Art and Design Commons^™

When They Sing A Song Of Joy With Sorrow, Ziba Rajabi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As an Iranian female artist, my work revolves around my desire to reconcile my relationship with two distinctive places, Tehran (my native land) and Arkansas (where I reside now). In my paintings and installations, I re-create intimate moments culled from my home and neighborhood in Iran. Due to a situation where I am far away from my homeland and not allowed to return without being forced to remain in Iran, I can feel my memories of home fading away. By utilizing memories from my past, I take aspects of images that are no longer recognizable and, therefore, are abstracted into …

The Line That Splits, Zahra Jewanjee

Masters Theses

The body of work I have created since beginning my MFA has been informed and impacted by my research into various inter-connected subject matters: subcultural spaces, the behaviours of crowds, micro and macro and territories and systems. These have been the philosophical and conceptual rationale of my studio practice. Meditation on these concepts is an important part in the preliminary stages of my process and the praxis of my studio work has been to interpret and implement these ideas. In many ways, this process suggests its own direction. I had no exact endpoint in mind but wanted to be driven …

Spontaneous Laughter, Laughter Without Reason, Evan Gilbert

Masters Theses

What is the function of humor in today's society? What is the role of the comedian in increasingly clownish times? How does humor challenge power structures in contemporary life and art? How can painting deploy these methods in an effective manner?

The archetype of the trickster has appeared in myth and literature around the world for many centuries. In all instances it represents the disruptive side of the human imagination, a being that lives outside the rules of conventional behavior who seems to have hidden knowledge or secret understanding of how society truly functions. The archetype of the trickster can …

Where We Are : Where We Thought We Were Going, Nathan Prebonick

Masters Theses

In this thesis I will discuss ideas of place, space and repurposing as they relate to my paintings. By tying these ideas back to specific hometown sites, I will trace the evolution of ideas back to their genesis to provide context for the aesthetics of the work. I reference the texts of Robert Smithson and Tim Cresswell, who wrote about transitive notions of place, as well as David Joselit, who’s “Painting Beside Itself” essay focused on painters concerned with the question of how painting enters a network. I hope to use these texts, in conjunction with personal descriptions of sites …

Icarus : How To Survive The Fall, Emile Stark-Menneg

Masters Theses

In this writing I will explore several films, videos, performances, and photographs from the past century that resist capitalism’s tendency to crush hubris, exaltation, and indetermination. But first, I would like to reimagine the Greek myth of Icarus. How has the myth shaped our understanding of escape? Daedalus, Icarus’s father, attempts to escape exile from the island of Crete by building his son a pair of wax wings. He warns his son not to fly too close to the sun because the wax will melt, and not to fly too close to the sea because the wings will become waterlogged. …

The Person-Less Portrait, Katelyn Ledford

Masters Theses

In an age of digital technologies, contemporary portraits look different than their predecessors did. Portraiture does not have to continue to rely only on the idea of physical likeness, even though that is generally how portraiture is conceived. Through our virtual lives, we build new versions of ourselves, gain an abundance of information, and consume technological visuals. These newfound engagements and understandings shape the portraits we build of ourselves and of other groups at large. In my painting practice, portraiture is a way to explore the contemporary landscape around me as a woman and a painter who engages in digital …

Addicts Of Nostalgia, Samuel Robert Campbell Drake

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I will reflect on issues of nostalgia through a series of work based upon the landscape where I grew up. I discuss how my paintings stage themes and negotiate criticality towards memory. The writing analyses my engagement towards the collaging of documentary and fictional sources: and how my paintings seek to dispel legibility and embrace slippage. Alongside discussions of personal experiences, I talk about the relationship of distancing in my practice, concerning tangible and geographic detachment. The thesis expresses my adoration for the history of British painting, and my efforts to internalize its traditions. Moreover, this investigation …

Picturing Things, Matthew J. Bivalacqua

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My creative process is a ritual I use to examine my personal narrative. Digital photography is a way for me to mine an object or environment with an obsessive emphasis, and extract an image that signifies something relatable. By employing tropes derived from my personal narrative, and filtering them through image manipulation software; I am able to dramatize aspects of perspective and scale. With an automatic mark guided by printed images and projections of digital panoramic images, the surface and resulting picture comes into focus. This is a way for me to move past my experiences. Achieving this level of …

The Medieval Genesis Of A Mythology Of Painting, Colin Dorward

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Abstract: The Medieval Genesis of a Mythology of Painting.

