Art and Design Commons^™

Vincent Van Gogh's Wheatfields And Piet Oudolf's Meadows: Color, Contrast And Change In The Landscape, Erin A. Cox

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This capstone investigates the unique relationship between Vincent Van Gogh and planting designer Piet Oudolf's vibrant use of color and contrast in their work as it relates to their perception of the landscape. The project is mainly a comparison of the two artists, exploring Van Gogh's use of complementary colors and brushstroke techniques to create vivid contrast in his renderings of agrarian landscapes, and Oudolf's parallel approach to creating painterly meadows and prairie gardens. The project focuses on Van Gogh’s study of wheat field landscapes, which are essentially the same in structure and composition but can be used to compare …

Narratives Of Place: Reasons To Look Up, Dean Justice Leeper, Dean J. Leeper

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Narratives of Place: Reasons to Look Up, is and exploration and reflection of Dean Leeper's personal interaction and relationship to the landscape of Missoula Montana, while as a graduate student at the University of Montana. This paper explores his thoughts, definitions, influences, reflections and descriptions of his most recent work created for his Masters of Fine Art Thesis Exhibition. Leeper presents his work and ideas as a small part of a lager ongoing dialog of how humans understand ideas of place as they relate to finding a sense of self identity.

Surveilled, Rachel Swetnam

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Debord's "Society the Spectacle" and Delouze’s Deleuze's "Society of Control" both imagine a dystopian future for humanity in a world governed by excessive self-advertisement and mass surveillance. This thesis begins with the observation that, sadly, their two visions have become a reality. Current technologies log our movements through GPS satellite data, and photographs taken by closed-circuit security cameras, or by passers-by on a public street, are constantly cross-checked against databanks of previously-compiled biometric profiles. Every movement and transaction is digitized and recorded, accessible to ever-widening networks of information exchange and surveillance. These data-networks are altering the manner by which people …

Modified Landscapes, Esther Nooner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Modified Landscapes is a body of work that reflects serious thought regarding Nature and its future. My personal experience and beliefs are at the core of why I believe this subject to be of great importance and why it will sustain many artists’ investigations for the time to come. The influences that informed this process are explored through experiences I had traveling, reading and exploring the photograph as a material object. The manipulation of the photograph is meant to question the beautiful, untouched scene and break the Romantic gaze that is historically tied to representations of Nature and insist upon …

A Personal Approach To Landscape: Empathy, Sentiment, And The Environment's Representation In Tumultuous Times, Lauren Hensens

Theses and Dissertations

My work approaches the multitude of personal experience within the landscape, considering its cultural representation, aiming to give the environment agency within these tumultuous times. The following text is a personal narrative, realizing the many lenses through which a landscape can be experienced, including analyses of artists, writers, and musicians who have represented landscape through their own individuality.

Through My Window, Haiyin Liang

Theses and Dissertations

I convey my thoughts through art jewelry; making jewelry is my language of communication and commemoration. Inspired by historical Chinese art and contemporary jewelry, my practice pays attention to bring classical Chinese aesthetics of hazy poetic and ideal arrangement into the contemporary jewelry field. The attention to detail refers to the quiet contemplation and emotional experiences encouraged by each of my works. Through my research, I use metalsmithing language to communicate with non-precious materials finding my own way of expression and meditation. Meanwhile, I build environments that display jewelry off the body in order to construct a picturesque landscape. The …

Polyanthroponemia: A Pursuit Of Mystery, Magdolene Dykstra

Theses and Dissertations

I wish I could believe in something. Having grown up in a religious household, I have continually teetered between faith and doubt. Landscapes seen and unseen are my last source of awe; here my doubt is suspended – for a moment. Using unfired clay, I create alternate landscapes inspired by sublime philosophy. The sublime experience is born in a sense of amazement linked to fear of something beyond our understanding or control. The amazing intricacy of microbiology, a whole universe existing alongside and inside us, fascinates me. The abundance of unfamiliar life in my work triggers a cautious curiosity. My …

Southern Grotesque, Maggie Ellis

Theses and Dissertations

The scenes I paint are submerged in specific landscapes I have encountered in Georgia. Honoring my experiences from this vantage point, I depict the rough and tumble attitude of my upbringing that is at odds with a rarefied New York art world I currently live in.

A Chair In The Woods, Victoria Dolloff

Theses and Dissertations

Victoria Dolloff's MFA Thesis considers traces of play and perception in the development of her artwork, exploring the idea of reorientation through subtleties of the absurd. Her installation Untitled (Landscape) questions object as place and place as memory utilizing fragmentation as reconstruction.

