Art and Design Commons^™

A Study Of The Symbolic Clothing Disposition Behaviors Of Generation Y, Patti A. Borrello

Masters Theses

This qualitative study explored symbolic clothing disposition behaviors of Generation Y. The disposition of their wedding gowns was investigated using material possession attachment concepts. The study explored the following research questions: (1) What did Generation Y wedding gown owners do with their wedding gowns after the wedding?, (2) What disposition method was used and why the disposition method was chosen?, and (3) How is attachment to a wedding gowns related to the disposition method selected? Subjects were recruited using a non-probability, chain referral or snowball purposive approach. Within the broad categories of keeping and disposing of, many of the specific …

Costume Design For My Fair Lady By Alan Jay Lerner And Leonard Loewe, Emily I. Taradash

Masters Theses

This paper discusses a theoretical costume design for the Musical "My Fair Lady" by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. The costume designer chose to set the production in 1912, stylizing choices clothing based on period silhouettes and social research. The paper includes character analysis, research, and a discussion of the design process.

Material | Adventure, Diana Wagner

Masters Theses

With the generous support of the RISD Grad Studies|Grant I traveled to London, England to deepen my thesis research of material libraries. This opportunity allowed me to visit the resources that inspired my enthusiasm for materials and to challenge the questions I posed in my thesis research, How we, artists and designers, learn from materials in the context of the library? The sources explored within this book highlight a growing community of academic and research based material collections in London, along with some exceptional exhibitions of materials and process in the context of the museum and archive.

Material Potential | Recontextualizing Material Libraries, Diana Wagner

Masters Theses

Material libraries are growing resources that offer an opportunity for artists and designers to discover a variety of materials. These collections are composed in a traditional taxonomy, pairing materials based on composition. Samples are typically commercially made and are displayed independent of context, means of production, cultural significance, and application.

Through making we learn a material’s potential: the transformation it can make, the form it can take, and the new composites we can create. This generative experience lives in the studio and workshop. But how can we introduce this language of process, critical thinking, and making to activate and challenge …

Speculative Archives : An Index, Sameer Farooq

Masters Theses

Building an official archive, a comprehensive depository of cultural memory, is an impossible pursuit.My work centers around the question: what gets lost in the capture ? Responding to this problematic, I create “speculative archives”— setting the practice of archiving against the archive. In doing so, my display systems (including photography, film and writing) reveal countless ruptures, even blind spots, in the smooth surfaces of the archive: the invisibility of the archivist, the challenge of capturing ephemera, the inherent value bias in collecting, and the inexhaustibility of documenting a subject.

Speculating on the archive has consequence for design practice. From the …

Learning To Live In Thick Interface, Jonathan Hanahan

Masters Theses

As media platforms shift towards more dynamic interfaces, the separation between user and content grows infinitely. While advertised as thin, light, and seamless, these platforms mask a thick and complicated space in which society must navigate. This is what I call the “Thick Interface.” The Thick Interface is the portal we use to toggle back and forth and through which we communicate. It is solid and porous, physical and digital, enhancing and diminishing. It may also be a combination of these things simultaneously, or none at all. My work highlights—rather than masks—the complexity of this space through interaction, participation, and …

Not Not Real : Exercises In Styling, Sophie Mascatello

Masters Theses

As a generative process of visual form, styling and artifice are co-dependent. Styling mediates visual and sensorial elements for aesthetic benefit, and artifice produces a fantasy otherwise unattainable. Together they are a rebus — an orchestration of symbols and shifted realities — that impacts modes of representation and subsequent shifts in taste.

In Not Not Real, the logic of “real” life is moot. Relevance and subjectivity are the only fixed parameters that govern stylistic intuition. The image produced — however candid or authentic it may appear — is artificial. But this imagery supersedes reality in provoking aspiration, rendering the …

Isolation Nation: Representations Of The United States In The Photographs Of Rémi Noël, Pascal Aimar, Yves Marchand And Romain Meffre, Mary Elizabeth Downing

Masters Theses

Visions of America vary greatly. There is an extensive variety found in foreign and domestic portrayals of the United States and these representations are affected by both pro and anti-American ideologies. Such juxtapositions can be found in contemporary French photography. In analyzing the works of photographers, Rémi Noël, Pascal Aimar, as well as the collaborative works of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, I will argue that their vision of America is influenced by their own perceptions and their viewpoint as French artists. These photographers seek to picture their versions of Texas, Detroit, and New York in ways that reveal aspects …