Art and Design Commons^™

No Canvas, No Rules, Francisca B. Ugalde

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This presentation activity is a creative exploration of the concept of DIS-EASE, as in the absence of ease, uneasiness, or discomfort.

Conceptually, I am exploring DIS-EASE in three ways:

1. As you can see, I am painting directly onto the gallery wall. As the keeper of these galleries, I can assure you that this is a big no-no. I mean how dare anyone disturb these pristine surfaces?! The rationale behind my discomfort is rooted in the idea that the gallery is a sacred space, and that these walls ought to be kept pristine so that the objects displayed against them …

Elevating The Queer Body, Grant Mahan

Graduate Theses

Elevating the Queer Body is an art based exploration in removing objectification in the visual consumption of my own queer body. Throughout this thesis, I explain the experience of queer objectification, and how to overcome it through abstraction in a painting practice. This research comprises spiritual ideologies, as well as the history of abstraction, to inspire me in creating an ethically consumed representation of my figure. This is achieved through an abstract depiction and veiling of my figure. Presented compositions are overlaid with Islamic inspired devotion and ornamentation as a form of elevating the body itself.

Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?, Jackie Ta, Ngoc Uyen Phuong Ta

All Theses

“Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?”

In Saigon, “Ai… hông?” is a phrase that street vendors often shout to advertise what they sell for the day. This body of work, “Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?” (Translates: “Saigon, anyone?”) invites the audience to take a glimpse into the vivid everyday life in contemporary Vietnam through a perspective of a Saigon local. Utilizing the modalities of painting and sculpture, I collect, accumulate and organize parts of the streets and marketplace by manipulating and amplifying certain key visual elements. The goal of the work is to reconstruct an experiential space that speaks not only to the …

Promoting Longevity Through Engagement In Purposeful Occupations, Jennifer K. Fortuna

The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy

Ron Henry, an artist based in Grand Junction, CO, provided the cover art for the Fall 2022 edition of The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy (OJOT). “On the Trail to Durango” is a 36” x 36” painting made from oil and acrylic on gesso board. Ron has been creating beautiful art since he was a child. Art has provided Ron with a strong sense of purpose throughout his life. At age 90, Ron attributes his longevity to living a healthy lifestyle and regular engagement in purposeful occupations, such as painting. In this tenth anniversary issue of OJOT, Occupation and the …

Sorrow Cannot Resurrect, Sharon Mathew

be Still

The magenta skull symbolizes life and death while the sword passing through the skull is a symbol of life’s ever present cycle of conflicts, grief, and sorrow. The ambiguous gray of the sword is used to convey the fact that we will all encounter an incredibly vast variety of struggles throughout the course of our lives. It is also outlined with gold detailing as a play on the phrase “every cloud has a silver lining. As the sword pierces the skull, out pours technicolor tears and blood. The bright colors represent the immense beauty and growth that we can find …

Aeneid: A Depiction Of Dido In Dutch Golden Age Art, Rebecca R. Kaczmarek

Parnassus: Classical Journal

No abstract provided.

The Anatomy Of Human Occupation, Jennifer K. Fortuna

The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy

Dr. Emily Balog, PhD., OTR/L, ECHM, an occupational therapy professor and artist based in New Jersey, provided the cover art for the Summer 2022 edition of The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy (OJOT). “The Knitting Brain” is an 11” x 15” painting made from watercolors. The inspiration for this painting came from years of experience working with individuals with head injury, stroke, and mental illness. The piece is from her Anatomy of Human Occupation series. This collection of paintings is a unique and authentic representation of Dr. Balog’s love of the human body and the healing power of occupation. Dr. …

Mixed Messages, Hannah Duggan

Masters Theses

The bodies of work that I have created during graduate school stem from my interest in mass media, culture studies and spectatorship in the digital era. My research engages digital technology and media studies to consider the ethics and ambivalence associated with spectatorship. Using traditional art mediums, I explore social and digital media, revealing tensions through representation and materiality. This translation from digital to analogue media is pivotal in all my work. Handmade objects introduce slippage and meaning as they break from the limiting format of the screen. This thesis will explore the research and content that inspired the creation …

Data-Painting: Expressive Free-Form Visualisation, Miriam Sturdee, Soren Knudsen, Sheelagh Carpendale

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Data visualization can be powerful in enabling us to make sense of complex data. Expressive data representation – where individuals have control over the nature of the output – is hard to incorporate into existing frameworks and techniques for visualization. The power of informal, rough, expressive sketches in working out ideas is well documented. This points to an opportunity to better understand how expressivity can exist in data visualization creation. We explore the expressive potential of Data Painting through a study aimed at improving our understanding of what people need and make use of in creating novel examples of data …

Matingkad - Flamboyant, Bhen Alan

Masters Theses

In the Tagalog language, matingkad is used when describing colors or light. Its English translation, flamboyant, usually describes a character of a person - a queer, performer, drag?

