Art and Design Commons^™

Other-Ing: Creating A Three-Dimensional Asian American Perspective, Caroline Yoo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Through my thesis body of work “Other-ing,” my goal is to create a three-dimensional Asian American perspective. As a result of Western standards implemented as the norm, where colonialism is still prevalent and white still reigns supreme, the media has created an onslaught of fictional Asian characters to control this group. Representations, tropes, stereotypes have long shaped the Asian American community, so much so that it is often easier to understand these one-dimensional depictions rather than the complex reality of how an Asian American defines themselves. Not shying away from implicating myself in this systematic structure of racism, I become …

Betwixt / Between: Hybridity In Asian American And Christian Identities, Sherry Xiao

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Hybridity is defined as the fusion of worlds that were once separate in one’s self. Both cultural and religious identity are sites of hybridity and dialogue with one another to shape conceptions of sacred and profane. My research explores historical accounts and anecdotes in which cultural understanding informs expressions of faith. My practice takes elements of Eastern and Western visual culture and art history and frames them within a Christian perspective through painting, printmaking, and installation. By participating in the legacy of religious art through a hybrid lens, I seek to adopt cultural ownership of Christianity.

Queering The Material, Rachel Youn

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Queer is the disorienting of a subject in space and time. With this notion, this paper goes through various extensions of my practice, investigating how I queer objects and actions to destabilize normative expectations of function. I engage with the aesthetics of Minimalism, the everyday experience of Asian American identities, and the association of the domestic environment with comfort and stability. Employing queer theory crossed with object theory, I posit how deception and failure exist as alternative understandings of how objects and environments function. Through subverting what is expected to be true and real, the work points to the fluid …

Same Stuff, Just Packaged A Different Way (Maybe It's Not So Bad?), Kyle Strobel

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Who Would You Be? examines the interplay between person and persona, relationship building, and artist-sitter dynamics. By placing contemporary sitters in the context of historical portraiture conventions, it seeks to lead viewers to consider the issue of self-absorption and vanity in social media profiles from a different angle. Additionally, this project became a way to enhance the quality of my personal relationships with those involved through providing a space to interact and creating a link for them between myself and each other.

Encounter: Alone In The Woods, Max Zagor

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Encounter aims to take the viewer into the darkest parts of the mind through my own journey into the woods. With the images, my work attempts to capture a pure level of the fear that I felt as I ventured into the woods, alone, at night to experience the emotions I wanted to show. Similarly, Encounter deals with why we see what we see; as in, why do we think we see Bigfoot in the shadows? Where does that idea come from? Through my research, I work to prove that our culture has implanted the imagery and thoughts of monsters …

Humidifier, George Bowles

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

A discussion of the painter’s position in relation to visual culture as organized by collage. The role of abstraction is described, the correlative possibilities for gestural and textual reference of which are entailed. Models for the translation of art-historical source material provide the painter with a path forward and justify the non-verbal art experience.

Ten-Der-Ness, Brittany Jasin

Graduate School of Art Theses

Ten-der-ness. The title of this document defines the word, because one can easily forget all the meanings of a word. To be tender is to be compassionate and kind but also can mean to be in pain. “The quality of being easy to cut or chew” is my favorite definition; because to me that says that to be tender makes you vulnerable to being swallowed by reality. It’s a common saying that without suffering we would never know compassion but, within tenderness, compassion and suffering exist simultaneously in a ten letter word. Within my thesis I am exploring tenderness through …

To Name A Thing: Painting Liminal Space, Chloe West

Graduate School of Art Theses

My work and this thesis engage in the language of fragmentation, the everyday, and liminality. I create work that both depicts and becomes liminal space, I am interested in the in-between, the indistinct. My paintings reside in an intermediate stage between representation and abstraction, embodiments of everyday surfaces and objects of banality: I look at the periphery. The work comes from a distinct awareness of the body in space and the gaze. I turn my gaze to the materials of liminal space: the threshold of linoleum tiles, the boundary of a window. The surfaces that I represent speak to space …

