Art and Design Commons^™

It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. In It Won’t Be Easy, Arkush places and piles her multimedia sculptures throughout the gallery to create installations that overlap ­with her writing and poetry, sometimes layering in (or extending out to) audio and video components. This approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate—though no less lively. Her work meditates on and ‘vendiagrams’ things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic. The exhibition title acknowledges that the …

Between And Beyond, Noah F. Heil

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Between and Beyond is a series of handbuilt and wheel-thrown ceramic objects which explore intimate queer relationships through the human figure. I assemble slabs of clay to create openings and negative spaces within the sculptures, implying the ways in which the human form also acts as a vessel. The sculptures as well as the figures themselves remain open and vulnerable, literally and metaphorically. The body is depicted through fragmented sections, alluding to the ways in which society and culture break up gender and sexuality into limiting binaries. These intimate, private moments are meant to conjure an imagined future free of …

This Is Just To Say, Iren Tete

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

My memories are marked by the desire to evade logic. At a young age I became a proficient player of the “What If” game.

What if I could hold light in my hands?

What if shadows had form that could be touched?

What if I could see through structures?

These mental exercises affected my relationship with reason and validity. Aware of the threat of the ordinary, I embraced the inherent magic in the notion of possibility. I understand possibility as the limitless potential of object, thought, or scenario. This potential extends beyond the apparent and prompts more questions than it …

Entangled, Katherine Cox

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

I create objects to incite wonder through their exuberance, inviting one to explore the beauty found in the strange and offering the viewer a way to interact with the discomfort of the unknown. Mysculptures are an assembly of engaging surfaces and forms revealing varying texturesandvibrant colors referencing natural and fabricated worlds. Each sculpture is entangled within its own environment or narrative and each is adorned for its own role, finding a balance between discord and harmony, captivation and repulsion.

Each is an individual exploration of the distinct qualities inherent within each object. They are precious in scale and stimulate …

Mie Kongo Interview, Mimonna Aljaber

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Mie Kongo grew up in the outskirts of Tokyo, Japan and now lives and works in Evanston IL, where she makes multidisciplinary work: ceramic sculptures & installations, 2D work and porcelain designed objects. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions, “Unknown game series” at Dan Devening Projects + editions, Chicago, IL "Beyond Function" Arts and Literature Laboratory, Madison, WI, "Reformat: Digital Fabrication in Clay" Lillstreet Art Gallery, Chicago, IL, “Circle in a Square” Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL. She has been showing her porcelain products at Paul Kotula Projects, Ferndale MI and Room 406, …

Closely Distant, Crisha Yantis

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Drawing upon my own experiences and observations of the world around me I use the figure to explore what it means to be human. This body of work addresses the universal experience of anxiety through the dynamics of both personal and interpersonal relationships, specifically focusing on fear of the unknown or what subconsciously lies just out of our comfort or understanding.

Often what is unknown is also what brings about questions of our own power and what we can or cannot control. In my work, I address ideas of power and powerlessness formally through what the figures lack. Their control …

Form In Place, Normandy Alden

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

There is a 200 acre farm in central NY state where I am building a house, a business, a family, a life. My vision for these extends beyond my own capabilities and lifespan. It is a vision of elegance, simplicity and utility. My pots are reflections of this vision, and embody the qualities of the life I seek. They are both exuberant and quiet, expansive and constrained.

The landscape surrounding my farm swoops and recedes with grace. Lines of windrows curve over hayfields, beautifully articulating undulations in topography. Nothing about this agricultural landscape is incidental. The lines and textures I …

Carrying Water: A M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition By Aaron Sober, Aaron M. Sober

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

For all of us, everyday life is punctuated by moments of victory, defeat, pride, and vulnerability. The process of welcoming gain and tolerating loss is a basic lesson in proportionality. My work is a personal reckoning with the contradictions that define this very human experience. Through animal imagery, symbol, and metaphor I explore the unpredictable circumstances that form a life lived.

We engage with, and understand our own place in the world through stories. By doing so, the avatars we create reflect the scope of our experiences, both sublime and damaged. The animal protagonists who inhabit my work are placeholders …

Constructions, Sean Ryan Larson

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

I have always been drawn to investigating the nature of ambiguous objects; objects whose role is unclear; objects that fall between distinct categories, and that exist in what appears to be transitional stages. The pieces I make provoke the imagination by building in experimental self-defined systems that refer to contemporary architecture, as well as comment on the ceramic and non-ceramic process. My pieces vary in form and intention just as the skyline carries changes in form and order. I want to make experimental objects that develop in front of me from the ground up, without a pre-planned result. Using fundamental …