Art and Design Commons^™

Fear And Nostalgia In Immigration, Daniel A. Matthews

Theses and Dissertations

Fear and Nostalgia in Immigration is a project that uses re-occuring memory and experiential memory to help us understand our common histories. The projects asks individuals to first share a re-occuring memory by writing it on a chalkboard. The next step is to then write an experiential memory about immigration, this can be a story you might have heard or it could be something from your own family history. These two tasks are done on a communal table where several individuals are engage in the same task at the same time. This aim of this exercise is to have something …

Vida En Sombras, Tommy Canales Burns

CGU MFA Theses

Verisimilitude. What is reality? Subconsciously we are acting out and absorbing information collating data and in turn responding with instincts. Learning processes to view and shape this world. I think of the Hermann Hesse’s doppelganger, the idea of a shadow self. Group identities can also have strange shadow selves. It is bizarre to look back at history and see the changing context of social norms, fashions, traditions, scientific, philosophical, and political thought. Art is a sign of the times, creating space for the inner dialogue of collective consciousness to be purged and hashed out.

Kimono, Elizabeth D. Hoffman

CGU MFA Theses

Globalization opens up opportunities for the international community to push for freedom of expression. It is precisely because the history of kimonos is a multi-cultural one, invented by the Chinese, then adapted and adopted by the Japanese, then altered by Western colonialists and changed as it permutated from the aristocracy to the middle class and to laborers, that I felt that it was relevant to today and the cross-cultural influences of globalization. This summer, I purchased two authentic Japanese kimonos, (one an everyday cotton one to use as a model for my drawings, and the second, an elaborate silk one …

Void Loop ( ) {, Jonathan Barrett Cromer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Void loop is an exhibition that addresses the dynamics of survival through an investigation of power, predation, migration, destruction, and renewal. As an installation of sculpture, video, and sound, the work on display explores associations between the human and natural worlds that inform who we are as individual, Social and biological beings. The repeated code surrounding the “void loop” title is a basic call and response serial communication between the microcontroller and the sensors. It commands the microcontroller to infinitely loop all code following the function, mimicking the repetitions of a pulsing heart. For the exhibition each piece is based …

Stories Of Otherness, Lee Ann Harrison

Graduate Theses

The thesis exhibition Stories of Otherness is an interactive installation created using dance, music, photography, video, ceramic figurative sculptures, and armatures of found objects to create a voyeuristic and physically participatory experience of situational art. Many artists from various art and literary genres influence my research and art, including Petah Coyne, Mona Hatoum, Pina Bausch, Mia Michaels, and Jeanette Winterson. The multi-faceted combination of art mediums and artists inspires me to create a mixed media, multi-dimensional installation for an immersive participant’s experience as a source for awareness, empathy, reflection, and ultimately as a “call to action” evoking change.

This thesis …

Dollhouse, Whitney Goller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses the work in DollHouse, her Master of Fine Arts exhibition on display at Tipton Gallery, Johnson City, Tennessee from January 25 to February 5, 2016. The exhibition was an installation consisting of five sets, each containing furniture - both 2D and 3D - and a mask with instructions relating to a room found within a dollhouse.

The sets and supporting thesis explore the ideas of social norms, feminism, and identity, and how submission to ideologies can create emptiness, while engagement can prompt social change. Topics include the process and evolution of the work and the artists who …

Remembrance: Drink While The Water Is Clean, Marissa Angel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis paper supports the Artist’s Master of Fine Arts exhibition held at the Tipton Gallery, located in downtown Johnson City TN from November 30, 2015 through January 22, 2016. The works Included in the exhibition consists of a series of mixed media collage paintings, a large scale etching combined with clay and a site specific installation.

The Exhibit features work that delves into the concept of nature as a subject of beauty, as well as a symbol of the resiliency of life. The work in this exhibit exposes the separation that exists between humanity and the natural world. Through …

Alejandro Acierto Interview, Madeline Bolton

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Alejandro T. Acierto is an artist and musician working in time-based media. He has exhibited his work at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Issue Project Room, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Salisbury University, SOMArts and presented performance works at the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, Center for Performance Research, and Center for New Music and Technology. Acierto has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff Centre, High Concept Laboratories, and Chicago Artists' Coalition. He is currently a FT/FN/FG Consortium Fellow, a Center Program Artist …

Snow Yunxue Fu Interview, Noah Fornear

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Snow Yunxue Fu (b. 1987) is an artist who lives and works in Chicago. Her work approaches the subject of the Sublime using topographical computer rendered animation installation. She exams and interprets the world around her through virtual reality, where she draws a parallel to the realms of multi-dimensionality, the physical, the virtual, and the metaphysical. Fu has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including Hong Kong Arts Center, Yellow Peril Gallery, Expo Chicago, Digital Culture Center in Mexico City, Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, Chicago Artist Coalition, Chicago Filmmakers, Kunsthalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, MoMA …

Leonard Suryajaya Interview, Megan Casey

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: BFA, 2013, California State University, Fullerton; MFA, 2015, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions: Irvine Fine Arts Center, CA; Expo Chicago, IL; Chicago Artist Coalition, IL; The Center for Fine Arts Photography, CO; Roy G Biv Gallery, OH. Publication: Lenscratch; Chicago Magazine; South Side Weekly. Lectures: Society for Photographic Education 2014 National Conference, MD; Society for Photographic Education 2016 National Conference, NV. Awards: New Artist Society Award; James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship; Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Prize for Emerging Artist.

