Art and Design Commons^™

Sukima: Vertical Views Of The Floating World (2017), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"Sukima is a Japanese word for a crack in a door, a narrow space that opens up when the panels of the sliding doors are pushed to the sides. ... You’ve seen enough to electrify your imagination and let it complete the picture. This is what happens when you look at a long and narrow ukiyo-e print in a pillar format – hashira-e. Or perhaps this partial sight only unleashes your curiosity and, craving a fuller view, you expand the narrow slit and can now enjoy broader vistas replete with details. For such cases ukiyo-e designers came up with …

Manual / Issue 9 / Out Of Line, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor-In-Chief, Amy Pickworth, Editor, Fida Adely, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Stefano Bloch, Mimi Cabell, Namita Vijay Dharia, Douglas W. Doe, Jared A. Goldstein, Lucinda Hitchcock, Jan Howard, Kate Irvin, Douglas Kearney, Amber Lopez, Jeffery Moser, Sheida Soleimani, Craig Taylor

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Out of Line. The nineth issue. This issue of *Manual*—themed Out of Line—is a collection about the way that lines disrupt, point outward. In poetry, the attention to detail one takes in crafting a line is all about making the line disappear, making something it holds to take front stage. . . . The space between the lines creating the image . . . the space around that argues for the importance of all that the lines hold. Manual 9 (Out of Line) complemented Lines of Thought: Drawing from Michelangelo to Now, …

Risd Faculty Values Statement, Rhode Island School Of Design

RISD Faculty Values

After thoughtful consideration and refinement of the 2017 RISD Faculty Values Statement, the full-time faculty, several part-time faculty and RISD Museum curators voted in favor of its contents and have signed on as supporters. We intend that this statement will remain relevant beyond the current political moment and encourage its wider distribution—both at RISD and beyond.

Ise Annual Report 2016-2017, Intercultural Student Engagement Office, Barbara Baker

Intercultural Student Engagement (ISE) Annual Reports

The ISE Annual Report 2016-2017 is a year in review containing a message from the director, staff updates, community programs, statistics and general report of the work of this office. Our Mission: The office of Intercultural Student Engagement (ISE) promotes cultural awareness, dialogue, and interaction while serving as a hands-on resource for specific RISD communities. Primary target communities include: students of color, international students, students identifying within the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning (LGBTQ) spectrum, religious and/or spiritual students; and those dedicated to inclusive community.

This office provides leadership in the areas of student success, retention programs, campus education and …

Multiple And Moving, Maia Chao

Masters Theses

This document maps my negotiation of the art practice as experienced in school. It is a record of development, evaluation, narration, articulation, reflection, argumentation, and continual redefinition. I consider the physical and social realities of the studio practice as they relate to my needs, values, and desires on a personal and global scale. Flitting between the mundane and the fundamental, the center and the margins, this thesis reflects my mental topography as a series of parts whose relations to each other are multiple and moving.

Wielding Daggers : The Female Uncanny, Stephanie E. Hanes

Masters Theses

This thesis document is a compilation of personal essays that analyze aspects of visual culture and philosophy. I am greatly interested in how this analysis is related to women bodies; the nude in western art has a long history of being constructed for the male gaze. This significance of the identification of women with the body exposes women in our culture to learn their own particulars for self surveillance. By looking into the mirror, what is reflected back? With these essays, I am opening myself to the unknown and the unknowable, revealing the paradox of feminist and philosophical scholarship. When …

Breathe, Iggy Choi

Masters Theses

Everything around us is interesting, but we Keep so busy we miss out what is importance. When we first get a gadget we get excited for few months, but soon we lose interest and seeking for something new and cooler. We are constantly hurt, tired, stressed, overwhelmed, but we are not aware because we are so focused on the future. We need to reset to get back on our track. We need to stay aware and remember our first excitement in order to refresh our purpose and focus. Life would be better if we step back, breathe, and notice what …

In The Marketplace, Anina Major

Masters Theses

The decision to voluntarily establish a home contrary to the location in which I was born and raised (The Bahamas) motivates me to investigate the relationship between self and place. To further explore my own migration and the emotional complexities that surface, with a desire to fabricate terms of cultural integrity and its defining influence. To express poetically the kindred ideals that resonate from home and intertwine those values to cultivate moments of reflection and acceptance. To promote encounters between past, present and future by weaving the memories of my own background and experiences, consequently unveiling a rich culture composed …

How Long Can You Hold Your Breath?, Felicia Leroy

Masters Theses

I began freediving, a sport in which one dives as deep as possible on single breath hold, as a way to approach the inaccessible space of the deep, to expand my understanding of the unobtainable.

This space (the deep) seemed to me to be representative of something that is totally unknown, its power existing in its inaccessibility, in its un-know-ability.

Through training/experiential data collection and using human physiology at depth as a framework, this thesis work book explores a single breath hold to the other side.