A Catalogue Of Thoughts, Whitney Meredith

Graduate School of Art Theses

The nature of experience is ephemeral, but drawing is a permanent record of change that can serve to concretize it. Drawing is about concentration, memory and failure, and it enables a depth of seeing. In my work, through drawing, collecting, and arranging, I struggle to store time and set an image against the tide of inevitable and constant change. The lens which I take is that of the fragment: the preeminent form, normative and unavoidable, which enables the distillation of personal narrative and memory in a way that speaks to the universal nature of existence. My analysis is built upon …

Flesh And Blood, Clayton Petras

Graduate School of Art Theses

In my work, I look for ways to visualize and document the degenerative mental disease of Parkinson’s and transform it into portrayals of the disease itself, its effects, and those it afflicts. Being a physical breakdown of the body, both popular culture and my own corporal understanding influence my interpretation and representation. This document outlines those influences and their buildup towards a shared understanding of the interests behind the work, as well as implies what the work does through these contexts.

How do we give identity to a disease that is difficult to diagnose or view on medical technology, currently …

Fighting Domestic Terrorism: Art's Role In Social Activism, Jonathan Cornell

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

Through a study into the complex web of Church and State, I describe how the American condition falters under a Capitalist regime. Throughout this thesis, I identify incongruences within pervading socio-political tropes. By dissections of religion and culture, I identify how the American people are subjugated by their own ideologies, thereby perpetuating a cycle of class struggle and social injustice. I assert that the American hero has failed in the face of material desire and blind faith to a ruling plutocracy, and that organized religion has been ultimately subsumed by politics as a tool of control. Using the visual …

My City Limits, Maggie Tarr

Graduate School of Art Theses

Many have taken part in the act of flanerie,[1] however, many have fallen victim to the flaneur; “the flaneur is the man who indulges in flanerie…”[2]. I am perpetually followed by the male gaze. I am a flaneuse, a surveyor of my surroundings at all times. “Outsider/insider is a border the flaneuse must skirmish on constantly, if only with herself.”[3]

This thesis is a first hand account of my negative experiences that are generated by the many flaneurs of sexualized culture and lustful society. It is an analysis of the paintings I have created as …

Time Passing: Image Of Reality And Reality Of Image, Yihuang Lu

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis examines how my practice addresses the subjective and metaphysical nature of the photographic and cinematic medium. Neither the assumed objectivity of a camera lens nor the objective reality suggested by the photograph exists. However, for me, the camera perceives the world by itself, subordinated to the photographer’s subjective interpretation. Along with my photographic/cinematic practice, this thesis examines how the camera perceives the world on its own way and how the audience member’s ultimate perception is formed not only by his or her personal experiences, but also by the camera and the photographer’s perceptions. Using a non-representational method, my …

Light On, Baby. No Future, Shane Dollinger

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This project is a realistic depiction of the circularity of experience. As Images of ourselves and our experiences become increasingly inescapable, the repetitive and nonlinear nature of those experiences is amplified. This issue is explored in looking at contemporary artists/filmmakers whose handling of inundation in representation and narrative distinctly embraces multiplicity. Queering structures of representation, the work holds a mirror to the way that we experience living, encountering images, narrative structures and memories.

One Epic Φf Stardusts, Y∞N Irene Hong

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

A long time ago in a far away galaxy,

there was a star shining alone in the deep darkness.

The beautiful star aged and exploded into a supernova,

where her golden light scattered into the tiniest sparkles of dust,

pouring down to Earth.

Made of Stardust,

humans naturally have responded to the divine light that they carry inside their souls,

through diverse acts of enlightenment such as art, religion, and science.

.

.

.