Es-Sen-Tial, Lyn A. Govette

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is in support of the exhibition entitled ES-SEN-TIAL on display in Tipton Gallery located in Downtown Johnson City from February 27, 2017 to March 10, 2017.

The exhibition is a presentation in fiber medium of the human impact on the landscape, specifically using the extractive industry of coal mining as example. This is accomplished through the use of digital imagery printed on textiles, hand and machine embroidery, and surface design techniques of dyeing and layering. This body of work reflects the artist’s interest in art activism and the utilization of photography, fiber arts, ideas and techniques, as creative …

Between Rock And Breeze, Lena Schmid

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis project consists of a series of works on paper and songs about the collusion of the body and nature. I use a lens that both distorts and makes clearer the ineffable ways our bodies shake their boundaries, moving without us and within us.

Light And Space, Lindsay M. Burke

Theses and Dissertations

I make visceral images that are simultaneously elusive and confrontational. They are in dialogue with the historical tradition of figurative painting and drawing, but also aim to subvert those conventions. I want to catch and retain, as long as possible, the attention of my viewer by creating a familiar space that is slowly undermined. In my works the human body is dispersed in space; plants and tree parts are stand-ins for human desires, and gender is assigned to fragments of the body and to objects, then withdrawn.

"Perhaps," She Said, "Looking Itself Could Be An Antidote.", Sarah Moore

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Climbing Mt. Rainier, Kathleen O'Connor

Theses and Dissertations

My work addresses notions of the American landscape through image, memory, and experience. Using found images, video, and a variety of materials to make objects I investigate the intersection of external representations of landscape in American culture and internalized desires of landscapes.

Enduring Peripheries, Anna Yeroshenko

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

In the 80s when Russian state-sanctioned architectural production consisted of standardized buildings that deplored any unnecessary ornament or decoration, an architect functioned only as an interpreter of numerous limiting factors. As an act of protest against the stagnation in architecture, a group of young architects began to create projects that existed only on paper. For them ‘Paper Architecture‘ became a way of bypassing restrictions and dissenting, a way to critique the dehumanizing nature of the architectural style that prevailed at that time. Spatial compositions, which were hard to comprehend visually, elements of inverse perspective, and impractical, idealistic environments depicted a …

Tales From The Fells, Anne Elder

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Our relationship with the natural world is complicated and under scrutiny as we make irrevocable changes to the earth. We enter the woods to get lost, and to find ourselves. We walk there to find thrills, peace, inspiration; to hear ourselves think, to be surprised, to make profit. Our childish fears may have changed from bears, monsters and getting lost, replaced by adult fears (bears, unsavory humans, getting lost). The woods may frighten us or be a place of comfort, but it is rarely a neutral experience. When we lose access to these spaces, it affects our ability to find …

Literary Landscapes: Mapping Emergent American Identity In Transatlantic Narratives Of Women's Travel Of The Long Eighteenth Century, Leah Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines intersections of the development of maps from the Native American-European encounter to the establishment of the New Republic and transatlantic British and American narratives of women’s travel of the long eighteenth century. Early European and American maps that depict the Americas analyzed as parallel “texts” to canonical and lesser-known women’s narratives ranging from 1688 to 1801 reveal further insights into both maps and these narratives otherwise not apparent. I argue that as mapping of the New World developed, this mapping influenced representations of women’s geographic and social mobility and emergent “American” identity in transatlantic narratives. These narratives, …

Encounters, Judy Knowles Ford

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Mythos For The Mortal, Stephanie Elaine Kolpy

Art and Design Theses

My Thesis body of work, The Mythos for the Mortal, presents visual interpretations of apocalyptic mythoi—past, present, and future. These works are both a conscious and unconscious response to childhood exposure to apocalyptic stories and form a visual record of social, political and religious interpretations of the apocalypse. The overarching theme of apocalypse (from the Greek word Apokalypsis, meaning ‘to unveil’ or ‘to reveal’) has allowed me to reconnect to my youth and heritage and has driven me to articulate more clearly a perspective regarding the future and what it will ‘reveal’ to us. I use the landscape as a …

Like Alike, Jill Zevenbergen

Theses and Dissertations

Like Alike explores notions of pleasure and beauty through an examination of mundane activity. Pleasure is simple, uncomplicated niceness. Pleasure is forgettable and related to the norm. Beauty is complicated and hardly predicted. Finding beauty in the banal provides an escape from mundane life. The banal, then becomes unforgettable. The nondescript, everyday experience becomes important and gains meaning. Like Alike's electronic format is adapted from the original format of an artist book.

