatures as real, and is rooted in bestiaries, folklore, creature design, and the concept of secondary worlds. Fantasy is at the core of this project, wrapped inside mock naturalism.

Excorio: Cursed Films, Haunted Props, And Fictional Reality, Racheal Bruce

Graduate School of Art Theses

The project Excorio is a series of visuals which act as a container for a fictional horror film from 1979, also titled Excorio. Films are often adorned with a curse in conjunction with tragedy, making its surplus value fetishistic in nature. When subject matter is supernatural, as it often is with horror, it is simple to explain the gruesome actions of people, on and off set, as ghostly intervention. This phenomenon is explored through films such as Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby and Friedkin’s 1973 film The Exorcist. A film’s props and supplemental materials can act as a catalyst for …

Fine/Not Fine: A Cancer Intervention, Erin Lewis

Graduate School of Art Theses

Fine/Not Fine: A Cancer Intervention offers a new way to think about and interact with cancer patients. The projectconsists of an illustrated memoir, poster, birthday cards and a zine, offering an autobiographical perspective of a cancer survivor. Fine/Not Fine helps cancer patients by educating the people in their lives. Readers learn about healthy interactions with cancer patients. They are discouraged from using toxic language,and from citing conspiracy theories and alleged magical cures not rooted in science when interacting with cancer patients.

From Disconnect To Connect: How To Critique The Objectification Of Animals Through My Photography, Gaoyuan Pan

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this thesis, my photography deals with the long history of objectification of animals in Western culture and philosophy. Aristotle started this objectification because he considered animals were born for human consumption. Later, Descartes finalized this objectification by separating humans from animals. This objectification is still central to the global capitalist system, which consumes animals as an industrial product. Through presenting a documentary of dead or dying animal bodies with black and white photography, I challenge the legitimacy of using animals as products and present the injustice treatment of animal bodies under this objectification. Furthermore, this objectification allows humans to …

Art And Empathy: Self Discovery In A Dark Forest, Younser Lee

Graduate School of Art Theses

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 40 million people report feelings of depression, anxiety, and stress as the world moves at an increasingly rapid pace and faces unprecedented challenges. However, many ignore these negative thoughts and fail to acknowledge them as a serious issue. My art, which shares my own experiences, creates safe, cathartic places for viewers to think about their own emotional experiences. Crucial to this process is my use of daily objects and the creation of individualized, participatory, and multisensory experiences.

My art relates to daily life and the negative emotions that we experience daily. I …

Restoring Connection, Alexa Velez

Graduate School of Art Theses

As a multidisciplinary artist, I draw attention to our disconnect from the natural world. My work seeks to restore that connection through movement and sound. In this thesis, I discuss how I use movement and sound to create affective experiences that sensitize viewers to the world around them. The camera is my primary artistic tool. I take on the role of director, cinematographer, editor, choreographer, performer, and soundtrack composer to create my video art. Through my work, I transform the ordinary spaces we inhabit into theatrical settings for storytelling, intertwining the familiar with the uncanny.

Nature is one of my …

Unmentionables, Madeleine F. Grotewiel

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text explores the capacity for shamed bodily materiality to narrate the complexity of healing from sexual trauma while rape culture persists. Because rape is discussed so little in public, sexual healing often takes place under a meaty layer of shame, placed on the survivor’s body. Their truth is frequently interpreted as too much/gross/ugly/unspeakable for the public, and it is simultaneously not enough to be discussed/accepted/pursued as an actual issue. This uncomfortable teeter-totter comes from the patriarchal boundaries drawn between what is privately or publicly acceptable. There are plenty of depictions of sexual violence in popular culture and the canon …

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, …