As a Stardust, an artist, a Korean, and a woman,

I keep walking in between opposing forces and varying perspectives

until I transcend their boundaries and …

( )* *This Smells Familiar, Sachi Nagase

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Fragments from quotidian sensory experience conjure memories from personal history. Vague manifestations of feelings become interpretations of memories, which are investigated through immersive installation, sculpture, and video. Imagined scenarios are constructed to expose moments of cultural disconnect and reveal states of inbetweenness, which settle within territories amongst imagination and reality, adult and childhood, and loss and comfort. Within the works, sensory experiences including smell, sound and taste develop to relay meaning and affect. Haptic, olfactory, and auditory stimulation allow active participation, while subjectivity inherent in taste and smell generate space for new meaning. Color is used to immerse, to delineate …

Open To The Public: The Political Zoo, Mary Brown

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Open to the Public: The Political Zoo is a two-part project that began as an experiment, a creative curiosity into the intersections of co-authorship, political censorship, and mail art. Spurred in a moment when the news media is being challenged by those in the highest offices, the analog nature of this project explores the potential of a world in which online self-expression is hindered. Mail art projects, while out of the box in this digital era, are situated in a history of 20th century artistic practices. Used as a tool for creative exploration and community in Western countries, in Eastern …

[Insert Body Here], Katie Yun

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The personal is political. Using humor and my individual narrative, I illustrate the main three factors that drive my work and relate them to corresponding theoretical frameworks: 1) My OCD tendencies and labor as art concept 2) Assimilation and the appeal of the White Cube 3) Reclamation of identity and Abject art. Through textual and visual research, I provide scholarly backing and precedents set by other artists to situate these personal narratives as part of a larger structural system of oppression, while being transparent of my culpability and participation in these structures. I posit that my work provides a nuanced …

Cat Metamorfosis: Becoming Animal And The Freedom Of Non-Identity, Hannah Becker

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

A large number of modern and contemporary female artists have employed the state of becoming to either free themselves of or challenge the social norms that come with being a woman. Kara Walker frees the Mammy of her expectation by combining her with a sphinx in her monumental sugar sculpture, A Subtlety. The Guerilla Girls have an impenetrable and unidentifiable voice when they speak from behind gorilla masks. Lucy Gunning’s The Horse Impressionists depicts women mimicking the behavior of horses to lose their human consciousness, and more specifically, female identity. Looking beyond the art world and into recent consumerist …

Phenomenal Marks, Ruptured Spaces, Relearning Language, Crossing Cultures, Meelee Ahn

Graduate School of Art Theses

The form of my thesis is one of interruptions, or “Ruptures,” as I call them. These are events of my personal history, or stories from the lives of artists, that intervene against my narrative through graphic and language devices meant to be understood as equivalent to the material affects in my painting. Important artists and movements mentioned are Gerhard Richter, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenhauler, Lee Ufan, Doho Suh, and Abstract Expressionism. Writers and philosophers Maurice Merlou-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Joan Banach, Sigmund Freud, John Gage, Brian Massumi, Allen Weiss, Clement Greenburg, Shin-Chulgyu, and Yoon-Dongju are also discussed. The idea discussed include …

Creatures Of Play, Melissa Shelton

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis explores my practice as an artist and my work’s cultural, theoretical and social contexts, such carnival theory, feminist studies and film studies, as well as references to mythology and my own biography. I discuss forms of representation of gendered identities through my work in drawing, performance, animation, video and installation.

The masks we wear become as real as our bare face. Through the act of doubling the representation, my thesis work BECOMING/a fine line situates the mask as the mediator between reflections, mirroring the identity and the notion of performativity. Embracing a certain incompleteness and embodying the theoretical …

Teleterrestrial: The Universe Of Technological And Natural Scenes, Nat Rainer

Graduate School of Art Theses

In the Universe of Technical and Natural scenes, is Telerrarin. Telerrain is composed from my point of view as an artist. This terrain of combined forms is seen in three scenes that assemble technology, humanity, and the natural world. Each scene is set in different landscapes: the desert, the countryside, and the ocean. As an artist, I see these settings with the vision of a director that drives the atmosphere, life forms, and cyclical verves that make these landscapes real. As a writer, my voice describes how technology, humanity, and the natural world fit together, and then asserts the kinds …

The Lost Voices Of Women In Poverty And Feminist Discorse, Anna Maria Tucker

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

My statement is that women in poverty are now, as in the past, in circumstances of exclusion within the feminist struggle. This exclusion is mirrored in various cultural movements and milieus. I see my performance work as a vehicle to express the emotions of women in class struggle. This has taken center stage with the return of the political (Trump, etc.). My work gives emotion and lived experience primacy to assert the unique subjectivity of working-class and poor women. This pays homage to the women who were relegated to the backdrop of modernist art.