Work made in support of this exploration touches on darkness, depth, the edge, the …

Untitled, Ting Tan

Masters Theses

This is a collection of things I am interested in. Through these things I attempt an understanding of myself. They are unpredictable and often difficult to capture like clouds, trees, water, winds. This book is my journey of self discovery.

I walk in my memories. I walk in the city. There, I capture and record fleeting moments of things I love. Through this process, I give myself a chance to understand the reasons for this attraction. It also gives me an opportunity to understand why I want to find myself, and why I always want an exact answer to this …

Hear Her Sing, Da Wei

Masters Theses

Indeed, this is not an academic paper, nor really a novel or diary.

It is some words from a young soul.

“Hear Her Sing” is to explore a new aesthetic methodology of artist’s writing. Physically, it aims to approach an experimental experience between texts, images, sounds, materials, and paper form. The writing seeks for an aesthetic metaphorical printing representation of my embodied multimedia installations. The project looks for profound sensory impression of linking vision, hearing, touch and intuition, imagination; and asks the reader’s eye, ear, hand, and mind to constantly shift channels. While reading, imagination infinitely extends.

I Remembered I Am Happy, Emily Pan

Masters Theses

This journal is a collection of thoughts on small actions and repetition and getting through getting places.

I / You / They, Yolanda Lam

Masters Theses

This thesis is a journal of conversations.

Similarity In A Distance, Ran Zhuo

Masters Theses

I grew up in an interesting yet contradictory environment. As both of my parents were busy with their jobs, I was raised by my grandparents and I believe that’s where the contradiction aspect of my personality came. My grandfather was a professor of physics in a university and my grandmother was a professor of violin. Unconsciously, I was influenced by them and developed a keen interest in cross-disciplinary and cross-media subjects. The two subjects of music and physics represented art and science, emotion and reason, abstraction and concreteness, and invisible and visible to me.

My work is primarily engaged with …

Habitually, Sunha Joo

Masters Theses

This book is a journal of the conscious looking into my most unconscious behaviors. I documented and observed my unconscious habits, and tracked where they originally came from. Observing myself was both the process and the result of the work. I played a triple role throughout the process. I was an object, an observer, and a conduit. I wrote and became a subject of the writing. I used various forms, styles and voices in this book to align the work experience of these constantly changing roles with the writing experience and to embody different perspectives.

As a result, this book …

A Normal Novel Collection, Xiaopeng Qi

Masters Theses

This thesis is a game novel collection.

Which is an experimental attempt that I use the playable texts as a way to document daily clues. While reading the thesis, the readers will have an experience of the game-like sense of substitution and view switching. Through the narrative of texts, I try to express that in the future, making games which under structural wraps is a living strategy way to self-expression and communicate to outside in this hyper-normal spectacular society.

The Body Carrying Its Otherness, Rae Yuping Hsu

Masters Theses

Prosthesis points to an addition, a replacement, and also an extension, enhancement, transcendence.

Prosthesis points to subtraction, the creation of a void, a need, disability, deficiency.

This thesis explores the ways in which the body and technology come into contact with one another and are incorporated, integrated, fused and reciprocal. It seeks to negotiate the slippage space within these contrasting stand points and propose that the body and its otherness was always already one.

Floop : Improving Eating Habits, Namrata Phirke

Masters Theses

All of us strive to eat breakfast daily, and a lot of us fail. 10% of all Americans skip breakfast daily, and the number increases sharply to 23% for the people in 18-34 age group. Something changes distinctly when people turn 18. This age group includes students who transitioned from their home to college. This shift severely affects eating habits. At home, our parents look after us and make sure that we get the optimum nutrition as we grow. But life isn’t so smooth in college. We realize the importance of our parents who used to worry about our health …

Lamination Of Reality : Ever-Thickening And Thinning Space, Leekyung Kang

Masters Theses

Since 2014, my work has navigated question of surface and through this search in order to redefined conventional understandings of space. Often times, my imagery draws on architectural infrastructure (such as construction sites and scaffolding), exposing the underlying structural framework within these landscapes. Through the recent installation, I establish a correlation between the bone/skeleton of the location to expose a more raw and unseen space, which is present but never fully revealed.

In Google Earth, the camera eye traverses different surfaces from the urban streetscape to the underground to the cosmos. Within this virtual landscape, glitches exist that are virtual …

Content-Aware : Investigating Tools, Character & User Behavior, Llewellyn Hensley

Masters Theses

Content—Aware serves as a platform for investigating structure, corruption, and visual interference in the context of present-day technologies. I use fragmentation, movement, repetition, and abstraction to interrogate current methods and tools for engaging with the built environment, here broadly conceived as the material, spatial, and cultural products of human labor.