People have called me flamboyant due to the way I dress, my gestures, and how I approach my work. Because of this, I have experience discrimination and abuse towards my race and gender, as well as my citizenship status. Therefore I have learned to begin employing flamboyance to be opaque (matingkad na kulay).

With this experience, I had to adjust the opacity of my body as a way of survival …

New Revelations, Ineke Lynne Knudsen

Masters Theses

This project imagines a not-so-distant American future where Christians and conservatives have triggered the Apocalypse. In my paintings of the Apocalypse, all the desires of conservative Christians have come to pass: the eradication of people of color and queer folks, a revitalization of the American frontier and wilderness, and the return of Jesus Christ in the form of the Rapture. I’m specifically painting White conservative Christian girls, and I’m interested in their unique intersectionality of being a White conservative (an identity rife with racist social implications), being female (an identity deeply abused within the Christian subculture), and being a child …

Baseball Camp And Other Stories, Lucas Mockler

Masters Theses

Of the questions I ask myself concerning the making of a painting, the one that continues to drive the work is this - where do the facilities and properties of technique in paint handling meet the action and then final experience of the painting? In the attempt to answer this question I have made work from the building up of my life. I have dug out from the memories of childhood and the metamorphosis of fictions into personal realities. I have added new movements and marks and built abstractions in the dark. The hope would be that as I work …

Pace/Place/Space/Tempo—The Choreography Of Equity And Expressions Of Black Living, Vessna Scheff

Masters Theses

My skin is natural. My skin is political. My hair is natural. My hair is political. My speech is natural. My speech is political. There’s no such thing as apolitical.

My current interdisciplinary practice in painting and performance focuses on how Black diasporic identities hold, create, and process subsistence narratives. For this research, I am asking the questions: What role does pace play in resistance strategies and how can it be communicated through tempo? How are unspoken histories conveyed through movement, silence, the glance of an eye, fat crackling in a cast iron, pushing play on a walkman, and seeds …

Tobetitled, Dylan Riley

Masters Theses

My practice is rooted in an investigation of digital and painted images. It meditates on the interbred way in which contemporary images are produced and consumed through painting and error-prone processes of mechanical reproduction. As seeing is, for many, our confirmation sense (you have to see it to believe it) I search for the power structures and epistemological values within contemporary images, particularly representations of objects. My work explores how the meaning of objectivity has shifted over time and how images respond to that shift. Heavily relying on image making software, I first create compositions digitally before translating them to …

Can’T Stop Coyote, Tala Worrell

Masters Theses

I work hard to keep language out of my studio. Language reminds me of my mom’s voice, people telling me what to do, not having the right accent, critiques, criticism in general, mis-truths, and never being good enough. Language is the material of my thoughts, and most of my thoughts, or the ones on a constant loop anyhow, are all those voices over and over again.

Painting is where I get to be me, with myself, and in my body. Painting is my home, family, refuge, and best friend. I’m not looking at myself from the outside, no one can …

Paradigms Of Horror, Xingge Zhang

Masters Theses

“It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy” (Hume, 1757).

Horror, said Adorno in another context, was beyond the scope of psychology. Horror tries to frighten, shock, horrify, and disgust using a variety of visual and auditory leitmotifs and devices, including reference to the supernatural, the abnormal, mutilation, blood, gore, the infliction of pain, death, deformity, putrefaction, darkness, invasion, mutation, extreme instability, and the unknown. Supernatural or uncanny narratives can shape, distort, or reflect the storyline in literary works, but also …

Somewhere In The Universe: Senior Thesis 2022, Mallory Nelson

Honors Theses

My senior thesis, entitled Somewhere in the Universe, is an exploration of what makes a place believable, and how I as an artist can make something that doesn’t exist feel like it could. However, one of my favorite parts about art is its ability to be interpreted in unique ways. I may have had a set of intentions and ideas when creating this project, but I also am open to the ways different people interpret this art.

The conceptual basis of my thesis is an attempt at worldbuilding. These worlds are based on various Greek and Roman Goddesses from the …

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

The Hidden Power Of Images: An Allegory Of Chaos And Performance In The Digital Age, Livia Xandersmith

MFA in Visual Art

Within this text, I explore the hidden power of images in American visual culture through painting-based installations. I investigate images of the past and present juxtaposed in a surrealist landscape. Through the use of images in the news, entertainment, advertising, and images within the home, I depict how the problems of the past bleed into our perceptions of the present. I find that this cycle of problem inheritance connects us as humans regardless of time, generation, and place. In my work, I explore the complexity of image culture and its shifting presence within the digital age. Using surrealist collage, I …

Necessary Myths, Jessica Ramsey

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

My thesis essay was inspired by my search for a belief system that could transform despair over what will be lost through climate change into valuing what we still have. In researching the earliest iterations of belief structures, I came across the Maros-Pangkep cave paintings. These paintings are the oldest known works of art, and by my interpretation the first evidence of religious life. They are a series of representational paintings which tell a story, and I was inspired to emulate this methodology in my own exploration of belief.