I will compare my lived …

Distraction And Community: The Magic Of Playtime, Heather Alfaro

Graduate School of Art Theses

Experiencing awkward encounters due to an anxious disposition, I create work that fulfills my own needs to fulfill the needs of others. By manipulating environments and providing props and crafted items, I take control of the situation to function within. Using craft, gift-giving and play, I encourage the audience to participate within my work—fostering community by providing an opportunity to play. Being ever fleeting, the encounters with the work and with the other participants distracts to allow the audience to lose themselves. When the work is gone, the memory lives on to comfort, and to inspire.

Contemplation Of A Place, Slow And Constant, Colton R. Carter

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis focuses on the complex nature of experience and the ability to capture its essence through forms of representation. I start with a narrative to give the reader my personal his- tory and context that drive my work. I then go on to examine the moment in which an experience exceeds the mundane and becomes significant. I also examine the object by focusing on its ability to act as a remnant of an experience, and therefore, it becomes a means of self-reflection. I use the work Box with the Sound of its own making by Robert Morris and Inhabited …

Satan's Beach Surf Them Webs 666, Shawn Burkard

Graduate School of Art Theses

It is crucial in today’s world to embrace technology, which is an essential component of our daily lives. It makes communication in our lives easier. Technology serves a variety of functions that help in the development of education, business, communication, and scientific research. The freedom it offers through social media platforms allows for personal connections at a global level to become feasible. Although the Internet provides ease of communication at a large scale, it is bound to have issues that pollute the intended connections. Virus, spam mail and cyberbullies are some of the items that contribute to it becoming a …

"Collaborating With Chance", Alyse Gellis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Have you ever felt a desire to get lost on a journey much larger than yourself or experience the thrill of the unknown? Think about a time you intentionally swam further out in a lake or the sea than you have before, or drove down a road without knowing where it would take you, or wandered around a new city without a map. Think about how you made the decision to push those boundaries. Remember how taking that risk in pursuit of an unknown made you feel, because it is that thrill that drives my artistic practice. Through my thesis …

Black Matter, Kahlil Irving

Graduate School of Art Theses

History as we know it, is inherited. Racism, fascism, white supremacy, and Eurocentric dominance have been presented as normal and acceptable within our society for many years. This has allowed police officers to execute Black American’s and not be acquitted for their horrendous crimes. As an activist I want to challenge the status quo. As an artist I am interested in investigating how I can present ideas embody or reflect contemporary issues and concerns. Using different colors can aggressively change how an object is perceived. Historical objects hold many important.

I explore many mediums, but an anchor material that I …

Interspace Suit, Moriah Okun

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My thesis work investigates the transformative possibility of mediating the space between ourselves and others, the tension between solitude and loneliness, and the disconnects between mind and body, personal and shared experience, and artist and viewer. The basis of my process is stitching and coiling — a practical and symbolic act of joining together material that serves as structure and surface. I am inspired by work that explores this middle space, like that of Archigram, Lucy Orta, Lygia Clark, and Ernesto Neto. These artists first showed me what it was possible to create when the viewer’s body becomes the site …

On Remembrance, Ashley Lee

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My works are inspired by autobiographical memories — especially those that are traumatic. However, the works rather discuss the nature of how memories are recalled, stored forgotten, remembered, manipulated, constructed, reconstructed, and destructed. Memory is a pseudo reality, that grounds on past events but is different from the objective truth. Memory is one’s own creation, which is formed by the body and mind through time, space, and experience. Then it is stored in the mind, within the infinite void of dimensional space. In my writing, I’ll explore John Sutton’s Philosophy and Memory Traces, Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida, Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed …