Art and Design Commons^™

Examining Our Relationship With Death: A Participatory Art Project, Lia A. Davido

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Death is a fact of life, yet researchers such as Caitlin Doughty, Todd Harra, Ernest Becker, and others, have found that people deem death a taboo topic of conversation. Doughty herself started a social movement, death positivity, to encourage this taboo to be broken, and to normalize talking about death. However these researchers published their findings in the early to mid 2010’s, before a major pandemic made death a more common occurrence for people. Inspired by previous researchers' experiences, this project asks the question: How do people feel about death now, and can socially engaged art create a space where …

You Are What You Wear: A Vital Materialism Of Textiles, Walter J. Greenleaf Iv

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Intermedial artworks are deemed effective when they draw from the roots of the most basic, universal elements of materiality, concept, sensation, and/or experience, melding disparate elements into an inextricable novelty. As hybrid artifacts, they take up an unusual degree of substance in one dimension or another, and can at times be difficult to categorize, describe, or document. Nonetheless, the potential for intermedial expressions to resonate with their viewership is strengthened by the depths to which the artist ventures, and through such a process the most far-reaching and complexly interconnected issues of our time can be made approachable on the personal …

Historical Narrative In The Music Of Sid Meier’S Civilization Vi, Alec Larner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is a 2016 strategy video game in which the player leads a historical civilization from 4000 BC to the present. The Civilization series is the subject of much scholarly writing, especially its representation of history and non- Western cultures. My work builds on Karen Cook’s research (2014) on the technological progress and American hegemonic identity signaled by Civilization IV’s soundtrack. I argue that the music in Civilization VI contributes to a Eurocentric teleological progress narrative of history inherent in the structure of the game: the idea that history is a story of inevitable and positive …

Spirits In My Studio., Katelyn Gabbard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The exhibition “Spirits in My Studio” unveils the inventories of elements in human relationships and connections through collecting and transforming remnants left behind—admiration of an object combined with a presentation format that creates an immersive three-dimensional field to traverse. An acknowledgment and celebration of entropy, the exchange in human experiences elevates the process to both content and medium. Moreover, it creates active entanglements with genuine physical relationships with the artist, the making, and the audience.

Witness, Revival, Testimony, Laura Ann Schroeder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist, Laura Ann Schroeder, discusses her Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Witness, Revival, Testimony, which was installed at Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, TN from March 2, 2023 through March 31, 2023, with a public reception held on March 24, 2023. The exhibition consisted of a collection of sculptural works and installations that evoke scenes and memories from the artist’s childhood. This body of work deconstructs the traditional family dynamic and the private domestic space through recreations of everyday life. The artworks are primarily made with repurposed consumer textiles and techniques like stitching and quilting that have historically …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

Someone, Stop Her! The Musical (The Gallery Show): The Thesis Document., Hannah Dewitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis document accompanies a body of work that is radically vulnerable, personally political, and emotionally complex. Through my work, I challenge myself and my audience to sit with discomfort and create an environment suitable to generate a nuanced appreciation of pain that approaches its acceptance through humor, confessionalism, and the subversion of tropes against themselves as an act of counter-mimicry. This document situates my work within art-historical context with a primary focus on performance art and applies insight from each artwork referenced to further analyze and defend my own work. Additionally, I use texts relating to Camp sensibility, binary …

Second Nature: Impressions Of Place., Trish Korte

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For my art practice, I grow and forage my art materials for eco printing, a direct contact printing method that reveals leaf shapes and hidden imagery through heat and pressure. I take specific cues from surrounding materials, objects, and environments. Tree systems and compelling textures of fungus are interpreted through ceramic and fiber. With an ongoing collaboration of natural materials and eco printing processes, my art speaks symbolically and metaphorically through imagery and materials. This thesis and accompanying exhibition present an examination of current work in context with an ongoing investigation of natural materials and eco printing.

Understanding The Persuasive Attributes Of Twitch Advertisements: A Study On The Effects Of Current Advertisements And Sponsorships, Colleen Sharkey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The research in this study aims to investigate the effectiveness of Twitch’s current advertising option, which includes mid-roll, pre-roll, and sponsored streams. It will focus on usefulness of content, brand credibility, purchase intent, and streamer credibility. Twitch has seen a surge in growth and attention in recent years, with an average of 31 million daily visitors and 1.3 trillion minutes watched globally in 2021 alone (Twitch Sales, 2022). However, despite Twitch’s growing popularity as an entertainment and entrepreneurship platform, little research has been conducted on the impact of its advertising options on brand perception. This study seeks to address this …

Chroma Cowboy, Jessica Gryder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Chroma Cowboy consists of eleven canvases wrapped in used feed sacks layered with vinyl to create brightly colored narrative scenes. Pulling from Pop Art colors, cubism shapes and a consciousness of materials, I designed this body of work to give the hard-working cowboys, ranchers, and agribusinesses a way to have their stories told to a larger audience. The strain on ranches due to generational changes, politics and environmental circumstances makes it even more important to document this way of life. I strive to further advance and inform the general public’s knowledge of the unyielding lifestyle and dedication that it takes …

The Metanarratives Of The Fourth Industrial Revolution And The Collective Cognitive Dissonance Of Metamodernist Discursive Formation, John R. Lewis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My artworks explore the impacts of the technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which began in the early 21^st Century, upon global society and the human psyche. My works are instantiated by multi-year research in the areas of social psychology, cognitive dissonance, computer evolution and artificial intelligence. My body of work portrays a cautionary sensibility regards new technologies such as robotics, quantum supercomputing, Artificial Intelligence, commercial space travel and nanotechnology. In addition, my artwork attempts to increase awareness of the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance.

The perceptions and cognitions of artistic viewers relate directly to the psychological phenomenon of cognitive …

"‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‎", Stephen Harmon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My work tries to perplex the viewer to acknowledge themselves in the act of seeing. In order to perplex them, I use ambiguous reference to figure and space using multiple perspectives, vantage points, gaze, marks, mediums, and, more recently, light and site specificity to establish liminal relationships and experiences. Liminality is a kind of in-betweenness, being on the threshold of places or states of being. My experiences in and studies of the Jewish Diaspora have been my path towards understanding liminality, but liminality is not unique to diaspora or to the Jewish experience and my work does not attempt to …

Conceal Reveal, Jacquelyn A. Bolton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My work is rooted in the human condition expressed through the materiality of textile and fiber arts and its connection to spirituality. The human condition, as I understand it, is the state of being a person complete with a mind, body, and spirit. This includes all the experiences a person encounters in life—birth, growth, aging, conflict, love, loss, grief, injury, relationships, trauma, rejection, joy, acceptance, and so on. The human condition answers the question: What does it mean to be a person? We are in flux. This ever-changing aspect of “being” is captured in the inherent qualities that are found …

Expanses, Austin J. Buchanan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This document will explain the nature of Austin Buchanan. This will go over the ideas, process, the executions, and the theories of my artwork. Explaining the ideas of space within, on, and around (outside), the picture plane.

The work included focuses on how a manipulated 2D surface evokes an experiential reaction. This manipulation enhances the actual experiences of real space that happens once someone becomes an observer of a 2D artwork and the conceptual idea of window space. This work challenges the ideas of the traditional picture plane illusion and the Flatbed surface or “Flatness” by expanding the picture plane …