My essay investigates the relationship between images and religion. Through W.J.T …

There Is Sometimes A Buggy: Queering The Cowboy, Kelsey Gavin

Art and Art History Honors Papers

For my honors thesis project and body of work for the Annual Student Exhibition 2022, I will be interpreting stills from David Lynch's movie Mulholland Drive, sourcing from a singular four-minute scene referred to as The Cowboy scene. I will be recreating this scene in various mediums focusing on three central parts of the scene: The Cowboy, The Skull, and Adam Kesher. This project will examine and delve into the overall theme I have been exploring in my studio practice over the course of the past several years about how film and painting intertwine. For the Annual Student Exhibition it …

Scene By Scene, Katita Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Katita Miller’s paintings and drawings depict quotidian scenes through the filter of an overactive mind. Populated by spectral figures and swirling portals, her interiors and landscapes fluctuate between the mundane and the fantastical. This paper explores the parallels between painting and theater and the context and process behind five paintings.

The Screen To Desire, Joseph Parra

Theses and Dissertations

Joseph Parra reflects on our often embellished online personas and their effect on our desires. Through luscious 3-dimensional painting Parra translates the seductive desire of the hypermasculine male-presenting figure through glorification and criticality. The tactile painting also acts as a rebellion to accurately represent “real” life on the digital screen.

Head, Shoulders, Knees, And Toes, Pol Morton

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores ideas of transness, chronic illness, and injury. Through assemblage and repetition, my larger-than-life paintings address the dissociation and fragility of a body that is unmapped by society. These autobiographical works attempt to locate the self when it is trapped, whether in a bed, in the home, or within the body itself.

Don't You Want To Be Happy?, Mario Rocha Rodriguez Jr

Honors Capstones

My capstone project is an exhibition of my artwork using visual distortions to convey a message to the viewer. I created nine new pieces out of the original seven proposed over the course of the semester with themes all relating to firsthand experiences that I think people can learn from. For the exhibit, I displayed ten pieces with two works that were made prior to the current semester. In conclusion, I present ideas that I have been holding in for the past 4 years.

The North Mississippi Field Guide For Young Explorers, Olivia Wymore

Honors Theses

The North Mississippi Field Guide for Young Explorers is an interactive field guide to some of North Mississippi’s wildlife designed for a younger audience, ages six to twelve. The creation of this field guide is a culmination of my inspirations and interests as a child and my involvement and passions as a student at the University of Mississippi. Multiple times during my college experience I have had the fortunate opportunity to work with the local Montessori school, Magnolia Montessori School, by volunteering for various events and leading educational activities. After working with this school and learning about their teaching methods …

“Paint What You Hate”: Philip Guston’S Hooded Figures And The Postponement Of The Exhibition Philip Guston Now, Thomas Baldwin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis interrogates the postponement of the Philip Guston Now exhibition, examining the justification for the postponement, the actions taken by the National Gallery of Art, and the effects of the postponement. My research examines the museum’s choice to cite social justice as the main context for understanding Philip Guston.

Uncaring Universe, Jingqi Wang Steinhiser

Masters Theses

Depicting the mythical and chaotic, my work revisits traditional and pop-cultural icons. I borrow my framing of absurdity from Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus: “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. [...]This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”

I grew up as the only child in a family of diplomats, a learning journey that mutated across geographies. Born in China, I lived in Russia, Mongolia and Korea before coming to the USA. My world is an aesthetic amalgamation of dissonant …

There Are Ghosts In The Machine, Jonathan Green

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are ghosts in the machine is a body of paintings that dare to dissolve the boundaries between my physical body, intimate desires, and paintings. Utilizing the aesthetics of leather lifestyles, the paintings express the transformational potential of desire and transgression. Oriented within my experience as a queer, transgender male, I call upon influences that range from the body horror classics by director David Cronenberg or the transgressive attitude of Nine Inch Nails, to theoretical works on the power of eroticism by Audre Lorde and Georges Bataille.Modified by hardware such as chains, zippers, and grommets, the paintings express the transformational …

As The Sun Yellows The Green Of The Maple Tree, Adam Fulwiler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Sun Yellows the Green of the Maple Tree is a body of paintings investigating communication, improvisation, play, and painting’s capacity for transformation.

Reflecting on my childhood spent with my brother, Austin, who experiences sensory differences due to autism, I establish a painted space that is both forcibly disjointed and meaningfully connected, invoking the uncertainty and complexity of perception and communication. Through chromatic nuance, physicality, representational ambiguity, and visual tempo, I invite the viewer into the act of slow looking—to encounter each work as a living, breathing, individual entity.

In the studio, I invent rules and aleatoric devices, mimicking …