Physical and graphic spaces become grounds for testing visual hypotheses. By testing images and usurping image-making technologies, I challenge the fidelity of vision and representation. Rooted in active curiosity and a willingness to fully engage, I collaborate with digital tools, play with their edges, and build perceptual portholes. Through documentation …

Otra Vez : Hierarchy As Designer, Jordyn Alvidrez

Masters Theses

Methods of hierarchy are often represented in graphic forms. They shape our world into subjective places/spaces of belonging or oppression. The need for order is a human condition. There is constant tension between the utility of ordered systems against the manipulative and ultimately subjective manner in which they are created. Where there is a system, there is a story. The narrative the hierarchy tells is just as crucial to me as the mechanics.

I position myself within various hierarchal systems as a way to understand the logistics of their becoming, but also, to manipulate (or justify) my cultural and ethnic …

I Trace The Fold : Fluidity And Flux In The Terrain Vague, Alicia Oas

Masters Theses

The terrain vague is the interstitial fabric of city life. It is the space between and around the inhabited city – abandoned urban space that constantly shifts in form and function. The terrain vague is found in empty buildings, former factories, parking lots, along the train tracks, and in unclaimed alleyways. In these still and quiet places, a fragmented narrative emerges from the pattern of urban color, texture, and light.

I record these patterns in the structure of the textile. Warp and weft interweave in layers of experience. The curtain captures both the substance of our collective memory and the …

Dermis, Julia Betts

Masters Theses

I create situations that hold onto spaces or things. That psychic energy can be transferred to a viewer. I’m curious about this transference and The Aesthetics of Disengagement and the empathetic nature of making work.

I often engage the viewer through overwhelm (such as: texturally, amount of objects, length of performance, mark making…) to create anxiety/tension around a body or around how a body relates to space. To create this overwhelm, I use ritual, repetitive labor that is between obsessive and meditative. In this boundary, I wonder about whether art is healing or can be. I’m interested in creating spaces …

Perceptual Alchemy, Evan Voelbel

Masters Theses

The farther we peer into the depths of human consciousness, the subatomic realm of quantum physics or the vast expanse of the observable universe, the more our notion of an objective physical reality or a predetermined, public, external world is challenged. With each new door we open, an entirely new set of questions is revealed. The world we perceive is never a direct representation, but even knowing how constructed our perception of an external reality is, are we capable of letting go of it? Through perceptual alchemy, my work probes the threshold between our constructed reality and the ‘external world’, …

Every Change, Ruhan Feng

Masters Theses

After being away from home for six years, distance and time make me reconsider: “Who am I?”

This thesis is an honest memoir, which records my reflections about life through my struggles, confusion with cultural identities, and conflicts with my mother in a one-child family. In a two-year graduate program, I continue to explore my identities as Chinese, an international student, an expatriate, and a daughter.

The text, accompanied by illustrations, interprets personal artistic changes. Printmaking in my work is not just a tool to make multiples. The ideas of layering and repeating are also applied to my three-dimensional installations …

Good Times, Tim Stoelting

Masters Theses

In this body of work, I set out to show an exaggerated display of the manipulation consumers face everyday Attaching stories to objects drastically increases their value. In benign settings, this might elevate a simple trinket into a family heirloom or drive a bidding war for a piece of gum chewed by a celebrity. On the adverse side, a story can play with our emotions to turn a desire into a need.

In this way, fear-based stories are a particularly powerful motivator; they can drive people to the most extreme actions. When used as a tool, fear can persuade even …

Balance Speaker : Efficient Work And Break, Jin Cao

Masters Theses

The name of this product is "Balance Speaker”. It is aimed to help designers to concentrate better while working and breaking, using sound and light in particular.

In this book, I will show you the design/testing process of the product, show how the working timeline and energy levels influence designers' concentration, and how to design the interaction of the product and test its usability. A

I Am Come Back To You, Eleanor Tomlinson

Masters Theses

Through various forays into psychological science and affect theory, this work attempts to understand how quick and simple commodities might coalesce into a complex portrait of individual and collective memory.

From Florine To Flocking : Observations Of A Painter - Printmaker - Embellisher, Elizabeth King

Masters Theses

I am a painter-printmaker-embellisher. The hierarchy of these labels shift to best suit the needs of each piece. Making an image that encourages looking takes precedent over how it is labeled. A quickly read painting is the enemy. I weave together complex passages on the surface to function as a speed bump, to slow down the viewer’s navigation of my paintings. I value color, pattern, and texture above a narrative. Borrowing the palette of Florine Stettheimer and the repetitive touch of Edouard Vuillard, my paintings teeter dangerously between being about the idea of decoration and being decorative. Domesticity, femininity, and …

Our Measured World : A Poetic Translation, Minryung Son

Masters Theses

Twenty-seven years alive. Sixty-one inches tall. One hundred forty-nine days abroad. How many more units would it take to describe me? What value is derived from this quantification? What quality of understanding does it offer? As human beings, we are constantly measuring our lives and implementing systems of standardization. Throughout history, measuring systems have served as frameworks for our comprehension and navigation of an increasingly complex world. This thesis approaches measurement as a means of revealing and processing this complexity of human experience rather than one that merely simplifies and distills. Through the lens of graphic design, my translation of …