Seeking Solace: Regret, Grief, Anxiety, Rebecca Schroeder

Honors Projects

Seeking Solace: Regret, Grief, Anxiety is a triptych video and artifact piece inspired by the abstract analysis of my dreams. It recognizes worries held within my subconscious and brings them to life through graphic design, photography, and video. The process of creating provides a new perspective of looking at both art and occupational therapy as methods of solving emotional distress.

I have recorded over 80 of my dreams in the past year. In these dreams, regret, grief, and anxiety are common themes. These themes are represented in three triptychs that cycle through past, present, and future problems. The cycling of …

Cc Ann Chen Interview, Margaret Basham

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: C. C. Ann Chen is an artist and educator based in Chicago, IL. She was born in Taiwan, and grew up in suburban Maryland. Chen holds a BA in Architectural History from the University of Maryland, and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chen’s work stems from architecture and landscape, and explores perceptual translations and misinterpretations of place, time, and memory. Projects range from direct observation to site-specific ideas, following an intuitive, experiment-based approach in her studio practice. She has been awarded artist residencies by Marble House Project, the Ragdale Foundation, and will be …

Jonathan Borofsky: Together To Build Our World, Leda Cempellin

School of Design Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Growth, Aria Elizabeth Smith

Senior Projects Fall 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

My senior project installation, Growth, is an exploration in pushing the boundaries between domestic space and the natural world. It exists in a state of surreality; when the human desire to control, contrive, and conquer nature is met with the inevitable power of nature to overcome.

I have always been fascinated by nature and the creatures that inhabit it, and over time this passion has grown to become a large part of who I am. About four years ago, I began to keep aquarium fish and was immediately …

House Of God: Ma Thesis, Michael James Cimino

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

What I tried: I considered the viewer more in this exhibition that any other prior. I created this work specifically to provoke response. I strategically exhibited objects deeply rooted in personal meaning, and mass culture in the Midwest. I intended to illicit a broad range of interpretation without any supplementary didactic. I wanted to observe the reaction of the view when no answer is given. I wanted to hear your interpretation without my own influencing yours. What happens with the responsibility falls on the view to make up their own mind, rather than simply responding to a predicated statement.

Why …

Closed For Business, Tyler Schrandt

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Closed for Business is an installation which creates an immersive environment that awards the curious. The inspiration for the exhibition came from local industry and human tendency. In likeliness of a defunct factory, the installation transforms the gallery into a dimly lit mysterious space. Using mostly objects found on local farms and in everyday households, a narrative takes shape. The question "what happened here?" looms as you investigate the space looking for clues. With a keen eye for observation, you navigate the room and stumble upon the office of a misguided -- and missing -- entrepreneur. As you internalizing the …

C Reverse For Care, José Luis Chardiet

Senior Projects Spring 2016

José Chardiet

April 2016

C Reverse for Care is organized in a five part care cycle: Wash, Rinse, Spin, Dry, and Wear. The piece is a study in reversibility. It is an effort to learn, to understand what it means to care, and an effort to try to achieve reciprocal balance in any relationship, whether it is with a family member, a partner, or a friend.

The staging is designed for circular movement, suggesting a cycle that is repeated after completion. The spacial structure of the piece is based on the shape of the white ginger lily, the national flower …

Marginalia, Scott Edward Vander Veen

Senior Projects Spring 2016

To explain, in a phrase, Marginalia is a space of queer esotericism. These terms may be evocative at best; rational understanding, through careful language, is inherently at odds with Marginalia itself.

Queerness, esotericism— both are nebulous terms because they invoke rejection and subversion as a means of orientation. They are always antitheses. They reject canon where it comfortably stands: the canon of contemporary aesthetics, of rationality, of identity, sexuality and body. Marginalia, as much as it is able, exists explicitly and intentionally outside the narratives that we are most familiar with.

Estranging itself from normative structures, Marginalia is given …

Even The Smallest Movement, Elizabeth Tomasine Chiappini

Senior Projects Spring 2016

In the laboratory I allow a specimen to undergo change. That change advances my understanding of the material and I move forward in light of the information I have gained. I expect change and use it as a tool. This project grew out of a year of experimentation –I built sculptures in order to watch them fall apart. During this process I realized that slow movements over time cause visible change and I chose to implement this understanding on materials that I had been studying: a slowly shrinking lemon, baking soda disintegrated by vinegar and the resulting sodium deposits. I …

The Curiosity Of Con, Petrified Breath, And An Accident Known As Blue., Steven Randall

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis installation emerged from an interest in visualizing breath. The resulting work came to exist at the intersection between art, biology, and performance.

The unicorn tapestries were used as a generative point of departure to explore the preservation and transformation of images through time, by time, and with time. Reproductions of the six tapestries were each etched into paper and then submerged into solutions of Phenol Red dye, Ferric Ferrocyanide (also known as Prussian Blue), and various forms of sodium chloride. Exhaled breath was used to encrust these images of the tapestries into physical objects which gradually crystallized and …

So Much Apparent Nothing, Emily Mcbride

Theses and Dissertations

This document contains reflections on motivations behind selected works leading up to and including my thesis exhibition so much apparent nothing. Through journal excerpts and analysis of my own psychology, I attempt to put into words my thoughts concurrent to my making, indirect as they may be. The following text shares my personal conflicts and ideologies surrounding art-making, the permanence of objects, and the acceptance of an identity in flux.