Art and Design Commons^™

The Curiosity Of Con, Petrified Breath, And An Accident Known As Blue., Steven Randall

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis installation emerged from an interest in visualizing breath. The resulting work came to exist at the intersection between art, biology, and performance.

The unicorn tapestries were used as a generative point of departure to explore the preservation and transformation of images through time, by time, and with time. Reproductions of the six tapestries were each etched into paper and then submerged into solutions of Phenol Red dye, Ferric Ferrocyanide (also known as Prussian Blue), and various forms of sodium chloride. Exhaled breath was used to encrust these images of the tapestries into physical objects which gradually crystallized and …

Dispersal: A Multidisciplinary Investigation Of Plant Life, Alexandra E. Arzt

Theses and Dissertations

Using plants as a basis for exploring the interstices between the human and nonhuman, this thesis investigates ideas of awareness, intelligence, deep time, animism, and the fluctuating human perception of the agency of Nature. It outlines environmental art practices since the 1950s involving vegetal life. In addition, the paper provides a critical analysis of plant perception of Jakob von Uexküll’s work and theories of vital materialism and “critical plant studies” while noting recent studies in plant neurobiology. In my work, plants become active participants via their movement, seeding, and smell. This study takes the form of imitation, purposeful symbiosis, anthropomorphism, …

Cute As A Button, Marta R. Finkelstein

Theses and Dissertations

Cute As A Button explores powerlessness, vulnerability, illness and addiction all wrapped up in tender buttons and a cute, cuddly creature. Using animation, sculpture, sound and an intimate space, I surround the viewer in a saccharine nightmare, one that references the dark underbelly of the cute and the sweet. The visual and aural elements are representative of the psychological and emotional states of powerlessness, which are overcome by the act of making and exploring a medium over which I can have complete control.

Space: A Discovery Of Visual Language, Kelley White

Theses and Dissertations

Space is a visual communicator. The act of perceiving space is a neurological soiree that projects and negotiates meaning in our constructed world. The poetry that we observe within space is tied directly to our emotions and to previous experience. Within ourselves, we each have particular feelings, unconscious or not, relating to height, length, and depth, as well as light and shadow. For example, a long, narrow hallway may elicit anxiety, while an open, sunlit nave in a cathedral may bring about feelings of serenity and joy. Our observations and interactions within the perceptual confines of space reveal clues to …

You're Gonna Be Ok: A System To Control The Uncontrollable, John Hendershot

Theses and Dissertations

This is a written defense to accompany the MFA Thesis Exhibition You’re Gonna Be Ok, an installation encompassing video, and other sensory components. This defense provides background for the artist’s motivation to make this work, along with a theoretical framework used to construct the installation. Accompanying photos, video, and PowerPoint are also included to give reference and documentation of the installation event.

Like Alike, Jill Zevenbergen

Theses and Dissertations

Like Alike explores notions of pleasure and beauty through an examination of mundane activity. Pleasure is simple, uncomplicated niceness. Pleasure is forgettable and related to the norm. Beauty is complicated and hardly predicted. Finding beauty in the banal provides an escape from mundane life. The banal, then becomes unforgettable. The nondescript, everyday experience becomes important and gains meaning. Like Alike's electronic format is adapted from the original format of an artist book.

A Space For Absence, Timothy Dalton

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on the evolution of my work created during my two years of study at Virginia Commonwealth University. Although I touch upon my influences what I am writing is a reflection after the fact that does not necessarily encompass my original intent or inspirations for these works. I find my inspiration from personal discoveries within my daily life. Light flickering through the rails of a fence as I walk by makes me more aware of my body's movement in space. Watching the steady condensation of water droplets forming on a fountain creates a moment of pause within the …

If Your Love Were A Grain Of Sand Mine Would Be A Universe Of Beaches, Valerie Anne Molnar

Theses and Dissertations

Each stitch is a piece of me that I give, a moment of my life and a unit of my love, meticulously culminated into a universal visual language. The optimist in me knits for the cause, while my formalist counterpart works to make the images that sell my thoughts. I knit for the lovers.I make these objects as a practice and a confirmation of my optimism. I make these images to communicate and persuade as a serious contender while at the same time retaining my own optimism and sanity by promising to never take myself too seriously.

