Art and Design Commons^™

Source Of All Hair, Wearer Of All Socks, Samantha Modder

MFA in Visual Art

I work figuratively in pen, collage, and digital media to portray larger-than-life Black, female characters taking up space in real and imagined worlds. In a series of mural installations, I present a subjective Black woman’s fairytale to process interlocking structures of oppression. Centered in the speculative practice of the Black imaginary that creates spaces of both comfort and confrontation, I tell the story of a Black woman who escapes into an alternate reality made up of only herself, her hair, and the clothes she wears. This text is centered on a chapter of this ongoing narrative, Source of All Hair, …

Sanctuary: The-Construction Of Communion, Carlos Salazar-Lermont

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis narrates the development of the multimedia art installation called Sanctuary. I unwrap the theoretical background of my practice, which is rooted in the theories of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, and the rhizome theory by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I approach my creative process as a grammatic of matter, space, and time, constructing meaning through an interplay of significants that connect to political, social, economic, and cultural implications. In the case of Sanctuary, I sought to create a path of empathy towards Venezuelan refugees in St. Louis, Missouri through the exploration of the concept of communion. …

Sculpture As Memoir, Tirzah Reed

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Questions guide my art practice, so they naturally guide the structure of this thesis.

Remember?

If I remember, what then?

What makes a memoir?

What is the work made of?

Nouns and adjectives—why have both?

What’s the role of sound?

How does the form of installation relate to memoir?

How do we take an installation from situation to story?

What happens in the studio?

What gets me to the studio in the first place?

What matters?

Objects have power. They hold the histories of their owners—or if they have not had previous owners, they at least carry the connotations of …

Patterning A Home, Zoë Finkelstein

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The question driving my constant impulse to create is this: how do the places in which we spend our time transform the four walls around us into this larger entity we call “home?” I begin to answer this question with an investigation into the use of repetition, time spent, and memory in my own body of work. In order for a space to become a home, one must build up a collection of experiences in that space over time. To show this, I explore the relationship in my work between repetitive mark making, pattern, intense labor, memory, comfort, and my …

Overlapping Entities: Visualizing The Space Between Nature And Culture, Zoie Brown

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my work I generate forms that occupy the space between our false conceptions of nature and culture. I subvert binaries–both between nature and culture and between women and men–through the physical conflation of microscopic and macroscopic spaces. Nature itself is a cultural concept; the notion that we are separate from nature at all is a fallacy. The body of work discussed uses ideas from Environmental Sociology and my definition of intersectional Ecofeminism to visualize the intersection of these cultural binaries within physical space. The pieces included utilize light responsive technology as a means of mediating our experiences with the …

Enter The Void: Visual And Other Pleasures, Serena Silver

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My research and art practice focus on the idea of power dynamics where the female is the passive object of the active male gaze. Through the influx of digital social media platforms, these power dynamics exist in many fluid forms which is what I believe to be the relationship between the masculine and the feminine- where the masculine is inevitably always alpha. In contemporary terms, this power dynamic exists and penetrates our daily consumption of visual culture. From the art world to the fashion industry and beyond- all are feeding into consumerism and capitalism. People have become brands, or as …

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 …