Author: Colin Dorward

Principal Advisor: Sky Glabush.

Advisory Committee: Dr. Kathryn Brush, Patrick Mahon.

This dissertation attempts to enrich awareness of the late antique and early medieval preconditions of art which fortified today’s capacity for painted representations to fulfill a demand for the presence of absent individuals, such as in the case of portraiture. Chapter one contextualizes this program of research in terms of my practice as an oil painter, where figuration plays a prominent role. Key aspects of my studio work are introduced, such as my commitment to working from …

Quiet Moments, Deitra Charles

CGU MFA Theses

I am a figurative artist who focuses on ordinary people and everyday objects. I paint moments. A moment of peace, a moment of tranquility, a moment of contemplation. It is my hope that my paintings will incite a feeling of warmth, presenting the possibility of thoughts that take you away from the stresses of day-to-day life – that they give you the opportunity to experience life differently, stirring within you some sense of peace.

It is my hope that my paintings will incite a feeling of warmth, presenting the possibility of thoughts that take you away from the stresses of …

Journey To My Roots, Ainura Ashirova Barron

MSU Graduate Theses

This autobiographical body of work is a visual journey that involved the investigation of my personal identity and roots as well as the exploration of my cultural history through a process that relied on photographs, stories and family traditions, such as crafting. I consider this process and practice to be my passage into a globalized society while simultaneously finding my niche in my newly adopted country of America.

The Dream Of Being Totally Open, Frederick Greis

Theses and Dissertations

This essay details four major themes in the paintings of Frederick Greis: spiritual experience, nature, pleasure, and humor. These themes are described within the context of the artist's main goal, which is to create an experience of profound unburdening.

I Like To Watch: A Literal Rendering Of My Own Gaze, Jenna R. Gribbon

Theses and Dissertations

Much of the pleasure of encountering the human form in paint derives from the access granted by the artist to their subject. My work highlights my own role in looking, and aims to make the the viewer aware of the ways in which they are implicated when consuming figurative work.

Loop, Lap, Leap, Hannah Schutzengel

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings use slow, subtle gestures to create experiences of quiet emotion: casual warmth and comfort, playfulness, ease. My focus is the irregularity of a poured liquid; the slow release of an ironed crease; the push and pull of care against things drooping apart.

Enmesh: The Art Of Trauma And Recovery, Joanna Pottle

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Liminal Space is an artistic installation within the ongoing, interdisciplinary creative/research project "Enmesh: The Art of Trauma and Recovery.” Utilizing a combination of research methods, creative processes, and cultural inspirations, this project asks the following questions: how can the artistic process (this project serving as a preliminary case study) parallel various modes of recovery and healing? How can this objective be visually communicated through a mixed media approach of drawing, painting, and printmaking and how can this approach be an effective tool of communication? What can we conclude from both modes of work (solitarily or collectively)? How do they accomplish …

Over Certain Undecidedness These Heartstring Intimations, Martha Hemingway

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

over certain undecidedness these heartstring intimations is the culmination of a two-year-long abstracted cycle of textured conversation, internal eye contact, and endless playlist-making. Hemingway’s work is based in process-oriented reflections on habitual behavior, manifestation of sentiment, and sense of self. Her paintings draw inspiration from the ways in which we approach and avoid our internal and external routines – how degrees of our subconscious considerations affect how we extend ourselves to others. Individual auditory preferences of different colliding souls have carved a space for her in a language of empathetic abstraction – attempting to elaborate the curious beauty and pain …

Trackable Painting, Jisoo Hur

Theses and Dissertations

This paper describes how I suggest a way to read images in painting by supposing that the gap between paintings can have a new role in the reading. This process consists of three parts that go through references and titles of my paintings.