A Key To All Mythologies, Theresa Frances Marchetta

Theses and Dissertations

Over the last two years(August 2006-June 2008) I have been engaged in landscape painting that takes an experimental approach to material. My use of acrylic, the plastic paint, combines landscape with distortion and artificiality. Plastic has lost the futuristic and hopeful appeal it had in the past but it might still be an apt material to employ for a truly American artwork.

Bounded Surface, Emilie Sayward Brown

Theses and Dissertations

The relationship between surface, perception, and structure has occupied my graduate studies. Locating, transforming, and transcending the surface requires play with perceptive abilities not only of vision, but of touch, hearing, and the other senses as well. How do the interactions of sense with the qualities of a surface determine our perception of the world? What role does the extension of the senses play in one's ability to perceive surface and structure? Using sense information gleaned from surfaces, the tectonics of our world are made visible. Might this relationship be played backwards as well? Composed structures produce surfaces upon which …

In An Expression Of The Inexpressible: Even This Title Is Stolen, But I Chose It, Carmen Alis Mcleod

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a tour through an imaginary building that contains the work I have completed in the last two years at Virginia Commonwealth University. The body of the text provides a discussion of specific paintings as well as more general themes related to painting and art. The discussion includes thoughts on futility, desire, schism, the leap, collage, photography, materiality, painting, image, and landscape. The second part of the text is an abstract statement about the paintings included in the thesis show, Splinter Paintings.

Catalysis., Mary Barton Nees

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses the process of discovery that led to her Master of Fine Arts exhibition at Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, from March 19 to 23, 2007. Investigations in printmaking, mixed media, and symbol are highlighted. The work for the thesis show consists of nineteen, 30" hand pulled works on paper. All works are oriented vertically and floated in the frame. Of this collection, thirteen are monotypes, four are collographs, and one is a collage. Insertions include intaglio, brayer marking, encaustic wax, paper, oil paint, pen, and sumi ink. Topics included are the artist's thinking into the nature …

Toward A New Kinship Constellation, Nellie Helen Frances Appleby

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to elaborate on my artwork during my graduate studies, while contextualizing it within the framework of the art world and the works of other artists. A main project during this time was to minimize the singular interpretation and framing of a fine art photographic print, while expanding its possibilities of meaning through the addition of important ephemera and objects such as plants, drawings, moving imagery, conversation and the unknown.

Invisible Green, Amanda Sauer

Theses and Dissertations

How is nature conceived today, a generation into the environmental movement? Many contemporary artists grapple with how to reconcile our inheritance of both a precarious natural world and the culture that created it. My work investigates the subtle intricacies of our relationship with nature. I use photography to develop a way of seeing that points to the often-unnoticed nature in front of us. In particular, my work recognizes and re-imagines nature's deep connections in the context of our ecologically changed world.

The Oldest Well, Saul Benjamin Becker

Theses and Dissertations

This body of work, representing the past two years, is focused on the idea of the composite landscape. This reconfiguring of the elements from the external world combined with invented places is a way for me to articulate the subtle transactions between the interior psyche and the external world. The way this new conglomerate space is represented is a result of my inquiry into the relationship between nature, culture, and the sublime. The place where the private acts of the studio meet the shared exterior world is where I find my intellect, fantasy, and sense of reality collaborating in chorus.

Magic Mountain, Diana Al-Hadid

Theses and Dissertations

My installations are propositions for an imaginary world that relies on its own internal logic, a world of believability without recognition. While the work references landscape it also emphasizes its contrivance, as it is automatically estranged in an "unnatural" gallery setting. I subvert or de-familiarize the materials and processes that I use in the service of creating a fictitious environment. My places are impossible places. They are irregular, illogical, and unstable. Our imagination can be one of most dangerous things to psychological stability as it is an inventory of all things possible, no matter how irrational or improbable. The irrational …

Escape Artist, Charles F. Gustina

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reviews the background, influences, and evolution of the body of work entitled Folia, which forms the basis for the candidate's thesis exhibition. It traces the development of the candidate's artistic inclinations from drawing to photography. Directorial and Pictorialist photography are discussed as forebears in the Influences chapter. Evolution of the Body of Work details how the current work grew from both the candidate's background and influences. A Brief Anthology of Quotations references Susan Sontag's influential work, On Photography, with quotations that have either influenced the candidate's work or reflect his perceptions of art and life. The balance of …

Landescape, Dragana Crnjak

Theses and Dissertations

Shape, color and line are three basic elements I use to explore the possibilities of visual language. The process in itself is important since what is left on the paper are simply records of moments from which a work is constructed. These moments are mixtures of my memory, my everyday observation, my struggles and hopes. The starting point is always in between known and unknown, and it is always a new attempt for clarity. Rather than expressing what I already understand and know, I have a need to change my working methods quite often in order to expand my own …