Say Yes To Who You Are, Brooke Ann Inman

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Seeing It Straight, Heather Harvey

Theses and Dissertations

This Master of Fine Arts thesis is divided into four main sections:FAITH and DISBELIEF: In which I reckon with the implications of faith versus rationality as a secular nontheistic artist. IDEAS: The central locus of my work is a place of indeterminacy between what is known/familiar and what is just one step outside of that. This has nothing to do with mysticism, science fiction, or anything else unmoored from established fact. Section also touches on the particular vantage of a female artist with working class roots.THE WORK: Selection of work made during graduate school, and the the guiding thoughts behind …

Would You Believe Me If I Said I Didn't Need You, Andrew Kozlowski

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an attempt to expand upon the ideas that permeate the practice of art making that has developed over the past two years. Art criticism, theory, history, and practice are used to give definition to the boundaries of my ever-shifting body of work. Focusing on the elusive nature of communication in both public and private spheres, these projects range from installation and sculptural work, to web projects, photography, and drawing.

One Million Paintings 2005-2007: A Thesis, Jared Lindsay Clark

Theses and Dissertations

I assist discarded collectives of objects to volunteer themselves for inclusion into the privileged legacy of flatness – assuring them they can be transformed into Painting. Reducing my interventions - often to mere arrangement - respects the possibility of this transformation while frankly retaining the objects' original functional identities. Every surface of any object is a readymade painting – especially flat ones. By stacking objects and aligning their surfaces on one privileged side into a flat mega-surface, I am composing and collaging – even building – a painting. With my amateur interest in German I latch upon the double meaning …

Jimmy Hit His First Home Run, Eileen N. Rafferty

Theses and Dissertations

This document begins with the end of a life and ends with the beginning of hope. It is a brief description of the artist's history, artistic and literary influences, and subsequent works produced during graduate school, specifically Dichotomy, Swan Dive, and Jimmy Hit His First Home Run. Topics discussed include Human Physiology, Transference, Buddhism, and Bubbles. This document was created in Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac, Version 11.2.

Innate, Kiara Pelissier

Theses and Dissertations

I often think of life as a tight rope stretching across an expanse. Our inner strength enables us to walk forward across it. When this fails us, we fall. But in those moments when we prevail, we soar and float as though weightless and timeless. As a gymnast I learned that control of one's insecurities results in a powerful and balanced presence of body. Give into them and the body becomes uncertain and clumsy. Rarely is life this transparent. Many forms of tension manifest themselves in physical, spiritual, and emotional unrest. How does the physical contour of the skin reflect …

Codes Of Interaction, Timothy Michael Martin

Theses and Dissertations

The ideas within this thesis are meant to clarify my explorations, research and painting practice during my studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. I expand on my general statements about being fascinated by advancing technologies and concerned about the after effects of these advancements. The writing explores my curiosity about the internal, skeletal structure of things and how they operate. I explain how the paintings are idiosyncratic hybrids that evoke animation, imaginary scientific propositions, blueprints, maps, and advancing technologies. The work combines these interests with my observations of day-to-day experiences. Isolated events provide found compositions which I then manipulate: a seemingly …

Perpetual Novelty, Brian Caverly

Theses and Dissertations

Within this thesis is a mapping out of the processes, concepts, and influences, behind the sculptural practice of Brian Caverly. From Complex Adaptive Systems to the world of order of Michel Foucault to the reexamination of the Modernist movement by Yve Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, a rhizomatic path of connections and lines form and cross over, weaving together into a swarming mayhem of over population. Out of this chaos and order grow complex installations and constructions that are inherently bound by the system of their making, yet attempt at every turn to escape conformity.