Liable To Change, Jody Travis Thompson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Liable to Change is a body of paintings in which I explore diverse approaches to the representation of visual space. Depictions of space and movement change throughout the pictures by combining various artistic conventions, such as trompe l’oeil realism and non-objective, geometric abstraction. Oil paint, resin, beeswax, and other materials create built-up surfaces which contain the history of their making. Interaction between various finishes and light on these surfaces changes based on the viewers' proximity to the painting. Images of monkey bars, lattice, golden ratio and flower of life patterns provide a structure through which line, form, and space are …

My Spring 2023 Honors Thesis, Callie Honaker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

For my thesis project, I displayed fifteen printed photographs of self-portraits that I have made outside of class. In these self-portraits, I have applied special effects makeup to my face to create different portrayals of myself. These range from more abstracted makeup to characters. The majority of these makeups are from the chest up and created with face paint and self-made prosthetics. In this imagery, I have also chosen accessories and the background to coincide with the makeup and the mood that I am conveying. Minor adjustments have been made digitally in order to enhance how the image comes across. …

Preying For A Miracle, Hannah Oakes

Undergraduate Honors Theses

For my BFA Capstone exhibition Preying For a Miracle I analyzed the Biblical book of Job found in the Old Testament in relation to my own life. My interest in the Book of Job stems from a human desire to understand suffering, especially suffering that is unprovoked. At the beginning of the book of Job, Job is described as “blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil”. (Job 1:1) As the first chapter of the book progresses, Satan comes to God and presents a wager. Satan insinuates that Job is only faithful to God because God has “put a …

Umberto Boccioni's States Of Mind, Sonya Shrier

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Umberto Boccioni’s series the States of Mind (1911) and discusses how these works represent a breakthrough in the artist’s search to find a pictorial expression for concepts that occupied him throughout his career. The States of Mind exists in four complete iterations each comprised of three images: The Farewells, Those Who Go and Those Who Stay.The first set of oil paintings, begun in late summer of 1911, are in the Divisionist style and are in the collection of the Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan. A set of charcoal and contè drawings on paper, likely completed in …

Sex Is Always On The Table, Jordan D. Artim

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines my work parallel to the formal and symbolic qualities of Renaissance painting, specifically the work of Bronzino. Through understanding the visual representation of the queer community throughout art history, harkening back to specific artists such as Paul Cadmus and Robert Mapplethorpe, my work attempts to find new ways of representing queer experience that extends beyond eroticism and the sexual gesture.

Anywhere Out Of This World, Amanda C. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This essay discusses my paintings alongside Merleau-Ponty's theories of perception and the history of form and color in painting. The relationship between perception and color is examined in the work of Paul Cézanne, Hans Hofmann, and Luis Barragán, along with Henri Matisse's Chapel of the Rosary.

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

Theses and Dissertations

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.

Archaeology Of Social Patterning, Chase Bray

Theses and Dissertations

The episteme that created the grid as a structure for logic has been usurped. We compose meaning from an adulterated grid, or pattern. I process meaning through the abuse of acrid patterns and the grid, the reduction of imagery to silhouettes and by referencing both cultural and classical mythology.

A Thesis Is Not A Diary And Other Myths, Erin Irene Wolf

Honors Papers

How do you write about a feeling you do not understand? How do you organize what is purposefully messy? How can you name a ghost of something that you push into the world with your hands? In this thesis, I will explain my practice, form, and material as a way to illuminate my art, along with various readings and philosophies that I use to guide the work.

Nothing But The Night, Theo Drake Trotter

Senior Projects Spring 2019

I am concerned with fragile, delicate things that have been discarded, used, and left behind. I often think of my work as a sort of a “skin” between myself and the viewer- it hides a lot but also reveals a lot, the way that the skin does on the human body. I think of the way the skin shows traces of a person’s history, of a person’s touch. Because of this my work also has a connection to memory and the act of remembering, which is often fragmentary and connected to small details that only become important long after the …

Consumption, Aurora Blake-Jennings Abzug

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This body of work is neither a chronicle of my eating disorder, nor a record of my recovery. The oil paintings and graphite drawings that make up this exhibition, seek to explore my difficult, complicated, and often self-contradictory relationship with food, and how it affects my relationships with my friends and with myself.

I am particularly interested in eating rituals. These are the sets of cultural prescriptions for the ways in which food and the process of eating can define a social interaction. Ice cream picnics, brunch dates, and Instagram snapshots all lie at the heart of my culture's social …

Through Space, Paige Lauren Eckensberger

Senior Projects Spring 2019

The experience of creating this body of work has been about progress and discovery. My pieces have been formed using lines, shapes, and color, through reactionary processes. Shapes interact with each other, responding to the other elements in the piece, either in sync or in opposition to each other. Some lines are infinite, extending past the limitations of the canvas and implying an extension beyond the work of art itself. In this way, I construct imaginary spatial dimensions that I find myself lost within.

I started this body of work cautious and rigid. By introducing the element of chance into …